EDWARD TABASH: Atheists Must Not Self-Censor

CELEBRATING REASON AND HUMANITY December 2013/January 2014 Vol. 34 No.1

THREE EVOCATIVE PAPERS FROM ‘WOMEN IN SECULARISM 2’ KATHA POLLITT | REBECCA GOLDSTEIN |

RONALD . LINDSAY: Faith—the Humanist Perspective THE SECULAR RIGHT AND ITS DISCONTENTS Joseph Ratzinger and the Nativity Legends | Cremation and Religiosity

Ophelia80% 1.5 BWR Benson PD | Russell Blackford | Shadia B. Drury | Tibor Machan

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Published by the Council 7725274 74957 for Secular

December 2013/January 2014 Vol. 34 No. 1

The Secular Right and Its Discontents 32 Why I Am Not a Liberal, CELEBRATING REASON AND HUMANITY and You Shouldn’t Be Either Robert M. Price Highlights From ‘Women In Secularism 2’ 35 Progressive vs. Liberal 18 Women’s History: A Core Secular Issue Glade Ross Susan Jacoby 39 Why Secular Humanism and Libertarianism 22 Feminism, Religion, and ‘Mattering’ Are Incompatible Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Dan Davis

27 Sexism and Religion: 43 Joseph Ratzinger and the Nativity Legends Can the Knot Be Untied? Etienne Vermeersch Katha Pollitt Translated from the Dutch by Stuart Silvers

45 Cremation and Religiosity Richard G. Dumont

DEPARTMENTS EDITORIAL 63 Life on the Brink: Environmentalists 4 Faith: The Humanist Perspective 52 Church-State Update Confront Overpopulation Ronald A. Lindsay Attack of the Education edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, Pseudo-Reformers with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich OP-EDS Edd Doerr and Anne Ehrlich 7 Doctoring the Script Reviewed by Tom Flynn Ophelia Benson 54 Science and Religion Anti-Evolutionism: The Bible Is 64 The Way of Science: Finding Not the Main Issue 8 Do the Best Lack All Conviction? Truth and Meaning in Jason Rosenhouse Russell Blackford a Scientific Worldview by Dennis R. Trumble 56 Secularity and Society 9 The Strange Persistence of Faith Reviewed by Daniel M. Kane Tibor Machan Public Education Means Secular Education 65 Books in Brief 11 When the Devil Tells the Truth Wayne L. Trotta Shadia B. Dury

12 Atheists Must Not Self-Censor REVIEWS POEMS by William Doreski Edward Tabash 59 Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, 53 Driving to Keene on Sunday by Loren Collins LETTERS Reviewed by William Harwood 55 No One’s Buying Art These Days 14

61 The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood by David Montgomery­ Reviewed by Wayne L. Trotta Editor Thomas W. Flynn Associate Editor Lauren Becker Managing Editor Andrea Szalanski Ronald A. Lindsay Editorial

Columnists Ophelia Benson, Russell Blackford, Arthur Caplan, Greta Christina, Edd Doerr, Shadia B. Drury, Nat Hentoff, Tibor R. Machan

Senior Editors Bill Cooke, Richard Dawkins, Edd Doerr, James A. Haught, Jim Herrick, Gerald A. Larue, Ronald A. Lindsay, Taslima Nasrin Contributing Editors Roy P. Fairfield, Charles Faulkner, Levi Frage, Faith: The Humanist Perspective Adolf Grünbaum, Marvin Kohl, Lee Nisbet

Literary Editor Austin MacRae Assistant Editors Julia Lavarnway Sean Lachut

Permissions Editor Julia Lavarnway Art Director Christopher S. Fix

Production Paul E. Loynes Sr. ope Francis has been in the news reality is that even if Francis were lately in stories both about his inclined to modify church doctrine, Chair Edward Tabash lifestyle and his pronouncements the institutional, ossified weight of the Board of Directors R. Elisabeth Cornwell on various topics. Many regard church would likely prevent him from Kendrick Frazier P Barry A. Kosmin him as someone who represents a doing so. Jonathan Tobert radical break with papal customs and In any event, in this editorial I’m not Leonard Tramiel Judith Walker Catholic traditions and doctrine. He has going to focus on the statements from Lawrence Krauss (Honorary) adopted a more simple, less insulated Francis that have caught everyone’s mode of living than his predecessors; Chief Executive Officer Ronald A. Lindsay attention. Instead, I am going to discuss he has urged his fellow Catholics not his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, or The Executive Director Thomas W. Flynn to place too much emphasis on the Light of Faith, which he issued in early Associate Director Lauren Becker church’s teachings on issues such as July. This document has received rel- Director, Campus and contraception, abortion, and same-sex atively little attention because—well, Community Programs (CFI) Debbie Goddard marriage; he has even said a few kind it’s an encyclical, not something con- Director, Secular Organizations things about atheists. Much debate has sidered light reading. Furthermore, this for Sobriety Jim Christopher ensued over whether Pope Francis will encyclical largely restates what every- Director, African Americans bring about significant changes in the one knows already: that the Catholic for Humanism Debbie Goddard church’s doctrines and rules or whether Church, along with most other reli- Director of Development (CFI) Alan Kinniburgh his statements are no more than an gious bodies, believes faith is a virtue.

Director of Libraries (CFI) Timothy Binga indication of a change in tone. On the Faith is something that supposedly can latter view, he is less hectoring than his give the believer special insight into Communications Director Paul Fidalgo predecessors, and he may have differ- dimensions of reality undiscoverable by Database Manager (CFI) Jacalyn Mohr ent priorities, but ultimately his beliefs reason or science. As suggested by the Webmaster Matthew Licata are not significantly different. title of the encyclical, faith is considered Staff Pat Beauchamp, Ed Beck, I lean toward the latter view. Among illuminating. Melissa Braun, Shirley other reasons, every time Francis has But precisely because the encyclical Brown, Cheryl Catania, Eric Chinchón, Matt made some statement that suggests does not constitute breaking news, it Cravatta, Roe Giambrone, a departure from prior church teach- merits attention. It confirms that the Jason Gross, Lisa Nolan, Paul Paulin, Anthony Santa ing, a clarification has quickly followed Catholic Church, like other religious Lucia, Diane Tobin, to assure the faithful that Francis is institutions, continues to claim a spe- Vance Vigrass not saying anything inconsistent with cial way of knowing that differs starkly Executive Director Emerita Jean Millholland established church teaching. The sad from secular methods of acquiring

4 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org FREE INQUIRY (ISSN 0272-0701) is published bimonthly by knowledge. Regardless of any subtle unpersuasive. They combine specious the Council for Secular Humanism, a nonprofit educational shifts in the church’s position on var- reasoning and unsound analogies. For corporation, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. Phone (716) 636-7571. Fax (716) 636-1733. Copyright ©2013 by ious ethical issues, it will continue to example, consider these remarkable the Council for Secular Humanism. All rights reserved. No part insist on the importance of faith. The assertions: “The light of faith is unique of this periodical may be reproduced without permission of the publisher. Periodicals postage paid at Buffalo, N.Y., and same can be said for other religious since it is capable of illuminating every at additional mailing offices. National distribution by Disticor. bodies, of course. This insistence on the aspect of human existence. A light this FREE INQUIRY is indexed in Philosophers’ Index. Printed in the United States. Postmaster: Send address changes to FREE importance of faith constitutes a crucial powerful cannot come from ourselves INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. Opinions difference—arguably, the crucial differ- but from a primordial source: in a word, expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or publisher. No one speaks on behalf of the Council for Secular ence—between most of the religious it must come from God.” Here, Francis Humanism unless expressly stated. and the nonreligious. The former cling assumes what is to be proven: namely, TO SUBSCRIBE OR RENEW to the view that faith gives spe- that faith is capable of illuminating every Call toll-free 800-458-1366 (have credit card handy). cial access to realities that exist apart aspect of human existence. What’s the Internet: www.secularhumanism.org. from the natural world. Moreover, evidence for this? And then, of course, Mail: FREE INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. the faithful believe this claim of privi- he bootstraps the extraordinary power Subscription rates: $35.00 for one year, $58.00 for two years, $84.00 for three years. Foreign orders add $12 per year leged access does not require rational of faith into “evidence” for faith being for surface mail. Foreign orders send U.S. funds drawn on a justification. Indeed, faith cannot be a gift from God. This is a non sequitur U.S. bank; American Express, Discover, MasterCard, or Visa are preferred. justified through reasoning, because that doesn’t even rise to the level of Single issues: $5.95 each. Shipping is by surface mail in U.S. the concept of faith is of some spe- circular reasoning. (included). For single issues outside U.S.: Canada 1–$3.05; cial awareness that goes beyond the 2–3 $5.25; 4–6 $8.00. Other foreign: 1–$6.30; 2–3 $11.40; 4–6 $17.00. awareness obtained through the ordi- nary exercise of human cognitive fac- CHANGE OF ADDRESS Mail changes to FREE INQUIRY, ATTN: Change of Address, P.O. ulties. Furthermore, because assertions Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. based on faith cannot, as matter of “The sad reality is that even if Call Customer Service: 716-636-7571, ext. 200. principle, be subject to testing, there Francis were inclined to modify E-mail: [email protected]. are no criteria for their truth other than BACK ISSUES the pronouncement of some religious church doctrine, the institutional, Back issues through Vol. 23, No. 3 are $6.95 each. Back issues Vol. 23, No. 4 and later are $5.95 each. 20% discount on authority figure or the subjective expe- ossified weight of the church orders of 10 or more. Call 800-458-1366 to order or to ask for rience of the believer. By contrast, the would likely prevent him from a complete listing of back issues. critically thinking nonreligious individ- REPRINTS/PERMISSIONS ual tries to conform his or her beliefs doing so.” To request permission to use any part of FREE INQUIRY, write to FREE INQUIRY, ATTN: Julia Lavarnway, Permissions Editor, P.O. to the available evidence, which, in Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. principle, is publicly available to all. The WHERE TO BUY FREE INQUIRY nonreligious person claims no knowl- FREE INQUIRY is available from selected book and magazine edge of truths revealed only by spirits. sellers nationwide.

Although faith cannot be rationally Later in the encyclical, Francis trots ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS justified, this doesn’t prevent theolo- out the well-worn claim that the non- Complete submission guidelines can be found on the web at www.secularhumanism.org/fi/details.html. gians from trying their best to make religious rely on faith just as much as Requests for mailed guidelines and article submissions should faith seem not only reasonable but the religious; they just don’t acknowl- be addressed to: Article Submissions, ATTN: Tom Flynn, FREE a good thing. One certainly cannot edge it. Francis argues that: “In many INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. fault them for lack of ingenuity. To areas in our lives we trust others who LETTERS TO THE EDITOR the contrary, defenses of faith can be know more than we do. We trust the Send submissions to Letters Editor, FREE INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 or e-mail aszalanski@center labyrinthine in their complexity, and architect who builds our , the forinquiry.net. theologians often display an enviable pharmacist who gives medicine for For letters intended for publication, please include name, address (including city and state), and daytime telephone number (for ability to bury key questions under a healing, the lawyer who defends us in verification purposes only). Letters should be 300 words or fewer mountain of literary, philosophical, and court. We also need someone trust- and pertain to previous FREE INQUIRY articles. scriptural references. (Alternative occu- worthy and knowledgeable where The mission of the Council for Secular Humanism is to pation for a theologian: press secretary God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of advocate and defend a nonreligious life stance rooted in science, naturalistic , and humanist to a politician.) In this regard, Lumen God, is the one who makes God known and to serve and support adherents of that life stance. Fidei is an impressive piece of work, to us.” Yes, it is true we often rely elevating obfuscation to an art form. on experts, but in principle we can Once analyzed, however, it is appar- assess the expert’s claim to knowledge ent that the arguments advanced in this because it is a claim that can be refuted encyclical on behalf of faith are wholly by evidence that’s accessible. We may

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 5 have to time brushing up on lack of any basis for believing. stripped of autonomy and intellectual our chemistry (or at least consulting Of course, once the door is open independence, ends with the chilling WebMD) to come to the conclusion to accepting beliefs that cannot be words: “He loved Big Brother.” The that our pharmacist is dispensing the justified by reference to facts or rea- faithful are asked to love Big Brother, wrong dosage, but it can be done. How son, anything goes. Consider a central whether they are Christians, Jews, are we supposed to know that Jesus is doctrine of the Christian faith, namely, Mormons, or Muslims, so the illumi- trustworthy regarding God’s existence the Incarnation. That Jesus was both nation provided by faith can light the and attributes? “We can trust Jesus divine and human seems on the face way. because he’s the Son of God.” That’s of it impossible—it’s a transparent con- Francis may turn out to be a pro- obviously not an adequate answer. We tradiction to claim Jesus was simulta- gressive on some issues. He might even have no evidence that Jesus is the Son neously a person with limited powers change some Church doctrines, perhaps of God. “But scripture tells us Jesus is and a deity with unlimited powers— by removing the ban on contraception, the Son of God.” But why should we but that does not prevent Christians which, all, has no basis in the Bible. regard the writings collected in the from adamantly adhering to this belief, To the extent he allows Catholics more New Testament (selected from among because at the end of the day they can freedom in their personal lives, we sec- dozens of competing writings) as reli- always invoke faith. Faith means not ular humanists can applaud his actions. able authority about Jesus and/or God? having to supply reasons. But make no mistake. There will always “Because scripture is the word of God.” remain a chasm between the faithful— So we know there’s a God because of of any religion—and secular humanists. scripture, and we know we can rely on Secular humanists insist on the appli- scripture because it’s the word of God. cation of reason, science, and freedom Got it? of inquiry and reject the notion that any Centuries ago, Rene Descartes, with “. . . The Catholic Church, like set of revealed truths can be immune wonderfully understated sarcasm, identi- from critical examination. Consequently, fied the shell game theologians play when other religious institutions, they also reject authority figures who they appeal to faith. In the dedication continues to claim a special position themselves as the privileged to his Meditations on First Philosophy way of knowing that differs interpreters of these revealed truths. (where he argues for the importance of In his encyclical, Francis dares to say philosophy in arguing for the existence starkly from secular methods of that because of faith, “we have come of God), Descartes observes, “although acquiring knowledge.” to understand the unique dignity of it is absolutely true that we must each person.” Nothing could be further believe there is a God, because we are from the truth. Faith denies the abil- so taught in the Holy Scriptures, and, on ity of each person to use reason and the other hand, that we must believe empirical evidence to arrive at a correct the Holy Scriptures because they come understanding of our universe. Instead, from God . . . we nevertheless could not umen Fidei waxes poetic—and ma­ the faithful believe that knowledge of place this argument before infidels, Lnipulative—as Francis struggles to the mysteries of the universe must be a who might accuse us of reasoning in a defend faith. “Faith knows because gift from some supernatural power. It’s circle” (Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. it is tied to love, because love itself a strange notion of dignity that den- Ross translation). Indeed. brings enlightenment. Faith’s under- igrates human abilities and insists on Aquinas, Descartes, and many other standing is born when we receive the human subservience to unseen forces. theists have tried to argue for the exis- immense love of God which transforms Humanity will leave its childhood tence of God using reason as applied us inwardly and enables us to see real- behind only when we realize that faith to our knowledge of the natural world. ity with new eyes.” obscures instead of illuminates. Although their arguments are flawed, Yes, isn’t love wonderful and trans- at least they can be evaluated by every- forming? Love can one, believer or nonbeliever, and, there- make one so accept- fore, they are entitled to some measure ing—and submissive. Ronald A. Lindsay is president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of respect. Not so with claims based on Orwell’s novel 1984, its affiliate, the Council for Secular Humanism. This statement need faith. Faith doesn’t provide a basis for which vividly illustrates not be accepted on faith. believing; it provides an excuse for the how a person can be

6 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Ophelia Benson OP-ED

Doctoring the Script

ave you ever noticed how funda- futility. Our pleasures and interests and There are witches in Macbeth, a ghost mentally boring God is? I think motivations depend on our radical lim- in Hamlet, fairies in A Midsummer Hthat’s a slightly neglected subhead itations. We dream up gods that don’t Night’s Dream, and a wizard in The under and secular humanism. have our limitations, but we just make Tempest, but The Big Boss is offstage. God is boring because perfection is them alien to us in the process. Milton gave God a speaking part, but boring—especially in a literary charac- That’s all right, the imaginary theo- everyone has always found Satan by far ter, which is, after all, the God we’re all logian might say, God was never meant the more interesting character. familiar with. God is like trying to think to be a literary character or a friend to And as for the novel—God is just a of a birthday present for someone who have lunch with; God is meant to be label. The clergy is everywhere for the already has everything. Imagine trying something to aspire to. But I don’t think first couple of centuries, but even talk to tell a story about a perfect being. that’s right. I don’t think we aspire to of God is absent or perfunctory, and What could the story be about? God perfection, for the same sorts of rea- the stories are almost entirely secular. can’t have a quest or an adventure sons that we don’t want perfection in One exception is Helen Burns in Jane because perfection has no truck with the characters we watch in movies and such things. God can’t have a problem on television and read in novels. We to solve, a mystery to explore, a mistake want to be better than we are, gen- to rectify, or a need to fulfill because erally, but not as a step toward being “God is like trying to think of a all those possibilities depend on imper- perfect. Perfection isn’t the superlative fection. of better; it’s more like death. It’s com- birthday present for someone Take the Mars Rover for example. pletion, which means there’s nothing who already has everything. Like millions of other people, I watched more to do. Having nothing to do is Imagine trying to tell a story the NASA channel that August night how we punish people for crimes: we the Rover was successfully lowered to seal them up away from all their nor- about a perfect being. What the surface, and like millions of oth- mal work and pursuits, friends and could the story be about?” ers I was blown away by it. It was relations, projects and goals. such a staggeringly difficult task—not Humans, being evolved not created, just getting it all the way to Mars but are so constituted that we can’t possi- engineering it so that the vehicle hov- bly enjoy permanent cessation of striv- ered above the surface and lowered ing. It’s not our nature. (I suppose very Eyre, and what a little horror she is. She the Rover on a crane to avoid dust skilled adepts at meditation can in some endorses and submits to the brutali- kicked up by thrusters that would have sense “enjoy” extended cessation, but ties and deprivations of Lowood; she ruined the Rover’s delicate instruments. to everyone else you might as well be a rebukes Jane for resenting them; she Human beings did all that! But a per- rock, and what’s to enjoy in that?) This reeks of death. fect God could just put a Rover on Mars is why Jesus has been such a popular It’s almost as if no one really believes with no effort—except that a perfect variation on the story, of course—he’s it; they all just pretend they do. It God wouldn’t even want to, because a the proverbial guy you could have a works the same way that we perfect God already knows everything beer with. Just add some bits to the have movies and television along with there is to know about Mars. It knows story that say he’s also the son of God, plays and novels, at least in the main- how many grains of dust there are on and a bridge is built between the all- stream versions. (I draw a tactful veil Mars, how many atoms there are in too-human and the boring perfect. over the Left Behind series.) I don’t see everything, naturally, but in what each grain, and—you see how boring it It’s odd, though, that God never I do see there’s no trace of God or of becomes before you even get started. appeared much in fiction once people Perfection is indistinguishable from got bored with mystery plays. Why not? (Continued on page 49)

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 7 Russell Blackford

Do the Best Lack All Conviction?

n his 1920 poem “The Second the natural world. Our collective knowl- are issues on which it would be absurd Coming,” W. B. Yeats laments: “The edge base has expanded vastly. Many to “lack all conviction.” Yet we are Ibest lack all conviction, while the once-uncontroversial beliefs have been still confronted with many situations worst / Are full of passionate inten- utterly defeated. Think, for example, of where it is quite proper to reserve judg- sity.” The great Irish poet had in mind the geocentric conception of astronomy, ment, identify murkiness or complexity, the turmoil across Europe in the early well-entrenched at the beginning of or form opinions only tentatively. The twentieth century, not least the 1917 Western modernity but no longer taken mainstream sciences include numerous Russian Revolution that deposed Czar seriously by any educated person. legitimate and open controversies, and Nicholas II and culminated in Lenin’s Think, too, of many other claims that our scientific picture of the world is far ascent to power. Whatever the merits we can reject with confidence because from complete. of revolutionary Russia, and despite they assert the existence of phenom- What about claims made by social Yeats’s cranky theory of historical cycles ena clearly at odds with our scientific scientists and humanities scholars? (expressed in “The Second Coming” understanding. Investigation of such Some of these are, indeed, very pow- and elsewhere), the lines I’ve quoted claims is, of course, the bread and butter erfully evidenced, such as the essen- are frequently recited or alluded to of today’s scientific skeptic movement. tial facts of the Nazi Holocaust, and even now, almost a century later. They Reincarnation is just one example. Even people who reject them often do so powerfully summarize the danger of if claims about reincarnated souls or spir- out of deep ignorance or in bad faith. ideological fanaticism. its are conceptually coherent, they are Holocaust deniers are (surprise! sur- scientifically implausible. No conceivable prise!) often anti-Semites of one kind mechanism for reincarnation seems to or another or even outright neo-Na- make sense when held up against our zis. But many claims about historical, current scientific picture of the world. “. . . Ideologues display an social, or cultural matters have nothing Given the total evidence supporting that like the empirical support, based on intensity of conviction, and an picture, reincarnation claims should be extensive investigation, that underpins unscrupulousness in acting almost ruled out. Almost. We should our knowledge of the Holocaust. The upon it, against which good, fair, not close our minds completely, but we social sciences and humanities are fre- should view these claims as extraordinary quently volatile and politicized. There perhaps liberal-minded people and ask for exceptionally compelling evi- is typically no consensus of experts, and seem helpless.” dence. entire schools of, say, literary, social, or To take a very different example, economic theory may be built on shaky consider traditional ideas about the foundations. respective roles for men and women: To complicate matters further, non- So often, ideologues display an inten- these have not been defeated entirely, experts often feel the need to make sity of conviction, and an unscrupulous- but they have been undermined by judgments about highly complex and ness in acting upon it, against which many intellectual and social develop- contentious issues. For example, polit- good, fair, perhaps liberal-minded peo- ments. These ideas no longer prevail, ically important questions of economic ple seem helpless. So, do “the best,” or at least in Western countries, and their management—how best to handle at least the fair-minded, lack all convic- historical waning looks to be perma- a financial crisis, perhaps, or simply tion? Should they? nent, absent some catastrophic rever- how best to minimize unemployment Over the past five hundred years, schol- sal of sentiment that would probably in “normal” times—can become very ars and scientists have added, increment require social collapse. cloudy indeed. Some economic policy by increment—and sometimes with rad- As a species, we have learned a packages are, let us concede, trans- ical conceptual breakthroughs—to our great deal in recent centuries, and our (Continued on page 49) understanding of human cultures and knowledge has been hard won. There

8 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Tibor Machan OP-ED

The Strange Persistence of Faith

hile people could be rational can discredit human thinking as a road How many of them believe that moral- most of the time, they often to understanding the world, many of ity is real in the sense that it involves Wdon’t choose to be. This is espe- us will allow faith to make the big dif- choosing between right and wrong cially true when it comes to religious ference for us. And sure enough, if we conduct! (Or, by extension, that there faith. Sure, few religious people utilize come to the conclusion that the only are rational standards for deciding how their faith in dealing with common way to have morality and free choice to act.) problems: when they have a flat tire, is to reject naturalism, we will usually Perhaps there is a way to reconcile they don’t get out of their car and choose the former and abandon the ordinary life with such barren view- kneel down and pray for a miracle fix; latter. Not that we would actually give points, but it is very doubtful that the when they have physical maladies, with up on naturalism; we would just refuse notable exceptions (such as Christian to endorse it as the big picture. We Scientists), they usually consult physi- would buy into some kind of rough- “It is . . . because of this cians and don’t leave a cure solely up to and-ready hybrid instead, some dual- fraudulent association of faith their god. All in all, most people these ism of nature and spirit. days generally confine their reliance on Faith is a dead end for most pur- with desirable things in our lives faith to their minds and don’t let it rule poses, but because the alternative— that it stays around. Never mind their plans of action. relying on the study of nature—gets how little it actually delivers.” Why then is faith still so popular, so closely linked with denying morality even in advanced societies? It’s not and free choice and all that we think because faith is actually useful or effec- these make possible for us, people cling tive. In large measure, it is because faith to faith despite its ultimate poverty. For idea will sell well. If people accept is promoted by its champions by associ- no one can reasonably give up moral- that without faith there is no love, no ating it with desirable things such as art, ity; even those who advocate doing beauty, no right versus wrong, and so marriage, love, and even science (as in so fall right back into making use of it on, they will very probably opt for faith the case of the Templeton Foundation when they insist that sensible people even if doing so is irrational. Doing and its cadre of religion-friendly scien- should not believe in it and should see this may have nothing in support of it tists). The concept of free will, too, is left it as bogus, and they often wax rather except for one thing: the alternative, a to the domain of faith, because atheists righteous about it all. Nor is free will life without faith that so many take to tend to be materialists, a stance that for easily rejected. After all, the choice to mean a crassly materialistic life, is unac- many precludes contracausal free will reject it is itself supposed to confirm its ceptable to most. or causal agency in the natural world. existence! Then, if you add that most Indeed, it appears that the main obsta- cle to the spread of a naturalist—or secu- It is, I submit, because of this fraud- of the sublime aspects of human exis- lar humanist—approach to human life is ulent association of faith with desirable tence would have to be abandoned if a that too many of those who defend these things in our lives that it stays around. naturalist approach were to triumph, it life stances have mistakenly denied too Never mind how little it actually deliv- becomes why, despite its ultimate much that makes human life interesting ers. Never mind all the time and pro- and evident uselessness, faith has stay- and unique. paganda it gets from certain circles. ing power. Association with aspects of our lives Among many of the so-called“new that most of us deem important, how- atheists,” all this comes across very ever misguided, makes faith persist. clearly. Just see how many of them It was Immanuel Kant who defended defend the idea that human beings Tibor R. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair in a basic skepticism about the human are free to make choices that aren’t Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros mind so as to make room for religion. imposed on them by various factors School of Chapman University. He figured, maybe rightly, that if one over which they have no control!

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 9 Take action with us.

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Donate today. When you make a donation to CFI, you become a member of a worldwide movement of humanists, skeptics, atheists, and freethinkers—all working together to promote the secular worldview and give voice to your values. Our major goals include: n Protecting the rights of nonbelievers n Advocating for science-based medicine n Sustaining and expanding the secular movement Make your most generous gift today, or request information on planned giving or making a bequest. To receive a brochure elaborating on what we are doing to achieve our important goals and how you can help, please complete and return the attached card or contact us at: Center for Inquiry Development Office PO Box 741 Amherst, NY 14226 1.800.818.7071 [email protected] www.centerforinquiry.net/donate Shadia B. Dury OP-ED

When the Devil Tells the Truth

hen, in the midst of the American in internal conflicts in foreign coun- turned its attention to the world at foreign-policy debacle over Syria, tries has become commonplace for large, but the temptation to remake WVladimir Putin wrote an article the United States” (New York Times, the world in its image was checked by in , American pol- September 11, 2013). If powerful coun- the power of the Soviet Union within iticians balked in unison. Republicans tries such as the United States are bent the United Nations. At that time, polit- and Democrats denounced Putin in no on bypassing the Security Council and ical realists such as Richard Nixon and uncertain terms. They declared that his launching military strikes contrary to Henry Kissinger prevailed. But once bold impudence made them nauseous. international law, they will threaten the Cold War was over, the doctrine Some divulged that upon reading the the precarious international order. This of Manifest Destiny revived: this time, article, they had to vomit. The airways is already happening; many countries it was Manifest Destiny on steroids. were filled with their fulminations. How no longer feel safe and are therefore America was the anointed of God, dare this former KGB agent lecture, even seeking nuclear weapons, which they strutting across the globe in search hector, the American people? How dare see as the only means to deter an of monsters to destroy. It was bent he question the fundamental principle attack. The United Nations is poised on remaking the world in its image. of American greatness? What nerve— to become as toothless as the League But the project of world transforma- poking America in the eye in the pages of Nations, which was created after tion was no easy task. Regime change of its most hallowed newspaper! World War I and was unable to prevent was full of nasty surprises. By the end Was he not the guy who weaseled World War II. It is obvious that Putin’s his way into becoming president for conclusion follows logically from true yet another term, contrary to the con- premises. So what’s the fuss? “Did Putin say anything stitution of his own country? Was he Putin ended his article by taking not the guy who approved that antigay issue with President ’s outrageous? Not in the least. legislation just recently? Was he not the claim that America is “exceptional.” “It What he said was almost guy who harbored Edward J. Snowden, is extremely dangerous to encourage platitudinous.” wanted by the United States for reveal- people to see themselves as excep- ing sensitive government secrets? Was tional,” wrote Putin. In this way, he he not the backer of the Syrian dicta- made a link between American law- tor, Bashar al-Assad? These ad hominem lessness and belligerence and faith in of the second Bush administration, attacks fail to refute or even address the American exceptionalism. That’s what nothing had been accomplished. The argument. The fact is that sometimes, got Americans fuming. Putin thinks Taliban in Afghanistan was still unde- even the Devil tells the truth. American exceptionalism is dangerous. feated; al-Qaeda was stronger than Did Putin say anything outrageous? Americans think that it is God’s gift to ever; and the puppet regime installed Not in the least. What he said was the world. Who is right? in Iraq at such a high cost in blood almost platitudinous. He reminded and treasure was no puppet—instead, Americans that it was the cooperation here was once a time when excep- it became allied with Iran, America’s of America and Russia that made the Ttionalism meant that America was a nemesis in the region. Meanwhile, defeat of the Nazis and the creation special land of freedom that welcomed America’s image had been tarnished; of the United Nations possible. The the tired, hungry, downtrodden, and Sleeping Beauty had morphed into latter was established after World War persecuted of the world. But in the nine- Frankenstein’s monster. II to provide a more stable interna- teenth century, this early doctrine gave Many Americans believed that in tional order. The charter of the United way to the more muscular doctrine of electing Barack Obama they were clos- Nations made it illegal to use force Manifest Destiny. The latter was used ing a dark chapter in their history. They except in self-defense or by the consen- to justify the annexation of Florida, were therefore appalled to see Obama, sus of the permanent members of the Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Security Council. As a result, Putin was and California. After its involvement in continue the War on Terror: escalating dismayed that “military intervention World War I and World War II, America (Continued on page 48)

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 11 Edward Tabash OP-ED

Atheists Must Not Self-Censor

eginning around 2006, an internal ductive the stereotypical “self-hating Religious Beliefs and the Hatreds They debate accelerated among non- atheist” who—maybe even subcon- Cause Are Not Harmless believers regarding how aggres- B sciously—buys into an unexamined pre- Now, some might ask why this even sively we should argue against religious sumption that somehow it is actually matters. Why bother promoting athe- claims. Some argued for moderation; more correct, appropriate, and polite ism to the general public? In fact, there for instance, Jeff Nall (in The Humanist, for nonbelievers to be less aggressive are multiple reasons: August 2006) expressed disapproval of than believers in publicly promoting what he called “antagonistic atheism.” our worldview. 1. The hostility that so many people Yet since then, we have seen the impact Other atheists may not disapprove harbor toward atheists is, itself, a of such works as Richard Dawkins’s of more assertive arguments on prin- symptom of prejudice, a retrograde immaturity that the human com- The God Delusion, Daniel C. Dennett’s ciple but think that we need to adopt munity badly needs to overcome. A Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens’s a more restrained approach on tactical society in which most still distrust God Is Not Great, and Victor Stenger’s grounds, perhaps because the domi- someone who views the world as God: The Failed Hypothesis. These books nant religious culture is still so formi- natural rather than supernatural— joined Sam Harris’s 2004 The End of Faith dable that our current efforts to chip that refuses to laud those who have to form a significant corpus of assertive away at it need to be more subdued. I the courage to follow the evidence disagree. Moreover, I would argue that wherever it leads—is not an intellec- if nonbelievers face social disapproval tually healthy society. “Society is better off when because we exercise the same rights 2. If the universe is a closed physical to assert our worldview as do religious exposed to arguments against the system with no nonmaterial intel- proselytizers, then this social disap- existence of a supernatural being ligent beings in charge of it (as, I proval in and of itself becomes part of and against the supernatural assert, the evidence overwhelmingly the phenomenon of social repression demonstrates to be true), this reality generally.” that we must work to overcome. needs to be brought to the public’s If we continue to self-censor, the attention. social climate for accepting atheistic 3. The pervasive sense in our society that viewpoints won’t improve on its own. morality must be grounded in the new manifestos for atheism that received We atheists must push the envelope dictates of a supernatural being is a unprecedented public attention. of what is socially acceptable for us to horrific misconception that demands In my view, there is no reason what- say in disagreeing with religious beliefs. vigorous challenge. soever for atheistic arguments to be Otherwise, we stand little chance of 4. Historically, religion has been any- muffled. I defend a more aggressive either creating a more receptive envi- thing but a harmless and benevo- stance of arguing forcefully and pub- ronment for our views or reducing the lent set of mythologies. Over the cen- licly that the supernatural claims of current level of hostility that ordinarily turies, countless people have been religion are untrue. Society is better off greets the expression of our ideas. killed because of disagreements over for having literature such as the works None of this entails insulting reli- what will happen to them after they mentioned above. Society is better off gious people. It does require that we die. when exposed to arguments against not dissemble in expressing the reasons 5. In most societies known to us that the existence of a supernatural being why we believe that arguments for the subjected women to officially man- and against the supernatural generally. existence of a supernatural being are dated subordination, religion has By contrast, I view as counterpro- false. been the culprit.

12 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org 6. The opposition to equal rights for automatically. Yet, the use of evidence rights of believers, we have every right people romantically attracted to oth- and reason to independently conclude to explain why we regard their beliefs to ers of the same gender also stems that no God exists is considered morally be mistaken and harmful and should not from religious dogma. defective. This is the total reverse of refrain from saying so. 7. When activists began to seek greater what will be needed if rational thought personal sexual freedom, starting in is to prevail. Why Do Only the Religiously Penitent the 1960s, the opposition to such an To allow religious believers to deter- Receive Public Forgiveness? enlargement of liberty was motivated mine what is socially acceptable for us One of the major candidates for pres- by religion. to say about their beliefs is to let the fox ident in 2012, former Speaker of the 8. From the nineteenth century to the guard the henhouse. We don’t see major House Newt Gingrich, once said that he present day, religion has been the vir- spokespeople for religious views offer- couldn’t trust someone who didn’t pray tually exclusive source of opposition ing to temper what they say about non- and that one cannot have judgment to the full range of family planning belief in order to avoid giving offense without faith. We nonbelievers know options. to atheists. No movement devoted to that the courage to admit that one does 9. Finally, for the past few decades in the reforming and changing the beliefs of a not pray to an imaginary creature is a United States, television preachers have majority of society—or to lessening the positive moral asset, not a sign of moral lined their pockets with incredible sums majority’s hostility toward those who inferiority. Those who have studied phi- of money by claiming to offer their dissent from a pervasive belief—has ever losophy and science and concluded that viewers a path to salvation. They fur- succeeded by restraining itself so that the universe is natural, not supernatu- ther enhance both their revenues and the full force of its justifying arguments ral, have exercised the best judgment, their status as moral authority figures becomes muted. It merits repeating in not the worst. Yet a public figure such by leading their followers in condem- this context that our criticism of religious as Gingrich can cast such unfair and nation of others who are supposedly belief systems need not constitute ridicul- unjust aspersions upon us atheists, even though he has been guilty of adultery engaging in various types of sins. ing the believer. If a believer insists that and asked one of his wives for an open any criticism whatsoever does constitute It can readily be seen how much dam- marriage—actions that traditional reli- ridicule, then we must point out that, age God beliefs have caused throughout gious believers might be expected to first, this is not the case and, second, that history, and how much damage these deplore. Members of the general public such an accusation functions as a mask beliefs continue to cause. (By contrast, will sooner forgive Gingrich for these for that believer’s true motive, namely, no society has ever subjected women to moral flaws than give us atheists a fair to silence critics of the religious beliefs in formal second-class citizenship because hearing regarding the reasons for our question. The purveyors of religion relish of a desire to act in conformity with the nonbelief. nothing more than for nonbelievers to commands of the hydrogen atom!) The longer we hold back from deliv- be intimidated into arguing against reli- ering our arguments with full force, the Religion’s Stranglehold on Society Will Not gious claims in a softer, less critical fash- longer it will take for us to make public Abate on Its Own ion. Believers striving to defeat atheistic headway—and the longer it will take for arguments can scarcely be trusted to Having presented reasons for the impor- us to begin to dismantle the horrendous advocate for what is best for nonbeliev- tance of taking atheism to the general general public prejudice against non­ ers when they urge us to take what they public, I want to focus on why a more belief and nonbelievers. assertive posture is necessary. Again, define as a more diplomatic approach. Moreover, Gingrich’s plea for forgive- religious dogma’s stranglehold on the If the religious can claim to hate the sin ness for his past marital transgressions moral compass of society will not abate but love the sinner, as many do, we have has gained traction with the public sub- on its own, without a powerful counter- just as much right to assert that we have stantially because he touts his conversion movement. the ability to discredit the belief system to Catholicism as the key to his absolu- Whether we are dealing with athletes while still cherishing the believer as a tion from past “sins.” The public, by and who credit Jesus with some just-con- brother or sister human being. large, buys into the unjustified notion cluded spectacular performance on the We also must be vigilant not to fall that a church that has been riven by playing field or someone claiming to into the trap of feeling that we must the most horrendous child-abuse scan- have received special dispensation from affirm that we don’t want to come across dals—and that stands as the major insti- God because he or she was the sole as antireligious. Consider the last pope, tutional enemy of contraception, even survivor of a plane crash—totally ignor- Benedict XVI. He was sharply, explicitly in a world as overcrowded as ours—still ing the clear implication that this must critical of nonbelief. He never tempered somehow possesses sufficient holiness mean God intended for all the others to his statements by saying that he didn’t to be able to erase the effects of past die—society generally considers it mor- want to appear anti-atheist. As long as ally praiseworthy to accept these claims we are not trying to abolish the legal (Continued on page 50)

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 13 LETTERS

tinental Indian names. There is life by the time it takes to do from God, the institution of even a review of a book whose them. On the shortening side, slavery was not a moral failure main protagonist is America’s smoking is a possible or even on the part of Christian slave- bastion for pushing civil rights, probable exception, depending holders, auctioneers, overseers, the American Civil Liberties on how you do the accounting. and bounty hunters. There Union, and an excellent arti- Driving fifty-five miles per hour was no moral advance on the cle about the ethics of organ instead of seventy-five is a solid part of abolitionists and others transplantation that speaks for example: it takes more than a who were opposed to slavery. the society rather than the indi- lifetime of extra time driving They simply believed in differ- vidual. I seem to have missed per life saved. On the lengthen- ent “matters of fact” as opposed any articles in praise of the ing side, exercise is an example. to those who held millions in American Legislative Exchange Keeping fit is likely to lengthen bondage. Council (ALEC). life expectancy but statistically According to Lewis, no action Since I joined the Council for by less than the time it takes to can be viewed as a moral failure Secular Humanism and started do it, especially if you drive to if the motive is based on sin- reading Free Inquiry almost ten the gym and include the risk of cerely held beliefs. Accordingly, years ago, I have celebrated an auto crash or other accident. it is my sincerely held belief that that the leaning of the reader- So the really rational choice is to Lewis was morally and intellec- ship and authorship is toward decide based on the here and tually bankrupt. Left values such as social justice now: if you enjoy it or it makes Dennis Middlebrooks you feel better now, do it; if The Limits of Politics for the least among us. I think Brooklyn, New York our editor has to recognize this not, don’t. Tom Flynn’s editorial “The and not fight it. Alan Harris Left Is Not Always Right” (FI, La Cañada, California October/November 2013) was Rohan Perera a breath of fresh air. I’m tired Port Jefferson, New York of reading in Free Inquiry about the need for freethinkers to C. S. Lewis on Witches pursue a progressive agenda I agree with Tom Flynn that the Accepting Death (mostly promoted by the late Shadia B. Drury is spot-on with Left is not always right. What I I read with interest James A. Paul Kurtz). Kurtz was able to her critique (“Of Lewis, Mice, would challenge Flynn to answer Haught’s “No Qualms” (FI, Oc­t-​ see through the different reli- and Witches,” FI, October/ is, give me one example of when ober/November 2013). I share his gious systems and realize that November 2013) of C. S. Lewis’s the Right was right? serene attitude toward death. I they were not realistic. Why asinine claim that the burning Eric Lane was born on February 3, 1924, couldn’t he see that world gov- of witches was not a moral fail- and hence will soon be ninety. ernment, big government, and San Antonio, Texas ure on the part of Christians guided rule by “our betters” because they sincerely believed I have always regarded death— would suffer from fatal flaws that certain women were that, twice in my life was to be as well? Politics involves peo- in league with the devil and my immediate fate—as a quite ple—fallible people. Politicians Coming to Terms with deserved to be burned. natural event, not at all tragic. I get where they are because Human Irrationality Consider the following If have been an atheist since I was they are ambitious, aggressive, this argument is carried to its fifteen years old and hence do I was amused by the first example and often ruthless. An individ- logical extreme: because many not expect an . I regard ual’s rights are not going to be Greta Christina gave of her “ratio- Germans sincerely believed the the belief in paradise or hell as protected from them without nal irrationality”—about going claim that Jews were a danger- superstitions dictated by igno- strong safeguards. to the gym rather than working ous, parasitic race that needed rance. I have realized so much in out at home (“Can We Rationally my life—as an author and anar- Ben Fishler to be eliminated, the Holocaust Accept Our Irrationality?,” FI, was not a moral failure on chist political activist—that I feel Dennis, Massachusetts October/November 2013). I sug- the part of the Christians who I have done enough. I also feel gest that she apply her rational carried it out, and there was that when my day comes it will thought a bit upstream and no moral advance on the part be high time for me to finally Tom Flynn suggests that the consider whether to exercise at of Germans who rejected this rest. That is why I am not at all principles of social justice and all, never mind whether at the belief and resisted the Nazis. preoccupied about this inevita- diversity are separate from the gym or at home. I would like to Similarly, because many whites ble and natural event. I enjoy goals of the members of the introduce her to what I shame- in the antebellum South sin- life, and I still lecture, read, and Council for Secular Humanism. lessly call “Harris’s axiom”: cerely believed that blacks were make love to my beautiful wife But in the very same issue in there are few things you can an inferior race and the cursed who is thirty years younger. The which he writes this, I see articles do that are statistically likely descendants of Ham whose only thought that I harbor con- by people with Arabic and con- to lengthen or shorten your enslavement was a mandate cerning this moment is that my

14 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org wife will find it very hard to verse, which is utterly indiffer- dom of religion to all individ- living in a rural, conservative endure. But that, in any event, ent to our life here on this tiny uals, whether they agree with area, it is easy to feel isolated. is something I can do nothing planet. So they seek sanctuary us or not. I can see the appeal of a non- about. in some vague notion of the H. Edward Price religious group of like-minded Arturo Schwarz spiritual and transcendent and Sylva, North Carolina people. Even the singing. Pink Milan, Italy a hidden “deeper” meaning. Floyd’s “On The Turning Away” This is a worldview close to John Shook responds: comes to mind. Lyrics express- that of the New Age movement ing concern for other humans which, according to Wikipedia, Mr. Price has a quarrel with John combined with music is as pow- The State of Religious aims to create “a spirituality Dewey, not with me. I’m unable erful as any classic religious Humanism without borders or confining to reply for Dewey. I was pro- music. dogmas, that is inclusive and nouncing on Dewey’s human- John Worsley pluralistic.” ism, not my own. Re FI’s October/November Lenoir, North Carolina 2013 special feature, “Religious So I suggest that we rename Humanism: Dead, Alive, or religious humanists “New-Age Re “Congregational Humanism: Bifurcating?”: in today’s society, humanists.” This allows ordinary Throwing Out the Bad, Keeping the term religious humanism is an (vulgar) humanists like me to carry I found William R. Murry’s article the Good,”Jennifer Kalmanson oxymoron. Most people under- on with our hopeless naturalism, “Religious Humanism Today” (FI, October/November 2013): stand that if someone claims to while votaries of the New-Age helpful and thought-provok- it has been my observation that be religious, he or she believes in humanism can help themselves ing. I have a natural anathema many of our colleagues par- a supernatural entity generally to any of the available comfort to the term religious, but the blankets they want. Most import- ticipating in humanist congre- called “God.” Because humanists way Murry defined it was quite ant, it does away with damaging gations are actually refugees deny the existence of supernat- acceptable—especially when oxymorons. from Christian fundamentalist ural entities, they are, by defini- toward the end he began to churches that they feel had tion, not religious. Attempts to David Ashton equate it with spiritual. My wife been a blight on their youth. subdivide humanists into secular Birmingham, United Kingdom has always said I am spiritual They long for the sense of and religious are neither helpful even though a skeptic. I also common interests, friendship, nor convincing. had a problem with that term, shared values, and security that According to Tom Flynn and but Murry made me more com- Toward the end of an otherwise comes from organized commu- fortable with it. William Murry (“Introduction” and very informative article (“John nion with others, but they have I then read the next article “Religious Humanism Today”) Dewey and the Fighting ‘Faith’ come to realize that the igno- “Congregational Humanism: the key difference is that reli- of Humanism, FI, October/ rance, bigotry, repression, and Throwing Out the Bad with the gious humanists embrace a spir- November 2013), John Shook obscurantism of traditional the- Good.” I really can’t find a great itual, metaphysical, or transcen- includes an astonishing sen- istic congregations simply will difference. It seems it is splitting dent element, whereas secular tence: “Idealistically, humanists not suffice. Good for them. We hairs, and it seems more “cost humanists do not. I have no idea work to establish a universal all have a need to affiliate. It’s effective” to combine these con- what spiritual or transcendent spirit across humanity united in a major part of human evolu- cepts instead of trying to sepa- means in this context, and I don’t supporting that common faith.” tion. Rational people need to rate them. Let’s put all our ener- believe Flynn or Murry do either. This makes humanism sound commune with each other, too. gies into one body. Furthermore, the alacrity with like a messianic, evangelical reli- So what can be wrong with Arthur G. Howard which they use words such as gion that aims to sweep away doing it in an enlightened and devotion, reverence, and spiritual all other religions and convert productive way? Moreover, we Jacksonville, Oregon will make ordinary humanists all individuals to its point of need to have a decent peer very suspicious. view—or even to merge them group for our children and ado- The truth is that although reli- into some sort of group mind. lescents. And we need a public Response to a Review gious humanists may not actually No such sweeping away of tra- forum to proffer our ideas. We believe in supernatural entities, ditional religions is going to can promote humanist values It is not my practice to respond they cannot fully embrace the happen, and we should not by actually “doing them” as an to reviews of my books, but in consequences. There is a kind be trying to make it happen. organized group. this case I cannot desist. I fail to of nostalgia, a yearning for Instead, we should be inviting John L. Indo understand what humanist value, something more: not quite God everyone everywhere who has Houston, Texas secular or otherwise, is invoked perhaps but existing beyond left his or her traditional reli- when an author is slandered by the material world and the gion or become skeptical of it your writer, William Harwood (“A immutable laws of physics. They to join us in working toward Suspect Sales Pitch,” FI, December somehow can’t live with the idea a more rational and humane I was interested in the concept 2012/January 2013), as, for that ultimately our lives have no global society. One of the foun- of congregational humanism instance, “morally depraved.” significance and that we are dations of that humane society put forth in your October/ in a vast impersonal uni- must be the guarantee of free- November issue. As an agnostic (Continued on page 66)

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 15 ADVERTISEMENT

THE ACHILLES HEEL OF CHRISTIANITY

Undermining belief in “Christian free will” (CFW), faith curve and present the case against CFW in a can go a long way to promoting the cause of secular new way. A case that is arresting, interesting and humanism. persuasive; and especially something which they can evaluate based on their own experience. It must be Saint Paul told only half the story: “And if Christ be brief—so important today—and in ordinary language. not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” First, to make any headway at all, it is essential to acknowledge the kind of free will everyone experi- He should have added that if man is not free to ences every day—their apparent free will. People choose between right and wrong then there can be know they make choices and they know they do so no sin, no need for atonement and no need for Jesus freely. This is freedom from external compulsion and Christ—and your faith is also in vain. it is easily distinguished from CFW.

What is Christian free will? The Catholic Encyclopedia I see the argument this way. It surely can be im- states that a “free volition is a causeless volition.” proved by people reading this, and I hope someone Thus, “causeless” means not even influenced by the will do it. enormous disparities in genetic endowment, upbring- ing and environment between people, if that influence There is no doubt that if you are not a child or men- is a necessary ingredient in the cause of a serious tally impaired; and not under physical or mental moral choice. compulsion, you make choices all the time; and those choices are the ones you decide to make—even if you Consider the breathtaking enormity of that claim: might not like them. In that sense, there is no doubt nothing your parents taught you, nothing you learned you have free will. from experience, nothing you learned in church or school has any decisive effect on your serious moral But do you, and could you, have free will in the sense choices! There is something “causeless” in you, with that in making your choices you make them free of all which to override all that, if only you will use it rightly. that went into making you the person you are? Your contumacious refusal to do so is what condemns you to never-ending punishment. Consider the effects of these factors on who you are; how different you would have been if one or more It has to be that way since the Christian salvation had been otherwise; and whether these happened to story depends on mankind’s undiluted guilt; thus, the you or were chosen by you: explanations for “sin” cannot lie in anything over which one had no control. 1. Being born—and into a world where, as Jesus solemnly promised, the fate of What science did to the flat earth, it may do to this ­eternal­suffering awaits the “many”; with bizarre idea. Findings are mounting in neuroscience, only a “few” to find salvation. genetics, epigenetics and psychology, casting the gravest doubt on the Christian version of free will. 2. Your genetic inheritance. Many top scientists already believe the evidence is clear enough to deny it outright. Their work is just 3. Your life in the womb, shaping your genetic beginning. self.

Secularism should reach out to the thousands of 4. Your time and place of birth. intelligent Christians already on the weak end of the

16 Free Inquiry April/May 2013 secularhumanism.org ADVERTISEMENT

5. Your parents, relatives, race and gender; Is it not clear that in making choices you can be your nurture and experiences in infancy free from external compulsion but you cannot and childhood. be free of what made you, you—and what made you, you, was­not­of­your­choice? 6. The mutations in your brain and body throughout life; and other purely random You are told to believe that a child born of a fifteen events. year old, drug addicted prostitute, often abused and beaten by mother’s pimp of the moment, neglected, 7. Your natural physical stature, looks, smile semi-starved and often ill has exactly the same and voice; your intelligence; your sexual capacity for choosing to steal or not, as a John F. drive and proclivities; your personality and Kennedy or George Bush—first or second. Is that wit; and your natural ability in sports, remotely believable? music and dance. And yet the Christian story must have it that 8. Your religious indoctrination; economic way; for if your decisions are caused by any- circumstances; cultural influences; political thing not­chosen­by­you, you cannot be guilty. and civil rights; the prevailing customs of your times. What then about responsibility and accountability? It is as crucial as ever. 9. The blizzard of experiences throughout life, not chosen by you but which happened to Nothing about this understanding prevents holding you. people fully responsible and accountable for their acts, as now. We continue to urge, cajole, praise, con- Are these not the factors that made you who you are demn, educate and apply every sort of experience to today and who you were at any point in your life? Do to reform; and in any event, to protect society as they not absolutely determine who you even have the necessary. These are environmental influences; they possibility to be? always have effects—though not always as desired.

What is missing? The very many choices you made All but one thing remains the same: our attitude. It along the way? cannot be self-righteous because we know: there but for the lottery of life, go I. Yes, you made choices which made a huge difference, but when you made them, were they not entirely derived from 1-9? What else? Who cannot understand and relate to each of the nine points? Everyone knows they confront life with what Is there no basis for how “Christian free will” decides? they received—not with what they chose. Does your education, intelligence, religious training, and all the rest play no role, if it has the effect of Nothing new from science promises to demolish the being decisive? If not, how can you be responsible for resurrection; nothing ever yet said has done it; but those decisions? “Christian Free Will” falls by common sense analysis and may indeed be falsified by science.

This ad was paid for by a fellow feather on the sea of fate, for your consideration, comment and criticism — contact: [email protected].

secularhumanism.org April/May 2013 Free Inquiry 17 Highlights from ‘Women In Secularism 2’

On May 17–19, 2013, the Center for Inquiry (the Council for Secular Humanism’s supporting organization) presented the second “Women In Secularism” conference in Washington, D.C. FREE INQUIRY is pleased to publish the following essays based on speeches delivered at “Women In Secularism 2.”—EDS.

Women’s History: A Core Secular Issue Susan Jacoby

n the famous abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1837, everything would be just fine for that holy of holies, my wed- the early feminist Maria Weston Chapman replied to a large ding night. I doubt that the doctor believed this story, but he Igroup of New England Congregationalist ministers who prescribed the pill anyway. were scandalized by the fact that women were beginning My twenty-three-year-old niece found it almost incredible to speak in public on behalf of political causes such as aboli- that I would have had to tell such a lie to obtain access to the tionism. Her verse was aptly titled “The Times That Try Men’s pill, and I’ve since had many e-mails from other women her Souls”: age saying the same thing. The whole reason we’ve had this They’ve taken a notion to speak for themselves, ludicrous recent discussion about whether health insurance And are wielding the tongue and the pen; should pay for contraception is that our society has all but They’ve mounted the rostrum; the termagent elves, forgotten what things were like in the “good old days,” when And—oh horrid!—are talking to men! women had little control over any aspect of their own repro- With faces unblanched in our presence they come ductive systems. To harangue us, they say, in behalf of the dumb. . . . My generation of feminists came of age in the late 1960s. I am willing to bet that many well-educated secularist We operated within the context of a society that knew almost readers have never heard the name Maria Weston Chapman. nothing about the long struggle for women’s rights that That reflects not ignorance but the sad fact that the record began with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. If you had of both women’s history and secular history—to say nothing asked me, in 1968, to come up with the names of American of the connections between them—remains woefully incom- women who had been active in the struggle for legal justice plete in twenty-first-century America. for their sex in the past, the only one I am certain I could have It has often been said that one of the great weaknesses pulled out of my head was Susan B. Anthony. I might, possi- of the women’s rights movement over the past two hundred bly, have thought of Eleanor Roosevelt, because I knew she years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so had been ridiculed as the wife of the president for her interest that it must be resurrected for each new generation. I experi- in both the status of women and of black Americans. enced a perfect example of this recently, when I published an The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is e-book titled The Last Men on Top, about my father’s gener- both a cause and effect of their marginalization. If you are ation and what it was like growing up under the values that marginalized, you don’t have the clout to move your story prevailed in the late 1950s and early ’60s. into mainstream institutions—such as public schools—that The birth-control pill became available in 1963, when I automatically pass on the stories considered foundational to was eighteen, but it was far from clear how or if the pill could a society. Indeed, one of the main rationales for the existence be obtained by unmarried women (or girls, as we called and public support of such institutions is that they are neces- ourselves then) in Lansing, Michigan. So I went to a sary to passing on the common heritage of a culture. But the gynecologist, told him I was getting married in two months, pertinent question is: Just who defines what is “common” in and emphasized that I wanted to begin taking the pill so our heritage?

18 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org It isn’t surprising that the secular movement in America they are entitled.” has been characterized by historical discontinuities that, in Stanton was referring, of course, to the “government” of a number of respects, resemble the amnesia that held back men. The connection between Enlightenment values and feminism for so long. Every brand of religion maintains, and is, women’s rights was there, by the way, for both secular and a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values— religious feminists such as the Quaker Lucretia Mott, whom whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Stanton called “the greatest woman of the nineteenth cen- Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhier- tury” when she died in 1881. Religious feminists in the nine- archical structures, lack the power to hand down and dissem- teenth century were invariably pilloried—called atheists and inate their heritage in such a systematic way. sluts—by the more orthodox of their coreligionists. As for Even when once-marginalized movements succeed in chang- feminists who were agnostics or atheists, such as Stanton ing minds in their own generation—as the Enlightenment ratio- herself, they were written out of the history of the women’s nalists did in the American revolutionary generation, as the movement for a very long time in spite of their pivotal impor- abolitionists did in the nineteenth century, as feminists did in the tance during the nineteenth century. 1970s—they are often subject to re-marginalization in the next After the 1895 publication of Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, generation. Reason is not a religion. Secularism is not a religion. which excoriated all religion for its role in the subjugation Feminism is not a religion. If they were, there would be a femi- of women, it was decided by the national woman-suffragist nist/secularist treasury to pay for the dissemination of its values organization that the suffragist movement could not afford from generation to generation. I am concerned chiefly with the ways in which the lacunae and discontinuities in wom- en’s history intersect with the same phenom- ena in secular history and affect our ability to “. . . One of the great weaknesses of the women’s rights influence public policy. movement over the past two hundred years has been irst, I think we have long underestimated the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must Fthe degree to which all movements aimed be resurrected for each new generation.” at justice and social, economic, and legal equality for women have been intertwined with secular movements, beginning with the Enlightenment. Now, it is absolutely true that not all Enlightenment thinkers were supporters of to be identified with ungodliness. Even after the Nineteenth women’s rights. Most men of the Enlightenment, with the Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified in exception of Thomas Paine, seem to have given scarcely any 1920, Stanton remained largely unknown until the revival of thought to power relations between the sexes. American feminism in the early 1970s. But while not all Enlightenment thinkers were feminists There has been a similar effort to downplay the impor- (and I’m ignoring the fact that feminist wasn’t a term used tance of secular women in the revived feminist movement at that time), all feminists born at the end of the eighteenth of the last three decades of the twentieth century. Many and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries were prod- religious women today are fighting for equality within their ucts of the Enlightenment. The Seneca Falls Declaration of faiths, but that was not nearly as true at the end of the ‘60s. Sentiments, largely written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (born The fact is that secular women—especially, nonobservant 1815), is explicitly modeled after the American Declaration of Jews—played an outsized role in the 1970s in a way that made Independence. The Seneca Falls declaration states: “We hold feminists themselves uncomfortable (just as they had been these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are uncomfortable about the antireligious Anthony in the 1890s). endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . . . The reasons for this are complicated, but it really boils down to But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the fact that in socially progressive movements of the twenti- invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them eth century, Jews were always overrepresented relative to their under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such numbers in the American population. And the Jewish women government. . . . Such has been the patient sufferance of the who were so prominent among the founding mothers of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity twentieth-century feminist movement—to name just a few, Betty which constrains them to demand the equal station to which Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug—were all secular Jews.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 19 If you are a Jew, it is difficult to believe in equal rights for here has been no prominent atheist, no prominent figure women if you also believe in a form of Judaism that enjoins Tin the secular movement for the past forty years, who has each man to thank God every day for not having been born made women’s rights a fundamental rather than a side issue a woman. In the same way, if you are a Catholic woman, it is in the battle for secular values. The late Christopher Hitchens, impossible to believe in a traditional patristic Catholicism that Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris—without question the considers the male pope infallible and says that women can’t three best-known atheist writers of the past ten years— be priests because none of the twelve apostles was a female. have written about women’s rights as a secular issue almost That there are many religious women who consider them- entirely in terms of the treatment of women by radical Islam. selves feminists today should not obscure the fact that wom- I should make it clear that I, too, believe that telling the en’s equality was just as much a secular idea as the idea of truth about what Islamic theocrats do to women is extremely religious freedom for all, not just for minority faiths, was and important, and I am completely opposed to multiculturalists is a secularist idea. To the degree that feminism has become a who try to justify religious discrimination and violence against part of religion today, this is part of the process of accommo- women—whether in areas controlled by the Taliban or in certain immigrant communities around the world—as under- dation to secular values by liberal religion. standable “cultural” traditions. Burning witches was once an accepted “cultural” tradition. As a secularist and a feminist, I want nothing to do with cultural justifications for clear violations of human rights. We need, as secularists, to understand “The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups that discrimination and violence against is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.” women are hardly confined to the Islamic world, that they are hardly things of the past, and that they do have religious origins. One of the reasons Robert Green Ingersoll has long been one of my heroes is that he is The question of how much accommodation to make for the only famous male American freethinker secular values is not only a divisive force between religions in our history to make a priority out of women’s rights as a secular issue. Ingersoll’s rejection of the idea that women but within almost every religion, as we have witnessed in were, by nature, intellectually inferior to men—an article of the confrontations between the Vatican and those uppity faith for most men and most women in his era—was one of American Catholic nuns and between the most repressive, his distinguishing characteristics as a humanistic freethinker. violent forms of Islam and women who are willing to die for Ingersoll’s twentieth-century biographers failed to recog- their right to an education. nize that their subject held a radical view of women’s rights Feminism, because of the essentially misogynistic nature and wrongs that went far beyond the suffragist movement of the sacred books of all monotheistic religions, is by its very of his time. Probably this was because most of them wrote nature a secular challenge to faith. The reason it has been so before the emergence of the second wave of American fem- difficult for American feminism to own up to—and to own— inism in the 1970s. its secular origins is, of course, a product of the idea that there In the battle over the subjugation of women, Ingersoll can be no morality without religion, and the political reality sided with Stanton, who saw religion and centuries of reli- that being called “antireligious” has so often been the kiss of gion-based law as the main cause of women’s oppression, death for American social causes. rather than with those who saw the vote itself as the ultimate For its part, the secular movement has until fairly recently remedy for all of women’s ills. Like Stanton, Ingersoll viewed found it difficult to own up to the importance of feminist the franchise as necessary but not sufficient for women who action as a possible template for secular action within society. wished not only to be the helpmates of men but the masters We’ve begun to see much more emphasis in the past few of their own lives. In this he resembled feminists of the 1970s years on issues such as contraception, abortion, and women’s and 1980s more than he did the suffragists of his own time. rights around the world—as well as gay rights—as secular Before there were any reliable means of contraception, issues. But the question is why it took so long, and I think the Ingersoll spoke about birth control as the precondition for answer is to be found in these discontinuities in both secular women’s liberation from servitude. He also understood that and women’s history. compulsory childbearing was used by both the church and

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individual men to stymie any other aspirations that women ists need to involve themselves personally when volunteers might form, and I think this is particularly important in view are needed for causes of special import to women—and, of the efforts of the religious Right today to limit access to for that matter, all social causes closely connected to secular contraception as well as abortion. Ingersoll said emphatically, values. “Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself But women’s causes are particularly important to us in … must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself a strategic sense, as well, because we need more activist whether she will or will not become a mother.” Women could women as organizers of the secular movement. And I think, never be truly free, he said, as long as they were forced to rely by the way, that there are many more women atheists than on the self-control of men to avoid unwanted pregnancy. we see reflected in the polls, simply because atheism asa Those who considered the very mention of birth control social pejorative is something to which women are more sen- obscene would be horrified by the possibility that women sitive than men. might choose whether or not to have children, because invol- For example, I wrote a column for The New York Times untary motherhood guaranteed patriarchal control over all after the Newtown shootings in which I criticized atheists who female behavior. Ingersoll correctly described the ethos of describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” The col- both men and women “who believe that slaves are purer, umn was reprinted the following week in the Dallas Morning truer than the free, who believe that fear is a safer guide News, and my author website was flooded with impassioned than knowledge, that only those are really communications from atheists in Texas. One woman who good who obey the commands of others, and that ignorance is the soil in which the perfect, perfumed flower of virtue grows.” Ingersoll was well aware that women, as a group, were more religious than men— “. . . All movements aimed at justice and social, economic, but in sharp contrast to Victorian moralists and legal equality for women have been intertwined with who considered the female sex “purer” than the male, he attributed feminine reli- secular movements, beginning with the Enlightenment.” giosity not to woman’s higher nature but to her lack of education and utter eco- nomic dependency on her husband. In his preface to the prominent free- thinker and feminist Helen H. Gardener’s Men, Women and lives in a suburb of Dallas wrote that she is an atheist who Gods (1885), Ingersoll said flatly, “Woman is not the intellec- describes herself as “spiritual, but not religious” not because tual inferior of man. She has lacked, not mind, but opportu- she is afraid of social criticism herself but because she knows nity. . . . There were universities for men before the alphabet that her children would be affected if her beliefs were gen- had been taught to women. At the intellectual feast, there erally known in her community. This was very instructive for was no place for wives and mothers. Even now they sit at the me because, living as I do in New York City, I hadn’t thought second table and eat the crusts and crumbs. The schools for about this aspect of the problem for atheists who don’t live women, at the present time, are just far enough behind those in cosmopolitan environments. I have no doubt that this sort for men, to fall heirs to the discarded; on the same principle of family-connected social pressure weighs more heavily on that when a doctrine becomes too absurd for the pulpit, it is women than on men. given to the Sunday-school.” At the same time, I don’t think we’re going to get any- By the way, Helen H. Gardener is another nineteenth-cen- where if mothers are afraid to stand up for their beliefs and tury feminist whose name has been forgotten. show their children that atheism and secularism have a proud By placing so much emphasis on Ingersoll, I am not sug- tradition among women as well as men. This, I think, is why it gesting that what secular women need is a man to speak for is so crucial to reclaim the historical knowledge at the inter- them. I am saying that the secular movement needs more section of feminism and secularism that has too often been people, both men and women, who have a real passion for lost in each generation. the importance to the entire secular movement of what were I was recently reminded that this year marks the sixty-fifth once considered “women’s issues.” anniversary of what is arguably the most important Supreme Court decision on church-state relations—one from which ust issuing press releases about abortion, contraception, all others descend—McCollum v. the Board of Education of Jand violence against women is not enough. I think secular- Champaign, Illinois.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 21 This case was brought by Vashti McCollum, who died at cat was lynched. So it is not difficult to sympathize with that the age of ninety-three in 2006. It challenged the practice mother in Texas who felt that her children would be ostra- of allowing clergy to provide religious instruction for stu- cized and possibly worse if it became common knowledge dents in, and on the premises of, public schools. Classes for that they were being raised by atheists. Protestants were held on school premises; Jews and Catholics Vashti McCollum, who wrote about the case in her book had to go elsewhere. Records were kept, and students who One Woman’s Fight, is yet another woman in the pantheon of did not attend religious instruction had to go to a special forgotten secular heroes. It is up to us to restore the full his- tory of women’s involvement in the secular movement to our classroom and be singled out from the rest. own store of knowledge as secularists and atheists. Only then The key issue in the case, one continually raised today, can we begin to fight effectively to restore secular history to is whether the First Amendment ban on religious estab- American history as a whole. lishments meant that all faiths must be treated equally or whether it requires public neutrality between belief and Susan Jacoby is an award-winning independent scholar whose books unbelief. The latter was Vashti McCollum’s contention—and include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Metropolitan she won in an 8–1 decision with the majority opinion written Company, an imprint of Henry Holt Books, 2004) and The Great by Associate Justice Hugo Black. Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought ( During the three-year struggle while the case made its Press, 2013). This essay is adapted from a speech given at the way to the Supreme Court, McCollum was fired from her job “Women In Secularism 2” conference on May 18, 2013. as a dance instructor at the University of Illinois. The family’s

Feminism, Religion, and ‘Mattering’ Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

’ve probably agonized over this essay more than any other sloppily and mockingly misconstrued, or—the most elegant in my career. The source of my agony is this: Do I, for the first of all obliterations—entirely ignored. It’s all so civilly done Itime in my life, publicly address the gender issue? that you’re never sure that it isn’t your own shortcomings My method has always been to behave as if my being a being justly evaluated. female doesn’t matter. I try to behave as if the world is the Psychologists call these small but relentless I’m-not-even- way I know that it isn’t, hoping that if enough of us marginal- sure-if-I’m-imagining-it-perhaps-I’m-being-too-sensitive ized sorts—women, people of color, LGBTs—power through, interactions “micro-aggressions,” and they cite evidence that then the biases against us will eventually be shown for the for women as well as other marginalized groups, these hollow falsehoods that they are. I try to cultivate a pose of micro-aggressions take more of a psychological toll than gender-obliviousness, if only so that my energy isn’t dissi- overt, hate-filled attacks. The psychologist Derald Wing Sue pated in frustration. writes in Microaggresions in Everyday Life: “It is easier for peo- But the truth is that I haven’t been oblivious. How could ple of color and women to deal with the overt and deliberate I be? My engagement in both the tough world of profes- sional philosophy and the even-tougher world of literary forms of bigotry than the subtle and unintentional forms, fiction has afforded me an ideal vantage point for viewing because no guesswork is involved. It is the unconscious and the many subtle ways in which gender biases undermine unintentional forms of biases that create the overwhelming women. These biases have, in our more enlightened spheres, problems for marginalized groups in our society.” I know retreated largely to an unconscious level, yet they are all the this sounds incredible to people who have never consistently more powerful for that, making women hesitant to enter the experienced marginalization, which is why they really should fray and increasing the likelihood that, when they do, their consult the marginalized about it. On this topic at least, they temerity will be rewarded by their being dismissed, sidelined, must accept that they are not the authorities.

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n coming to address, if somewhat belatedly, these issues ters overwhelmingly, the kind of mattering that produces his Iof gender-bias as they continue to play out in the most perceptions of people, of himself and of others; of who are the nobodies and who the somebodies, who the deprived enlightened spheres of our most-enlightened society—even and who the gifted, who the better-never-to-have-been-born among my pro-reason, pro-science compatriots—I’ve come to and who the heroes. Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on link these gender issues to what I consider another failure of is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over recognition common in our secular community. So I’m going what matters. Who matters is a function of what matters. Here to switch gears for a moment and talk about this other issue, where I am, what matters is intelligence, the people who mat- ter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, then circle back to the dreaded gender issue. the heroes, are the geniuses. As secularists with strong scientific orientations, we’ve concentrated almost exclusively on the ways in which reli- Renee answered my editor’s question about her own despair gious mythologies recklessly abuse what called by way of her theory of mattering. She inhabited a region of the the “will to believe.” We’ve valiantly tried to rein in this wild mattering map in which she felt her own mattering to be seri- will with sound epistemology and explanatorily satisfying ously in doubt. She sees this as one of the fundamental ways in science, which is all to the good. I don’t advocate stinting on which a human life can go wrong. Renee convinced me that ideas sound epistemology and explanatorily satisfying science. But about mattering have rich implications, both psychological and there is another irrepressible will active in religion that we’ve normative. And apparently she convinced some others as well. largely ignored. I’m talking about the will to matter. I was first led to this notion of the will to matter by one of my fictional characters, a young woman named Renee Feuer, who was a protagonist in my first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. I would never “. . . The many subtle ways in which gender biases have come up with the idea on my own. I thought of undermine women . . . have, in our more enlightened myself back in those days as a rigorous philosopher of spheres, retreated largely to an unconscious level, yet science, and these ideas about mattering weren’t rig- orous. They were soft and unquantifiable. But my edi- they are all the more powerful for that. . . .” tor for that book remarked, “I don’t really understand Renee. She’s so bright and attractive, and yet she’s so unhappy, always on the verge of despair. Why?” I thought about my editor’s question, or rather I had Renee Feuer think about it. And because Renee was not as A few years ago, a psychologist named Ellyn Kaschak got rigorous a philosopher as I was—in fact, that was a large part in touch with me to tell me of the award-winning work she of her problem: she was a graduate student in a rigorous phi- has done on mattering maps and informing me of some- losophy department, and she, unlike me, couldn’t hack it— thing I hadn’t known, which is that the idea of the mattering she came up with these complicated ideas about mattering. maps has become a working theoretical construct in certain Renee turned out to be quite the theoretician of mattering. branches of psychology. It intrigued me that my fictional So I’m going to let her explain it: character’s idea had been incorporated into actual theoreti- cal work. So I Googled “mattering maps” and was astonished To matter, not to be as naught. Is there any human will deeper than that? It’s not just unqualified will, as Schopenhauer to get tens of thousands of hits—far more hits than if you would have it, that makes us what we are; nor is it the will to Google me! One of the first hits was an article in the Harvard power, as Nietzsche had theorized, but something deeper, of Business Review coauthored by George Loewenstein, one of which the will to power is merely a manifestation. We want the founders of behavioral economics, and Karl Moene. The power because we want to matter. . . . And the will to create? article was titled “How Mattering Maps Affect Behavior,” and To procreate? These too are expressions of the will to matter. Deeper even than the will to survive. We don’t want to live it used the idea of mattering maps to demonstrate the inad- when we become convinced that we don’t, can’t, will never equacy of the standard model of rational-choice theory. And matter. . . . We no sooner discover that we are than we desper- sure enough, it’s my fictional character’s ideas that this article ately want that which we are to matter. quoted: “We discuss the social dependence of preferences That was one of Renee’s ideas, the will to matter. And and its implications for economics by pursuing the idea that then there was her idea of “the mattering map.” Again, I’ll let in different social settings, different things are valued. . . . The Renee explain it: concept of ‘mattering maps’ captures this insight. As Rebecca Goldstein expresses it in the novel from which we adopt both People occupy the mattering map. . . . The map is a projection of its inhabitants’ perceptions. A person’s location on the the idea and the terms. . . .” From there, the article goes on to mattering map is determined by what matters to him, mat- quote some of Renee’s ruminations on mattering maps.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 23 n the whole, I was pleased that my character’s ideas had the Mediterranean, Judea, and into Europe— at precisely this Obeen enjoying such an active theoretical life independent time? This is too large a topic for this space, but I’ll float some of her, not to mention independent of me. But in fact I, too, general ideas. have been thinking a great deal about the concept of matter- The first thing that one notices is that all the affected ing in the thirty-odd years since a fictional character first sug- regions saw the emergence of large societal institutions orga- gested its importance to me. I’ve thought about mattering in nized around urban centers. These polities introduced a level relation to problems in moral philosophy, most particularly of anonymity and impersonality into human life, so different the reputed gap between “is” and “ought.” And increasingly, from tribal village life where all relations had been determi- I’ve been thinking about mattering in relation to the difficul- nately personal. Could this depersonalization have been a ties we secularists face in trying to understand the tenacity of nudge in the direction of existential pondering? religion. What is it that keeps intellectually sophisticated peo- Some social scientists, most notably David Graeber, have ple clinging to propositions about the world so far-fetched pointed out that the core period of Jaspers’s Axial Age cor- that they can be described, if you’ll allow me to use the tech- responds almost exactly to the period and places in which nical terminology of epistemology, as crazy-ass shit? coinage materialized, with minting overseen by governments who then used the wealth for military ventures that often resulted in large captures of people converted into slave labor—many times sent to mine the ore that would be turned into more coins. He calls this the “military-coinage-slavery complex.” Here, too, the “. . . For women as well as other marginalized groups changes are in the direction of depersonalization. . . . micro-aggressions take more of a psychological Perhaps the introduction of markets and of money— providing an impersonal measure of —intensi- toll than overt, hate-filled attacks.” fied the depersonalization inherent in the emergence of the large polities, again coaxing existential pon- derings. Another line of approach, recently put forth by Nicolas Baumard and Pascal Boyer, derives from data Archaeologists say that beliefs in the supernatural—ani- demonstrating that all the regions affected by the Axial mistic spirits of nature lodged in animals, wind, trees, rivers, Age’s normative ferment were unusually well-fed: in other sun, moon—extend back at least thirty thousand years to words, once the basic material supports for life have been established, a person is free to start wondering what makes Cro-Magnon man, whose cave paintings, requiring gaining it worth it. access to tortuously inaccessible places, are interpreted as Fortunately, sorting all this out isn’t my problem to solve expressions of supernatural beliefs. Why else go to all that here. The point I’d like to make is simply that what happened inconvenience? But the religions that still matter, that still res- in the Greek city-states, resulting in both philosophy and onate with huge swaths of our contemporaries—Hinduism, science, was part of something larger, a confrontation with Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and of existential dilemmas that involves a certain abstraction from course, the Abrahamic religions in all their teeming varia- the daily grind of life. What erupts quite forcefully in the Axial tions—were originally forged during the period that the phi- Age, over large reaches of the globe, is the sense that some losopher Karl Jaspers dubbed the “Axial Age,” roughly 800 to lives achieve mattering and others don’t, raising the possi- 200 BCE. Jaspers also pointed out that this very same period bility that perhaps there is something a person can do that saw the emergence in Greece of secular philosophy and tragic will make the difference as regards his or her own mattering. drama. He called it the Axial Age because these normative The thought that there might be a chance of achieving a life and spiritual frameworks extend out into our own day like that matters and that you might personally blow it—meaning the spokes of a wheel. And what connects them all—and here that you might as well not have bothered to show up for your I’m superimposing my own views over Jaspers’s—is a preoc- existence at all, for all the difference it makes—creates the cupation with issues of mattering. These traditions present special conditions that coaxed forth normative responses that divergent visions of how people should live their lives in order still resonate today. to achieve lives that matter. Why did such a preoccupation with mattering erupt over hat is remarkable about the Greeks is that, despite the wide reaches of the globe—China, India, Persia, all around Wfact that religious rituals saturated their lives—their gods

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and goddesses were everywhere and had to be propitiated lations as to what would conduce to the greatest good of the or something terrible would happen—when it came to the greatest number ever creased the beautiful brow of Achilles. question of what is it that makes an individual human life Nor was his singular value a matter simply of his prowess in matter, they didn’t look to their gods but rather tried to war, or his metaphysically mixed parentage, or his godlike answer the question in human terms. Their approaching the beauty, though of course these characteristics all mark him question of human mattering in human terms is the singu- as eminently song-worthy. But the item on Achilles’s CV that larity that created the preconditions for philosophy and its puts him over the top is the choice he made: he was given the secular morality. option, by his goddess mother, of a long but ordinary life or The Greeks developed an attitude I call the “Ethos of the a short and extraordinary life, and he opted for the short but Extraordinary.” This is an ethos that predates the develop- extraordinary life. That’s telling. ment of philosophy by several centuries. The crux of this ethos is that a perfectly average life, with nothing to distinguish Telling also is Socrates’s comparing himself to Achilles it from the masses of others, is not worth liv- in the version of his trial that Plato gives us in the Apology. ing. When such a life is over, it will be as if it had never been, leaving as little trace of itself behind as some poor bloke who disappears beneath the ocean’s waves—an image that called forth an intensity of terror for the seafar- “. . . There is another irrepressible will active in religion that ing Greeks. Greek religion offered little help in we’ve largely ignored. I’m talking about the will to matter.” palliating this terror. There’s no existential help forthcoming from those untrustworthy toffs with the Olympian address. You’re better off not even attracting the gods’ attention, unless you want to get yourself raped or worse. No, what you want is the attention of your fellow mortals. That’s all the redemptive Socrates, charged with the capital crime of impiety and of distinction we mortals are going to get. So what you must do corrupting the young, says that he will not bargain with his is to live so that others will hear of you, speak of you, repli- 501 Athenian jurors for his life but rather make the choice of cate your being on their own lips. Live a song-worthy life. As Achilles. Of course, Socrates was already seventy years old, so Pindar sang it: it was a bit late to achieve a short but extraordinary life, but And two things only— still the statement indicates how much the Socrates-Plato tend life’s sweetest moment: when in the flower of wealth team—who, of course, brought us philosophy as we know a man enjoys both triumph and good fame. it—still bought into the general Greek attitude of the Ethos Seek not to become Zeus. All is yours of the Extraordinary, while also modifying it in line with If the allotment of these two gifts their view that it’s reason, and only reason, that can confer Has fallen to you. mattering on human life. They refined the more vulgar credo Mortal thoughts that the unexceptional life is not worth living to read: the Befit a mortal man. unexamined life is not worth living. It’s the pursuit of reason The Ethos of the Extraordinary reaches back to the Homeric that provides the only kind of extraordinary that matters. Age. Just think of the heroes, Achilles first and foremost, And with this significant modification, the project of applying definitely a song-worthy sort. (The Iliad’s alternative title is self-correcting reason to the task of figuring out how best to Song of Achilles.) Achilles is miffed when Agamemnon takes live one’s life was off and running. Eventually, self-correcting the girl who was his lawfully won Trojan booty and, like reason would even question the presumption adapted from some entitled teenager sulking in his room when his driving the Ethos of the Extraordinary that had slipped, unexamined, privileges are revoked, nurses his grievance for fully twenty books of the Iliad, while the blood of his comrades-in-arms into Greek moral reasoning. soaks the Trojan soil. And yet Achilles was esteemed, even Think about that. What an achievement! The progress into the classical age, as the greatest of the Greek heroes. to be made in philosophy is often a matter of discovering Why? His heroism certainly wasn’t a matter of his giving any presumptions that slip unexamined into reasoning, so why consideration to the question of how his actions would affect not the unexamined presumption that got the whole process anyone other than himself. No Bentham-like utilitarian calcu- started?

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 25 ight across the Mediterranean from the philosophical There is grandeur in this mattering view of life, together RGreeks lived the still-obscure tribe that called themselves with the grandeur of the scientific view of life, the two joined the Ivrim, the Hebrews, who were approaching the problem in the progress we’ve made along that reason-seeking radial of how to matter by formulating a theism that eventually that reaches back to the Greeks, the implications of which, involved a one and only god, the source not only of the phys- both scientific and moral, we’re still in the process of unfolding. ical world without but of the moral world within. Because he The will to matter is some powerful stuff. It spawned the made us “in his image,” we matter to him (divine narcissism?), religions of the Axial Age that still claim the allegiance of and therefore (therefore?) matter. Our normative culture is the many who can’t imagine their lives mattering were they still a very uneasy mix of these two disparate approaches to deprived of their mythological scaffolding. But the will to human mattering pursued by these two Mediterranean peo- matter spawned, too, the tradition of secular reason, to which ples, the Greeks and the Hebrews—the one group approach- we are the heirs, the secular reason that has progressively ing the question of human mattering in human terms, the corrected the mistakes to which our species is prone, includ- other approaching human mattering in divine terms. ing mistakes about the facts of mattering. Ethical behavior is behavior that does justice, in ways both large and small, to the will to matter in all of us—which is why we can’t pursue the goals of secularism without simultaneously pursuing the goals of social justice. And what is it that micro-aggressions do? They undermine “It intrigued me that my fictional character’s a person’s sense that she matters—which is all the worse idea had been incorporated into actual when the people doing the undermining are those who matter to her, who share her region of the mattering map, theoretical work.” and so can’t be as easily dismissed as the ranting bigots and wild-eyed misogynists. Mattering matters. Without sensitivity to the will to mat- ter, not only can’t we understand the continuing force of religion in the lives of the many who otherwise feel they don’t All of the spokes that extend out from the so-called Axial matter, their lives subject to the same depersonalization and Age, not just the religious and spiritual mythologies but what devaluation that gave rise to the religious visions of the Axial the Greeks devised as well—which is the normative valuation Age in the first place, but we also fail to understand the secu- of self-critical reason—were prompted by preoccupations lar moral progress to which we are the heirs and upon which with human mattering. But of all the visions addressing we wage an assault, whether macro or micro, every time we human mattering that emerged during that normatively fer- undermine a person’s sense that he or she matters. tile period, only one has substantively changed, has evolved, Further Reading has made progress—has even, through its tortuously self-criti- Baumard, Nicolas, and Pascal Boyer. “Explaining Moral Religions.” cal methods (to which we commit ourselves when we commit Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, No. 6, 2013. ourselves to reason) corrected its own false presuppositions Goldstein, Rebecca. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Random and intuitions, which tend to favor our own personal mat- House, 1983. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House tering and those who are like us over those whose lives we Publishing, 2011. have trouble imagining our way into—and that, of course, is secular moral reason. It is by this means that we’ve come to know that every person matters,* or rather, what we know is the conditional that if any of us is entitled to a life of mattering (and we do tend to think quite passionately that we are), then all of us are so entitled. The will to matter, together with its mattering Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American novelist and philosopher. maps structuring so much of our lives, including our economic Her awards include a MacArthur fellowship in 1996 and Humanist of behavior, also anchors us in the realm of value. It’s where we the Year and Freethought Heroine, both in 2011. She is the author of should look in closing the gap between “is” and “ought.” 36 Arguments for the : A Work of Fiction (2010) and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (forthcoming * In asserting that every person matters, I am emphatically not asserting in March 2014), both from Pantheon. that only people matter, excluding the mattering of other species. But I would be prepared to argue that we humans matter in a different way.

26 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Highlights From ‘Women In Secularism 2’

Sexism and Religion: Can the Knot Be Untied? Katha Pollitt

an currently existing religion be disentangled from the Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions CThat was a question to which I had no ready answer, so I as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the asked a random selection of people what they thought. Cousin major characters: there is no daughter of God such as Jesus, Wendy, who fasts on Yom Kippur, gave an emphatic no. So no female prophet such as Isaiah or Muhammad, no female did Cousin Penny, whose family is Greek Orthodox. So did my lawgiver equal to Moses, no female founder of a major new daughter, who has been a militant atheist practically since faith such as the Buddha, and very few female religious leaders kindergarten. “Not as long as God is ‘the Father,’” tweeted the with independent power. Catholicism has many female saints literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn. That was pretty much how and charismatic women, but the most insignificant parish it went, even down to the Dublin taxi driver who told me that priest has powers denied the genius St. Teresa of Avila: only he thought people could get along fine without religion and a man can officiate at Mass and only a man can give absolu- probably would be doing so before too long. tion for sins. Even polytheistic religions such as Hinduism (or, We all know that the world’s major religions are deeply for that matter, ancient Greek and Roman religions) assign shaped by patriarchal ideas about women’s place. For some, that extends even into the next world: Mormon men may have to practice monogamy in this life, but after death they will have many wives, while a woman can only enter the afterlife if her husband calls her “Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there by her secret name. Plus, she will be perpetually Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex pregnant in the afterlife in order to produce people is made, it is to the advantage of men.” to populate her husband’s planet. Not exactly my idea of heaven! In the Islamic afterlife, men get a bevy of beautiful maidens, and in some versions their wives get to be part of their husband’s entourage, and in other versions get . . . oh, something wonderful, but no one knows goddesses a lesser role. To find a woman-centered religion, what it is. But other religions, Christianity for example, preach you have to go back to prehistory, to mother-goddess cults that men and women are equal before God—equal spiritually, about which we know little and that in any case cannot be that is, whatever that means. In Galatians 3:28, for example, proven to have reflected or shaped a matriarchal society in St. Paul famously wrote that “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, which women were powerful and independent social actors neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are (though it would be nice to think that they did so). Men are all one in Christ Jesus.” Jesus, you’ll remember, said that after quite capable of worshipping a female, whether Lakshmi or the resurrection there would be no marriage. And presumably Athena or the Virgin Mary, while vigorously repressing actual no pregnancy either, you’ll be relieved to know. human women. The guidelines laid out for human society here on Earth The major texts present a farrago of misogyny: menstrual were quite a different story. After all, St. Paul also famously taboos; double standards of sexuality of which religiously wrote “Let the women keep silent in the churches; for they are sanctioned polygyny is only the most obvious; a deep concern not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves, just with controlling women’s sexuality, expressed as an obsession as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let with prostitutes, virginity, wifely fidelity, women’s “modesty,” them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for and false charges of rape; and much, much more. Even Jesus, a woman to speak in church” (New American Standard Bible, who is one of the more woman-friendly religious leaders, for- 1 Cor. 14:34–35). Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, bade divorce except when a wife—not a husband, a wife—had

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 27 been unfaithful. That is interesting when you remember that to show solidarity with Muslim women, who were being Joseph had considered sending Mary back to her parents harassed on the streets—along the lines of the Danes, who when she was found to be pregnant by another. under German occupation wore the yellow star to protect The atheist in me wants to answer my question with a their nation’s Jews. My suggestion that maybe men should resounding no: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, wear the head scarf did not go over well. it’s baked in. I’d go further and suggest that the subordina- tion of women has historically been one of the main purposes oday there is a whole industry of feminist and progres- of religion—the original rulebook for patriarchy. To the Tsive-minded theologians of both sexes who apply their extent that religion has become more woman-friendly, it’s tremendous scholarly skills to reinterpreting the Bible and the because the larger society has become so. Thus, many if not Qur’an in more egalitarian ways. The atheist in me finds this most priests and rabbis and imams today tend to speak in the school of revisionism rather irritating. It seems like cheating. softer language of complementarity: men and women are After almost two thousand years in which it was perfectly equal . . . just different and—surprise!—different in ways that clear that St. Paul meant women should be silent in church, justify giving men power over women and barring women suddenly it seems he didn’t really mean that: he meant that women should behave a bit more circumspectly in church and maybe only in that one congre- gation in Corinth that he was addressing in that particular letter, where maybe there was some problem with women gone completely wild—and “Men are quite capable of worshipping a female, whether maybe, indeed, he didn’t even write that letter. Lakshmi or Athena or the Virgin Mary, while vigorously You can take this kind of exegesis very far, his- repressing actual human women.” toricizing and reinterpreting away pretty much anything that doesn’t fit modern liberal values. To give one example, some scholars see as a major obstacle to the modernization of Islam the belief that the Qur’an was given directly from God to Muhammad. It’s just the one text, after all, not from exercising power in many realms of human activity. Go an edited conglomeration of texts from different times and back a few hundred years, though, and nobody bothered places like the Bible. I’ve met Muslim feminists who don’t see about separate-but-equal spheres. Women were inferior that as a problem. They simply argue that everything objec- and subordinate, and that was how it was: men’s job was to tionable in the Qur’an relates only to Muhammad’s own time control women’s wanton, lascivious ways and low cunning, and is not binding in our own, while everything good and to resist their seductions as Adam should have resisted Eve. inspiring in it is eternal truth. Very simple! The same thing Women’s sexuality was not just different; it was dangerous has been going on in Christianity and Judaism for a hundred and potentially polluting and therefore had to be confined years and more. and channeled in a way that men’s sexuality did not. Yet It’s left to skeptics and atheists to ask why God gave his today, you would have a hard time, for example, finding a Word in such a way that up until the day before yesterday, he rabbi who would say that the reasoning behind the men- was believed to have been saying one thing pretty clearly— strual taboo in Judaism is that menstruation is unclean. No, in a way that everybody understood, from schoolchildren no, the ritual bath is a way of regulating sexual intercourse up to the most sophisticated religious leaders—so clearly, that empowers and honors women. Oh, please! Similarly, indeed, that it was hardly questioned at all, but now it is when American Muslim women talk about why they wear the seen as just a historical curiosity or a misreading. The Bible hijab or other covering, they tend to talk about it as a symbol is supposed to be divinely inspired, after all, and the Qur’an of religious identity, not as a portable purdah that keeps is supposed to be the direct word of God that Muhammad male strangers from being inflamed with lust. In the United was only transcribing. If it turns out that so much in these States, at least, it is hard to find a young Muslim woman who texts that generations have taken as divine truth is really just wears the hijab who will grant that there is anything sexist a narrow comment on something contemporary to the time or demeaning or controlling about it. I discovered this after of their writing—or a misinterpretation, a mistake, or even a September 11, 2001, when some very well-meaning leftists typo—why do we think the other bits are so divine or full of suggested that non-Muslim women wear the head scarf wisdom? Why are these books the ones we should look to for

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guidance on everything from workers’ rights to what to have no pronoun at all but simply repeat “God” instead, awkward for dinner? and ugly as that is. You can beef up the role of the women To the atheist in me, all this reinterpretation might be in the Bible, a practice as old as Christianity itself, because in great fun as literary criticism—to every age its own version the actual texts Mary is only a moderately important char- of scriptures and myths, just as every age has its own Hamlet acter and hardly the quasi-divine figure who is so central to or Othello. But to take today’s interpretation seriously as Catholicism. You can add Miriam’s cup to the items on the though it is what was always in the text seems like changing seder table. But at the end of the day, Miriam is no Moses, the rules late in the game. Shakespeare, after all, could write God is still a Father not a Mother, and Jesus is still a man and only like an Elizabethan: he only knew what was then known. not a woman. The New Testament is still the old familiar story But God is all-powerful and omniscient. He could have had of the hero born of a male god and a human woman who is his stable of authors say anything. He could have given the sacrificed for human sins and it’s all our fault. It’s still male sky/ Ten Commandments to Miriam instead of Moses and made female earth, immortal/mortal, superior/inferior, mind/body, one of them “Thou shalt have no inequality between men active/passive—the old dichotomies that have always exalted and women.” Instead, he not only spent four of the ten the male over the female. Christianity still has its obsession commandments stressing the importance of worshipping with virginity and sexual self-denial that has been so harmful himself exclusively, he addressed the commandments explic- to women in particular: hostility toward sex was part of its itly to men: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”—no original Roman-Empire brand. You can’t really derive our gender-neutral language there—and mentioned said wife in contemporary gender-egalitarian gay-friendly relaxed sexual the same breath as farm animals and real estate. God did not mores from it—at least, not if you are honest. And yet, some need to do that; he didn’t have to talk like some cranky old Christian theologians do exactly that. Hebrew patriarch. He’s God! Yet for some strange reasons, he mysteriously chose to ut wait. There’s another way to look at this question of speak exactly as if he belonged to the society in which his Bsexism and religion. We atheists get mad when it looks to books were written—as if he were no less ignorant, preju- us as if the goalposts are constantly moving. (Now you say diced, superstitious, or sexist than anyone else of that time. there’s nothing wrong with women wearing pants—that What this means is that feminist theologians have their wasn’t what you said when you were burning Joan of Arc at work cut out for them. They must pare away the thick layers the stake.) But haven’t the goalposts always been moving? of misogyny in their faiths while simultaneously demonstrat- Hasn’t religion changed and adapted and split and reorga- ing that these layers can be carted off like the detritus of an nized itself constantly throughout its history? Judaism after archaeological dig, leaving only what is pure and essential the destruction of the Temple became a whole different and original—which just happens to coincide with the things thing. Islam in Indonesia is not Islam in Saudi Arabia. When enlightened liberals believe today. The cranky old Hebrew Europe was ruled by kings and queens, the church under- patriarch turns out to be a wise old McGovernik after all. wrote monarchical rule as part of God’s plan, and Jesus Some of this research is undeniably fascinating. For himself was described as the king of kings. Today you’d look instance, scholarly work on the position of women in the crazy to invoke the Bible against democratic government; the early Christian church shows that they had far more ecclesias- Founding Fathers read the Bible as an endorsement of the tical responsibility than has been generally believed and that American Revolution. later generations altered texts that showed this: the apostle What we see as the intellectually disreputable moving of Junias, for example, mentioned by St. Paul, was actually Junia, goalposts can be described in another way: religion changes a female. Junia the female apostle? Medieval scholars just when society changes—well, maybe fifty years after society knew that had to be a typo! changes. That process only looks dishonest if you think reli- People today are hungry for a Christianity that is wom- gion is a set of fixed texts and rules and traditions, which is an-positive and sex-positive. That is partly why The Da Vinci how many atheists tend to see it. But you can also see reli- Code was such a huge success: we like the idea that the gion sociologically, and seen in that light religion is not really original church was a wonderful egalitarian place, that Jesus about the proper analyzing of texts and traditions. It is a social was married or at least had a girlfriend, and that this original practice that reflects the larger society. Religious practices are wonderfulness was erased from history by evil, sexist, celibate a way that a community reaffirms and reasserts its common men. project, its oneness. As society changes, people naturally sift But there is only so far you can go with this kind of histor- through the immense grab-bag of religious texts and tradi- ical revisionism. You can use all the inclusive language you tions and pick out the bits that make their world make sense, want and refer to God as “Our Parent,” “He/She,” or even use that make it seem as if everything is the way it’s supposed

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 29 to be—or alternatively, that make it seem as if everything is being dragged along by feminism and liberalism into mod- all wrong but could be made right with the proper religious ifying its former harshnesses, even as believers resist openly understanding. Religions themselves don’t put it like that, of acknowledging that process as we atheists would like them course. They have to maintain that there’s a direct line going to. (This is what the modernization theory would predict: as back to the beginning; that, for example, St. Peter was a pope society progresses, people abandon religion, or alternatively in the same sense that Pope Francis is one. Never mind that religion becomes a pale reasonable shadow of its former this could not possibly be true, given that Christianity was not extravagantly irrational self). But obviously, that happy if a codified religion in the first century CE and had no formal somewhat self-deceptive process of liberalization is not the hierarchy and, according to Garry Wills, no priests. This con- only thing going on in the world of religion. Right now, reac- stant rewriting of history—while never admitting that that’s tionary religious movements are gaining strength and doing what’s happening—is part of the process by which religions so while ferociously resisting modern roles for women: we see claim a moral weight and power that transcends time while this in many different faiths around the world. Does the rise actually being totally enmeshed in the present. As anthropol- of prove the modernization theory wrong? ogist Roy Rapaport put it, “to invest social conventions with Does it show us that not only can the knot not be untied but sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming that large numbers of people think the knot needs to be tied necessity.” That need for seeming necessity explains why even tighter? I have to say I’m still fond of the moderniza- tion theory. I see fundamentalist revivals as a testament to the lack of modernity—to the unequal sharing of its benefits, to new risks and insecurities and injustices that are “To the extent that religion has become more woman-friendly, bound up with nationalism, a lack of democ- racy, and of course the natural desire of it’s because the larger society has become so.” those on top (priests, sheikhs, men) to pre- serve their hereditary privileges. And here I want to complicate what seems to me a perhaps too-blithe assump- tion that religion is the main thing holding religious liberals and reactionaries both look to the past for back women’s equality. Fundamentalism is a vehicle for justification—to some imaginary earlier day when their own patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean that if people dumped values held sway. Thus Judaism is inherently socialist, Jesus religion they would become feminists. The French Revolution was a pacifist, Muhammad was a feminist, and we must get was carried out by men of the Enlightenment who were fero- back to that original vision. Or Jesus came not to bring peace ciously anticlerical, but their world-shaking transformation but a sword, God gave the West Bank to the Jewish people of France did nothing for women’s rights. The Soviet Union forever, and cutting off the hands of thieves is fine because and Communist China both liberated women from all sorts of that’s what they did in seventh-century Arabia—and that’s traditional restrictions but only insofar as it suited the state, the original vision we need to recoup. which remained firmly in the hands of men. Lenin made Where does all this leave our knot? Can it be untied? abortion legal, but Stalin (who wanted to raise the birthrate) Well, in theory, sure: as society changes, religion eventually made it a crime, and when it was legalized again it was with- accommodates it, however grudgingly and belatedly. The out provision for birth control, subjecting women to repeated Bible used to be cited as justification for slavery: a whole new brutal operations because so what, they were just women denomination, the Southern Baptists, was formed to defend and the state had more important things to produce in its it. But nobody looks at the Bible now and says, “You know, mighty factories than contraceptives. You can be good with- we should really bring back slavery, that’s truly the biblical out God, and you can also be sexist without God. In our own way to live.” Similarly, for centuries Christianity justified time, we’ve seen any number of pseudoscientific justifications burning women as witches. And the book of Exodus does say for women’s subordination—popularizations of evolutionary “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” But nobody, at least psychology, for example. in the West, pays much attention to that now, because we don’t believe in witchcraft; the whole concept of witches and o, to sum up: When the happy day comes that women’s witch-burning has long since been discarded. Sequality is a given that underlies and pervades society, So far I’ve talked about religion as though believers are the knot will be untied. Miraculously, the Bible will be seen

30 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Highlights From ‘Women In Secularism 2’

to have always promoted it. Eve will no longer be the weak- ing—Rebecca Goldstein’s wonderful concept—to others and minded temptress; she’ll be the far-seeing feminist who chose to God, the ultimate friend. The ongoing drama of sin and knowledge over obedience and got us out of that boring redemption in daily life is probably very exciting. Suddenly old garden. Each religion will be reframed, the nasty bits every action, every thought, is part of a great drama in which explained away or forgotten. It won’t be an entirely honest Jesus and Satan are fighting—over you! project, to my way of thinking at least, but for those who For women, that church we deride as sexist and reaction- want to believe in God and be part of a congregation it will ary may be an arena in which they get to take on a public be good enough. role denied them in the rest of life. If you live in a thoroughly This has already happened, to a certain extent. As barriers sexist culture, as much of America still is, calling yourself a fall in the secular world and women take on occupations and helpmeet who cheerfully submits may not feel as discordant responsibilities once barred to them, religious restrictions as it does to us, especially if the alternative is social isolation. stick out more. It just looks very strange to say that a woman So you reframe it: “I submit to my husband, but in return he can do anything a man can do except be a Catholic priest. has to love me and be a good father and come home at night But. instead of drinking with his friends.” For some women it’s not such a bad bargain. After all, Nietzsche famously described There is the other side. Not everyone is persuaded. The Christianity as the religion of women and slaves, a clever way more feminist and progressive the mainline denominations in which the weak got the strong to give up their power. become, the smaller they get. This is often explained by, for When the weak become strong, the dynamic changes. example, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, as the result So I guess what I am giving is a somewhat paradoxical answer of those denominations elevating namby-pamby liberal plat- to the question of the knot of sexism and religion: it can be itudes over genuine spirituality and hard religious truths. I untied to the precise extent that religion becomes less important have a different interpretation: these denominations draw and less necessary. By the time religion has thoroughly purged on well-educated urban middle-class or higher folk who are itself of male dominance and misogyny, few will care. becoming less and less religious and eventually fall away completely. For booming congregations and real enthusiasm, the energy lies within conservative denominations—espe- Katha Pollitt’s award-winning column “Subject to Debate,” in which she cially the born-again Christians. For these people, religion writes about the media, foreign policy, human rights, and other topics, is a bulwark against too-rapid social change, especially in appears in The Nation bimonthly. Her books include collections of her gender and family relations. They get too much from their essays and poetry. She is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow church or synagogue to give it up: practical help with very real at The Nation Institute. problems, a social network, a sense of belonging and matter-

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secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 31 The Secular Right and Its Discontents

As I noted in my editorial in the October/November 2013 issue, “The Left Is Not Always Right,” secular humanists don’t always lean left on social issues—even though, on average, they skew further left than the U.S. population as a whole. Some in our movement lean conservative or libertarian; see Tibor Machan’s column in this issue or consider the essays by secularright.org. cofounder Razib Khan and libertarian author Ron Bailey in our October/November 2012 cover feature, “Does Secular Humanism Have a Political Agenda?” Such diversity is to be expected and, from time to time, showcased. Below, noted author and Bible scholar Robert M. Price delivers a brash cri de coeur on behalf of secular conservatism. Glade Ross and Dan Davis assail the libertarian viewpoint from distinct yet broadly progressive perspectives. Reader comment is, as always, eagerly awaited.—Tom Flynn

Why I Am Not a Liberal, and You Shouldn’t Be Either Robert M. Price

ometimes I am asked how I can combine utter skepticism Such liberals hate authority (except their own) and are on religious topics with a conservative political stance, therefore ashamed at the historic dominance of the United Sas if the two were somehow inconsistent. Here is an States of America. So, loathing their own country, seeing answer. I am not trying to change your mind, only to provide it as the product of a heritage of crimes against humanity, an honest answer to a good question. they quite naturally feel a natural sympathy with America’s Are religious skepticism and political conservatism mutu- enemies, cooperating with them to take us down a peg, to ally inconsistent? It seems so, I think, only to those who have equalize everybody at the bottom line. If some have been rejected religion because it used to control their behavior industrious and productive, their gains will be given to those and they chafed at it. They perceive religion primarily, even who have not been industrious and productive. Rightly com- if only implicitly, as an authority they will not tolerate. This is passionate toward the poor, liberals, however, want to cut to why they want to debunk its claims. It is not necessarily for the chase and act as if everyone has had equal preparation. the sake of truth but rather simply to disarm it of its weap- Affirmative-action quota systems are the result, and they turn ons. This attitude is quite consistent with their liberal political out to worsen the problem, because they enshrine wishful preferences. There, too, they do not want to be contained, thinking about the hitherto-oppressed. If we act as if those restrained. They don’t want to be under any control. Now who benefit from affirmative action are competent and know this position might seem more consistent with libertarianism, what they are doing, the thinking goes, that will be equality which seeks the shrinkage of government and government enough; an egalitarian face on the matter, a bandage on the intrusion in the free lives of its citizens. But it is not, because problem. Minority candidates’ lack of academic preparation the liberal wants everyone to espouse his or her views and is the result of the oppression, as well as the cause for its does not mind legislating conformity to the liberal agenda. furtherance. No ethnic group is genetically, inherently infe- Sometimes called “pragmatism,” this hardball stance secretly rior: that’s absurd. You’d be talking about different species despises democracy, considering it simply a handy tool to vote instead of different pigmentation. Discrimination against in a social order henceforth irreversible. Pragmatism comes to any group is arbitrary, but it is equally arbitrary to pretend mean justifying the means by the ends. that their oppression has not disadvantaged them in terms

32 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org of preparation and even more arbitrary to assume that, once It is all doomed faith, like that of generations of Christians given the position they might have deserved had they been who looked for the Second Coming, which has never hap- suitably educated (which they weren’t through no fault of pened and will never happen. Get real. And, like the Christian their own), they will automatically do as good a job as one Science parent, stop thinking it is your right to take the rest whose inherited affluence has better prepared him or her. of us down with you. Equality has to be worked at, both through the oppressed I am happy to admit, as many have, that political conser- individual’s heroic efforts and the government’s attempts to vatism is a philosophy of pessimism. It accepts entropy as a engineer a better education (with resources) for everybody. fact. The goal is not to build a utopia (because conservatives We aren’t going to end up equal if we are not provided an remember that Thomas More chose the name precisely equal starting point. If someone is held back forcibly by refer- because it was a pun from the Greek: Topos means “place,” ees and starts the race five minutes late, the redress is not to while U represents both the prefixes eu (“good”) and ou declare him or her the winner; it is to make sure the person (“no”). Utopia is therefore the good place that of course can gets the chance to prepare for the race and to run it fairly never exist or can never be reached. It is like the North Star, next time. a beacon light to steer by but not a target one imagines Why do liberals not see this? Because, like credulous reli- will one day be reached. Reinhold Niebuhr, formulator of gious believers, liberals are committed to a dogma and will “Christian Realism,” understood this and spoke of the ethic not suffer any empirical evidence to budge them from it. Like of the Sermon on the Mount as, strictly speaking, unwork- the Protestant believing God has declared sinners to be righ- able yet applicable: it was a question of “the relevance of an teous in Christ on the basis of their faith, the liberal declares impossible ideal.” by sheer faith that those who ought to be equal are in fact equal. But that is a fantasy. The reality is, by contrast, “salvation by works.” You have to work hard. As with the Obama health-care fiasco, government liberals are driven solely by a faith commitment to “My atheist friends and colleagues think dogma: we need everyone covered, so the answer is to vote in a mammoth bill that will, by fiat, make everyone me mad when I tell them I am voting adequately covered—without rationing care, without for Republicans instead of Democrats.” killing the private-insurance industries, and without increasing the “Jack and Beanstalk” deficit that is shoot- ing up like a rocket already. It is a Christmas list of a plan—all the things we want—and, like a child’s list of presents, there is no real consideration of costs. Liberalism is that faith that calls things that are not as though they were. But liberals are strapping themselves in for a trip to utopia, It is a faith that will not allow war as an option because it and they refuse to disembark until they get there. But the ride always means diplomacy has failed, and diplomacy cannot doesn’t go that far. Thus they again embrace the unyielding fail—or at least the liberal will never admit that it has. It is a “don’t confuse me with the facts” fanaticism of faith. No faith that hopes our unilateral disarmament and being nice to political order that does some or most of the good will suit bloody-handed dictators will thaw them out and make them them. All of them, especially capitalism, are no damn good; hug us and sing (yes, you knew it) “Kumbaya”—as if foreign each is radically evil because it cannot achieve paradise for all. policy were an Esalen T-group. When the hostile powers who Capitalism marked a radical step forward and is just the sort have cynically negotiated with a liberal regime, thus gaining of thing liberals should rejoice in, because it demonstrates more time for preparation, finally show the true colors the that we can enlarge the pie of wealth, not just cut smaller liberal regime should have seen all along, the liberal, like the and smaller slices for more and more people (or keeping poor clueless liberal Baptist Jimmy Carter, will be shocked and the whole pie for a tiny elite). The middle class thrives under sincerely so—as shocked as a Baptist ought to be if archaeolo- capitalism. There was no such thing as a middle class in the gists discovered the bones of Jesus. pre-capitalist world. For the liberal, it is all or nothing. And This is all venturesome faith that is doomed to be dis- the only way to seem to have it all is to legislate a “say it appointed, just like the faith of Pentecostal and Christian and make it so” fantasy. If capitalism leaves some—relatively Science parents who bet their children’s lives on their dogma, few— behind in poverty, well, that’s just not good enough! give them no medicine, and “believe” God will provide results. Everyone must be equal, and no one can be rich, even though

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 33 that will squelch production, which will extinguish jobs old the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, occasionally confronted colonial and new, and everybody will be left with equal shares of an troops, going up against them “armed” with the shield of empty pie plate. faith—with prescribed magical war paint and chanted man- Capitalism came as close as anything ever has to tran- tras—and were cut down like harvested wheat. Their faith scending one of the corollaries of Murphy’s Law: the Law of may have seemed noble but was suicidal. This is what the con- the Conservation of Evil. The idea is that every social system is servative remembers as his liberal counterpart tries to solve like a pillow with a given amount of air in it. If you fluff it up the problems of war, climate change, and health care with here, you will automatically flatten it out there. Just choose orange-crate radios, wooden guns, and unshakable faith. which social problem you will ameliorate and be prepared to “But,” someone will say, “aren’t you the one who is flying deal with the damage you will be doing elsewhere. Capitalism in the face of the facts on this issue?” No, my impression is figured out a way of adding more feathers to the pillow. Yet rather that global warming, once a plausible hypothesis, has this does not make the conservative believe that all problems sunk to the level of so-called creation science (a.k.a. scientific are amenable to solutions such as this one. Spontaneous creationism), fudging evidence to reinforce its propaganda. remissions and medical breakthroughs are no substitute for The recent disclosure of e-mails between data-suppressing taking care of your fragile health. Conservatism seeks to con- global-warming scientists has vindicated my suspicions on serve—especially to conserve the gains of lucky breaks—and this score. It’s all pseudoscientific fraud, like pyramidology. doesn’t take wild risks by enunciating a goal and pretending My skepticism toward the claims of religion is at one with any steps we take in the name of it will automatically get us my skepticism toward noble-sounding but futile liberal dog- there. matic faith. My atheist friends and colleagues think me mad when I tell them I am voting for Republicans instead of Democrats. These “My skepticism toward the claims of religion is friends of mine appear to be single-issue vot- ers in that they think everything boils down at one with my skepticism toward noble-sounding to religion or nonreligion and that if we elect but futile liberal dogmatic faith.” candidates with supernaturalist faith, we will be voting for theocrats who will erase the line between church and state and who will in the end persecute religious believers. This is very That is like the “faith” of the New Hebrides cargo cults. ironic, because, if I am right, these folks are themselves believ- They saw Western colonial troops firing lethal weapons, ers in sacred dogmas of pacifism, martyrdom, and self-hating receiving orders through radio sets, and praying to their God asceticism. This might be judged as a battle between oppos- Jesus. So they decided to beat the Westerners at their own ing dogmatic faith commitments. And then I must ask: which game—by magic! They whittled wooden rifles, not knowing dogma is less injurious to America? Does Mitt Romney believe the difference. They made radio consoles (with no machinery Joseph Smith found the Golden Bible of Mormon and Moroni inside) out of orange crates, and they prayed to Jesus to bring after the latter appeared to him in the form of a glorified them consumer goods on a great ocean liner, just like he angel? Does Mike Huckabee believe in a seven-day creation must have brought them to the colonizers. This is the magical instead of evolution? Does Sarah Palin speak in tongues? thinking of liberalism—magical thinking elevated to dogma, Does Newt Gingrich believe in the bodily assumption of the invulnerable to facts. Virgin Mary? You bet. I am, to put it mildly, rather skeptical of Global warming, caused by sinners, is only the latest exam- these beliefs, though as a scholar of the history of religions I ple of the hysterical apocalyptic fervor of liberalism. The very do not have the luxury of sneering and deriding because I am notion of human beings being able to ruin the atmosphere compelled to take the neutral observer stance of the anthro- by spraying deodorant seems to me tantamount to the enor- pologist toward all these things. As a humanist I know that mous and infantile egocentricity of children that results in all these beliefs, while manifestly false in a factual sense, are the superstition of breaking your mother’s back by a misstep code that tells us about human nature and the people whose in hopscotch. The pointlessly costly, Draconian steps liberals existential stance is symbolized in these beliefs. want to take to counteract this warming by a half-degree per But, more to my point here, I must ask whether these century, well, that’s the cargo cult marching up and down implausible, even zany beliefs are liable to affect the country. the square with their broomstick rifles, going through the Palin said she would never try to evangelize her religious magic ritual. The cargo cultists, like the doomed troops of beliefs as president. And no avowed creationist president

34 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org The Secular Right and Its Discontents

would or could do anything to banish evolution from the affecting us in an extensive and very dangerous way. As one classroom. We already have locals doing that, and the battles who does not want to endanger America, which I love, by are necessarily fought in the courts, not the legislature or the entrusting it to a government committed to risky dogmas of Oval Office. If no conservative Republican president (Ronald faith, I shall have no trouble voting for Palin, Huckabee, Reagan, George W. Bush) ever really went to bat against Gingrich, Romney, or Lou Dobbs when the time comes. As a abortion, do you think they would risk the flack over cre- doubter—a skeptic who prefers a sober look at reality—I will ationism? It was sheer slander when liberals used to picture be relieved to see the end of the reign of the liberal Oliver Cromwell under whose power we now languish. Reagan and G. W. Bush as using Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic paperbacks as a blueprint for foreign policy (just as it was revealing to hear liberals reduce Bush’s belief in good versus evil to fundamentalism, confirming conservatives’ suspicions that liberals are morally nihilistic). Robert M. Price is professor of theology and scriptural studies at I can see none of these fanciful beliefs affecting national Colemon Theological Seminary and a research fellow at the Center for life or foreign policy. These creeds would affect government Inquiry. He is the author of Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost no more than Jimmy Carter’s reported belief in flying saucers. Gospels (Wipf and Stock, 2010). But the liberal dogmas I have outlined? They are already

Progressive vs. Liberal Glade Ross

here is a critical and recurring tension between contrib- tle the less successful to forcefully expropriate from others’ utors to this magazine. It’s between those who trend success. Ttoward a progressive/liberal view on the welfare state I think it’s obvious both viewpoints are tough to dismiss. versus those much more on the libertarian side. It may be the To any typical person’s sense of justice and morality, each is strongest and most pervasive division our community faces. prima facie valid. Yet they also seem to exist in irresolvable We are all humanists, but I believe there’s a very good chance conflict. This apparent irresolution is no doubt at the heart of those on each side of the progressive/libertarian divide view that “thread of tension” to which I referred, and much of my their counterparts as a little less pure and perfect in their thesis here will be to argue this tension has persisted precisely humanistic expression. because, instead of intelligently resolving the conflict, each Both sides are concerned with social justice and vary pri- side has chosen to concentrate on one of the two dictating marily in where their concentration (intellectual and emo- views, while largely disregarding the other. tional) is focused. Progressives stress the fact that, in a world I believe a much better path would be to accept the obvi- of abundant if limited resources, it is shocking to any sense of ous legitimacy that exists in both viewpoints and seek a logi- reasonable justice that some persons squander hugely dispro- cal synthesis. I do not think the task is difficult. I think, more- portionate large shares of what is available while others suf- over, a first key lies in a criticism I’ll presently direct toward the fer in miserable destitution. Progressives reasonably believe above-referenced op-ed piece. society should be structured so as to at least moderately ameliorate such inequality. achan celebrates the human freedom “to pursue pros- Libertarians, on the other hand, reasonably believe that Mperity in any form he or she desires—material wealth, such concepts as freedom (see Tibor Machan, “The Myth of intellectual resources, land, items produced by humans or Surplus Wealth,” FI, February/March 2011) and self-owner- nature” (emphasis added). Though I have tended toward the ship entitle each person to seek whatever level of wealth he libertarian side myself, I believe this excerpt reveals (and is or she may attain (absent wrongful interference with others) symptomatic of) a deep and critical flaw in typical libertar- and that the mere fact of having had success does not enti- ian thinking. The flaw consists, simply, in conflating what a

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 35 human produces with what a human does not produce. This is not all. In the exclusion that’s inherent in natural-re- Specifically, humans produce art, literature, useful inven- source possession, there is an implied and obvious require- tions, machinery, improvements on land, and the like. Humans ment for enforcement. Suppose, for example, that in a prim- do not produce Earth itself, or the in-situ materials that may itive state I’ve found a particularly choice cave and it be extracted from it, or the capacity of the air and water as my residence. This “claim” means nothing if others remain to absorb our effluents. All these resources exist absent the free to use (or perhaps even take over) “my” cave as freely as intellectual or labor contribution of any human to produce they wish. At the least, I must be prepared to defend my claim them, yet the typical libertarian stance is to treat them as one via use of clubs and fists, if need be. and the same with what a human has produced. It’s a critical But that’s in a primitive society. In any reasonably modern error, and I’ll explain why. society, I’ll in fact invoke the powers of society to first “recog- As one compelling basis supporting the general libertarian nize” my claim and then to enforce the exclusionary privilege viewpoint, I am hugely swayed by the notion of self-own- it implies. Pointedly, this is the very society that, in typical ership. I own myself entirely, and any claim or intimation libertarian thinking, I’d deny the right to inveigh a tax on me otherwise smacks patently of immoral slavery. Furthermore, for the privilege it is not just granting me but in fact is actively because I own myself, it follows that I have the moral right to enforcing on my behalf (indeed, even holding in reserve for fully claim (without limitation, compromise, or forced sharing the purpose, potential use of its monopoly claim on the use with others) the entire product of my own creativity, intelligence, of deadly force). and sweat. In other words, it’s immoral for others (through gov- Again, contrasting with personal produce, because it flows from the person, it is simultaneously something each person should be allowed to claim as his or her own untrammeled right (at least in any reasonable morality that deserves to be called such). But natural “I believe a much better path would be to accept resources are different. Their exclusionary enjoy- the obvious legitimacy that exists in both viewpoints ment is the product of governmental power as exer- and to seek a logical synthesis.” cised to forcefully exclude others from attempting simultaneous use (for example, if there are squatters on my land, I may call the sheriff to eject them). The first is a natural right and the second a negotiated bargain with the balance of society. ernment or otherwise) to forcefully take such products from me for the sake of giving to less-fortunate others. But natural resources do not fit this argument. Indeed, they o me, it’s a marvel that libertarians have generally failed are entirely, completely, totally, and abysmally absent from it. Tto comprehend this distinction. More seriously, it’s a fail- I made no natural resource. There is not one whose existence ure with very sad consequences, for it makes them a target (perhaps its form but not its existence) was enhanced via my of ridicule. It is no surprise, indeed, that progressives find creativity, intellect, and sweat—or by anyone else’s. They exist repugnant a view that seemingly justifies robber barons amid on their own and are equally the “inheritance” of all persons. paupers—where in fact the barons are not merely enjoying To put it another way, there is no inherent basis via which any personal produce in their favor (if in fact such is the case) human can claim a greater intrinsic right than any other to but also a grossly disproportionate share of non-produced such resources as are naturally available. natural resources, and without proper compensation to the Another difference ignored by typical libertarian thinking rest of society for the privilege. These are resources, indeed, is the fact that exclusive possession of my own produce does where the paupers have no effective choice but to work in nothing to detract from what others may possess. After all, and support the very society that enforces the baron’s dis- if I keep my entire produce to myself, others remain just as proportionately privileged use, and their own simultaneous well off as if I’d done nothing. This is not the case with natu- dispossession. It should shock the conscience, and it does. ral resources. To any extent that I claim use or possession of To resolve the conflict, really, is simple. Libertarians must those, others are diminished in their ability to use them. To wise up and grant the distinction. They must grant, in other put this another way, personal produce is additive (I can cre- words, that if I want to be privileged to enjoy for my own ate and add to mine, others can create and add to theirs, and exclusive benefit a section of beautiful beachfront land (while we may each justly claim the entirety of our own additions). society uses deadly force to prevent others from interfering), By contrast, natural resources are exclusionary and subtrac- I have a duty to compensate society for what it’s granting tive (what I take reduces what is left for others). me. If I want to use a river or the airways to carry away my

36 Free Inquiry April/May 2013 secularhumanism.org The Secular Right and Its Discontents

effluent, I again have a duty. Of course also, if I want to use those leaning in the progressive direction. roadways society itself has built, I’d better pay for the privi- lege. If I want to benefit from the national defense, I’d better peaking of which, having excoriated libertarians for their pay too—and on and on. Sown mistaken conflation, it’s time to even the attack. What kind of revenue levels could we expect societal insti- To review, libertarians sloppily extend a principle of patent tutions to enjoy if all other taxations were eliminated and truth (I own myself and thus my own produce too) to a point all revenues were instead collected solely on the bases I am of untruth (I have the right to untrammeled use of natural suggesting (bases for which, in short, there’d be no proper resources). It’s a dumb mistake, but (and sadly) the confla- rationale for moral objection)? I, of course, do not know. tion badge is not one that side wears alone. As it happens, However, it’s my sense they might easily enjoy revenues much progressives are guilty of overextending conflation on their greater than at present. side, too. As one illustration, I presently pay approximately $10,000 Here is how that unfolds. Witnessing the gross inequality per year in taxes on my family’s residential property. On the that exists in the world, progressives suitably recoil in abhor- basis I’m suggesting, I’d think it easy to justify many times that rence and declare that a just society must do something to (and, with elimination of taxation on my personal produce, ameliorate it. So far, so good. Progressives, though, stray such payments would be practical). I think the same basis when concluding that the need to correct one injustice jus- could justify increasing the gasoline tax by at least two dollars tifies creating another (in particular, expropriating the per- per gallon (for the burden my exhaust imposes on the atmo- sonal produce of persons). B, simply, does not follow from A, sphere)—and we’re just getting started. Many other readily justified revenues could be added, all of which would result in collections that are not just larger but (and more important) burdens that are much more progressive as compared to present schemes. “. . . A deep and critical flaw in typical libertarian thinking Indeed, this basis even justifies a form of redis- tribution. If I’ve excluded less fortunate others from . . . consists . . . in conflating what a human produces using some sections of prime real-estate, is there with what a human does not produce.” anything unreasonable if a portion of my payment (that is, the payment I make to society for the priv- ilege it has granted me) goes directly to persons excluded? I think not. In a large-scheme sense of justice, each and here (in particular) is why. member of our race has equal and reasonable claim to all our What is it that really galls the sense of justice? Is it that planet’s natural (as opposed to personal) resources. So if, for one person has such talent, energy, and ambition as to build purposes of practical organization, some are privileged to a huge nest-egg of wealth via personal production (think exclude sections of natural resource from equal sharing with Oprah Winfrey)? At most, that inequality might inflame one’s others, there is no inherent injustice in directly compensating sense of justice against the cosmos or providence but not those others. against society. No. What really inflames are precisely those The key lies in refusing to conflate those two utterly dif- situations where wealth enjoyment is skewed for reasons ferent economic goods (personal produce versus natural having nothing to do with personal production and instead resources). How interesting it is that, when we competently everything to do with particular persons having attained distinguish those two—when, in short, we recognize the com- positions where society grants them hugely disproportionate mon inherent ownership of one but not of the other (another (and largely uncompensated) privileges in exploiting natural way of saying that society may justly make claims over what resources. no one produced, but not otherwise)—how interesting that Failing to comprehend that distinction, progressives erro- we then acquire a morally just basis to fund large-scale public neously conflate the two inequalities (one for which you can projects, including potentially even a practice that involves only scream against “God” and the other for which you can paying stipends directly to those who claim fewer natural in fact scream against societal structures), which leads inevi- resources. tably to their conclusion that inequality in general demands a The hugely significant fact is, if societal structures were dull-knife solution. In short, they erroneously conclude that it built with these distinctions as their foundation, it would go a justifies a societal policy that implicitly denies self-ownership very long way (likely much further and in a more economically and thus also implies a kind of community ownership over efficient manner as compared to today’s structures) toward persons. This dull vision further results in failure to realize ameliorating the inequalities that so tug at the consciences of that much more effective amelioration could be achieved not

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 37 by creating an added social injustice but by instead correct- By clearly comprehending the distinctions outlined here, ing the very injustice that—were they more discriminating humanists on both sides should find common ground. We in their view—they’d realize is at the heart of what really should, indeed, find ourselves wholly united, with zero divi- inflames them. sion on such issues. It is because, simply, careful analysis erases To be very clear on this last point, I believe what really conflict between the senses of justice on each side. It allows a inflames progressives is when particularly privileged per- perfect, unified synthesis. Let’s get there, please. sons commandeer hugely disproportionate shares of natural If reluctance remains, I propose we put it in the terms of a resources without fair and adequate compensation to the crass, nuts-and-bolts exchange. Libertarians: Will you dump rest of society. I believe, furthermore, the true solution lies in your claim of untrammeled right to natural resources, if in extracting just compensation. exchange progressives without compromise your claim of self-ownership? Progressives: Will you do the opposite? o conclude this piece I want to say, “Man, we all gotta wise Will you, in short, totally honor the concept of self-ownership Tup.” We’ve got to look at things precisely, and in a very (including all this concession implies), if in exchange liber- discriminating way. All of us seek justice, but we must do it tarians concede that natural resources are never truly and broadly and universally, and we must stringently avoid tunnel intrinsically owned by any person—that, at most, persons are vision. In particular, we must avoid becoming so focused on granted a privilege to exclusivity by the balance of society, one element of justice that we end up conflating elements and it’s a privilege that should always be compensated? of its concern with elements that do not belong, a mistake Can we make a deal? that inevitably leads to the commission of a second injustice while seeking to remedy the first. Indeed, because of such Glade Ross was born and raised a devout Mormon; he was in law school failures to discriminate, in today’s society we have the worst at Brigham Young University when evidence compelled him to confess of both worlds. Universally, governments fail in their policies that it was all baloney. He practiced antitrust litigation for two years in Southern California, then founded a software business of which he is CEO to honor an assumption honoring equitable rights to natural and president. He currently lives on Puget Sound in Washington with his resources then simultaneously fail in their policies to honor wife and children and is passionate about sailing. self-ownership, too.

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38 Free Inquiry April/May 2013 secularhumanism.org The Secular Right and Its Discontents

Why Secular Humanism and Libertarianism Are Incompatible Dan Davis

or a short time, I called myself a “libertarian secular human- Even in Smith’s time, when nearly all business was con- ist.” I wasn’t completely comfortable with this designation: ducted by small shops, farms, and service providers, the reach Fmy innate pessimism about humanity made me doubt of the hand was limited. Women (one-half of the population) my qualifications as a humanist, and I found libertarianism’s were generally excluded from economic activities; the poor, near-religious belief in the virtues of unregulated commerce working or otherwise, were rarely able to improve their sta- vaguely disquieting. tus; Native Americans stood outside the system entirely; and Then I reread Paul Kurtz’s “Affirmations of Humanism” the Southern plantations (the period’s one significant excep- a few times. I realized that I substantially agreed with all tion to the small-business model) were powered by slaves. of Kurtz’s principles and that my low opinion of humanity Most Americans had little or no access to the invisible hand shouldn’t stop me from at least acting as though I had hope (possibly excepting the middle finger). for the species. Essentially, my reservations weren’t significant Today, the hand is even less in evidence. It has been ren- enough to place me outside the secular-humanist umbrella. dered obsolete by national and multinational corporations However, after spending entirely too much time thinking acting in concert with, sometimes in control of, governments. about the topic, I was forced to conclude that liber- tarian principles were incompatible with my own, as well as with those of secular humanism. Libertarianism has many seductive aspects, par- “Some libertarian proposals for government limitations ticularly to diehard individualists like me. Its propo- nents believe in the separation of church and state, are simply unworkable, but that alone would not freedom of (and from) religion, the rights of people render the two life-stances incompatible. The breach is to determine their own destinies, universal equality between their underlying value systems.” under the law, freedom of speech, and the right to live as one sees fit as long as no others are harmed. Most secular humanists would have no problem with these positions. Even libertarians acknowledge that the system is broken, The irreconcilable differences between libertarians and but they tend to maintain that the primary problem lies in secular humanists arise in their viewpoints about govern- government meddling. Without government intervention, ment’s role in public life. Some libertarian proposals for gov- they explain, corporate malfeasance would be constrained by ernment limitations are simply unworkable, but that alone the ability of individuals to sue for damages. Plaintiffs would should not render the two life-stances incompatible. The be made whole and their successes would incentivize other breach is between their underlying value systems. businesses to behave responsibly. The libertarian belief in the benevolence of the free mar- To anyone who has ever been involved in business litiga- ket borders on mysticism. It starts with the market’s “invisible tion, the idea of individuals (or small businesses) successfully hand,” a metaphor introduced by Adam Smith in his treatise suing large corporations on a recurring basis is ludicrous. The Wealth of Nations (1776) and stretched far beyond the Pursuing a lawsuit is absurdly expensive and time-consum- author’s original meaning by today’s enthusiasts. Smith’s ing; suing a large corporation can quickly become financially “hand” refers to the cumulative effect of competitive inter- devastating. Even an attorney willing to work on contingency actions among buyers and sellers throughout society that would be vastly overmatched by corporate legal staffs’ sheer ultimately culminate in lower prices, better products, and numbers, resources, and capacity to prolong a case indefi- general prosperity. Or so the theory goes. nitely. Occasionally an activist in the mold of Erin Brockovich

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 39 prevails, but even in a libertarian paradise it is hard to imagine interdepartmental secrecy and paranoia, pointless internal that such outcomes would be much more frequent than they squabbles, and unethical (if not downright stupid) practices are now. inside and out. And corporate faith in the virtue of competi- Libertarians also argue that government does not accom- tion extends only as far as everyone else’s competitors; most plish or produce anything. They point out that our own gov- businesses would prefer to crush or buy out their own. ernment maintains an unjustifiable military presence abroad, Of course, government agencies almost invariably incorpo- engages in preemptive and unnecessary warfare, gives away rate some inefficiencies, but so do most large organizations vast sums to foreign governments while demanding zero of any sort. In fact, the internal political and administrative accountability, and provides unwarranted subsidies at home workings of government bodies and large businesses are to corporations, other business entities, and particularly to not very different from one another. Both types of entity individuals professing to be poor. All of these expenditures are constrained by revenue and cost limitations, and in the are funded by money extorted from our most productive citi- absence of adequate controls, either can fall victim to fiscal zens in the form of mandatory taxes. shenanigans. Inefficiency and corruption are far more likely Economic libertarianism holds that the following “truths” to proceed from poor management, excessive complexity, are self-evident: and inadequate internal controls than from the entity’s nature and purpose. Both corporate and government work- 1. A free market is the best means of achieving overall peace ers are motivated by a desire to keep their jobs, receive their and prosperity. paychecks, and perhaps advance to a higher level. They may 2. Governments are inherently inefficient, unproductive, and compete among themselves to achieve these goals, but the confiscatory. They are also inimical to peace, prosperity, nature of their employers has little to do with the process. individual freedom, and the free market. The biggest libertarian grievance against government is 3. The only legitimate function of government is to protect the latter’s power of taxation. Libertarians regard taxation its constituents against those who would forcibly abrogate as legalized robbery, an activity that the government should their rights, and such protection is to be provided by a be protecting them against rather than imposing upon them. standing (volunteer) army and internal police forces. However, if governments are to fulfill even the night-watch- man role that most libertarians believe to be their only justi- fiable function, they must somehow pay for viable mili- taries, law-enforcement structures, and criminal-justice systems. Some libertarians believe that one or more of these “Even libertarians acknowledge that the system is systems can be funded by voluntary payments from the broken, but they tend to maintain that the primary nation’s citizens, who will be happy (or at least willing) to make such payments in exchange for their security. problem lies in government meddling.” This belief warrants further scrutiny. Today’s military is a far cry from the BYOM (Bring Your Own Musket) model of Adam Smith’s time. Although libertarians point out that elimination of a significant These “truths” incorporate at least two assumptions: that military presence abroad would greatly reduce expenditures, any authoritative entity not constrained by competition and a the costs of supporting a respectable military at home would focus on profits must devolve into inefficiency, wastefulness, remain enormous. To be capable of defending the nation from and abuse of its powers; and that any system of mandatory potential external threats, the armed forces would still require taxation is tantamount to legalized extortion. Although the up-to-date aircraft, warships, missiles, satellites, (arguably) current behavior of our government provides compelling nuclear weapons, and a large variety of other ordinance, not to supporting examples, the premise that all government is mention highly trained personnel to maintain and operate these inherently harmful is hard to take seriously. devices. How would we fund such a massive undertaking? If competition and the profit motive are the primary Presumably the citizenry would be placed on a voluntary means of achieving organizational efficiency, then the opera- tithing system, where everyone would donate a “suggested” tions of large businesses must demonstrate this principle. Yet percentage of his or her income to the military. Of course, in many, if not most, large corporations are more than a match lean economic cycles, this tithe would be apt to drop signifi- for government agencies when it comes to the embedding cantly. Even in good times, it’s likely that contributors would of inept managers and employees, internal empire building, periodically fall short of their suggested percentages (when

40 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org The Secular Right and Its Discontents

the family car broke down, or Junior needed orthodontia); porate enforcers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth very few would ever exceed their recommended rates. Certain centuries. segments of the population, such as pacifists and most of the The use of private penal systems has already raised ethical poor, could be expected to opt out entirely. questions. Because the bottom line is paramount, what qual- Because maintaining a robust military requires a reliable ity of food, lodging, and medical care do inmates receive? source of revenue in good times and bad, depending on Are adequate ratios of officers to inmates maintained? What voluntary donations does not seem particularly feasible. levels of education and training are required for correctional Simply collecting, controlling, and allocating the contribu- officers? Are prisoners forced to labor at activities that benefit tions would create an enormous administrative burden with prison owners rather than the public at large? What is the multiple opportunities for corruption and fraud. A system of likelihood that resources will be expended on rehabilitation, mandatory taxation is the only reasonable solution. especially since recidivism would be better for business? Many libertarians accept the necessity of funding the mil- Libertarians point out that the effectiveness of the penal itary through taxation but believe taxes should be confined system would be controlled by regular reviews and evalua- to that purpose. They believe law enforcement, for example, tions by its purchasers, the general public. But what criteria should be privatized and voluntarily purchased by the public. would the public apply? Based on opinion polls and current Current law enforcement is provided at many levels. policies, many citizens would be satisfied so long as crime Federal policing agencies include the Federal Bureau of rates remained low, even if that criterion were met solely by Investigation, the Border Patrol, the U.S. Marshals Service, seg- imposing harsher sentences and imprisoning increasing num- ments of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and various others. State and local police include highway patrols, state troopers, park rangers, county “. . . Many, if not most, large corporations are more sheriffs, city police, campus police, and various than a match for government agencies when it comes to the specialized agencies. Then there are the court systems: U.S. district and appellate courts; the embedding of inept managers and employees, Supreme Court; the Court of Claims; the supe- internal empire building, interdepartmental secrecy and rior, appellate, and supreme court systems of paranoia, pointless internal squabbles, and unethical (if not each of the fifty states; a multitude of admin- istrative law venues; and so on. Finally we have downright stupid) practices inside and out.” federal, state, and local penal facilities. Even assuming that some of these agencies could be reduced, eliminated, or consolidated (such as by eliminating the idiotic War on Drugs and dissolv- bers of people. Those of us concerned with social justice, reha- ing most of the tax-collecting agencies), it would be virtually bilitation, and compassion (as expressed in “The Affirmations impossible to create a workable method for funding the of Humanism”) might take a very different position. remainder on a voluntary basis. Wealthy individuals and cor- If we accept the necessity of funding the military, law porations might jump at the chance to own and operate their enforcement, and the criminal justice system through manda- very own law-enforcement systems, but the resultant benefits tory taxation, the libertarian argument against confiscation to the rest of us would be questionable at best. becomes moot. Since some degree of confiscation is neces- Of course, many private security agencies and a few pri- sary in any case, we are freed to examine the possibility of vate penal facilities already exist today. They are, like all pri- government providing other services that private enterprise vate businesses, heavily oriented toward making a profit. This could not be expected to offer on an equitable and consistent orientation raises several questions. basis. For example: Could a private police force be expected to Skipping over less-controversial services (such as fire pro- enforce the law without favoring its largest contributors? tection, public utilities, and motor-vehicle registration), we What sort of treatment might be expected for people too now address the social safety net: the assumption of a gen- poor to donate to the agency? How much influence might eral “right” to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. These wealthy supporters exert over the appointment of officers issues go to the heart of the unbridgeable gap between liber- and management? How easy would it be for the wealthy to tarian and humanist values. use police forces for their own private purposes? Recall the Every society has a certain number of people who are use of private—and public—police as strikebreakers and cor- either unable or unwilling to support themselves, whether

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 41 temporarily or permanently. This number includes the physi- restriction of a host of unethical business practices would cally or mentally handicapped, innocent victims of economic simply disappear. The influence of labor, which has dwindled adversity, the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, petty crimi- steadily over the past decades, could not come close to pro- nals, and the children of each subgroup. The diverse composi- viding an adequate countervailing force. tion of the group (overall, a majority of victims and a minority The libertarian answer to the possibility(!) of corporate of users) creates confusion and controversy among those who abuse is that business would regulate itself, if only out of would address the problem. enlightened self-interest. Since negative public perception Our current approaches to unemployment, poverty, and would result in decreased business, corporations would be homelessness encompass a hodgepodge of federal, state, motivated to act in the public interest. local, and private systems and activities. Millions fall through Of course if this theory were true, it would be manifested the cracks, while some take advantage by gaming the system. even within today’s regulated environment. Yet most busi- The quality and quantity of help available to those in legit- nesses, especially large ones, spend an inordinate percentage imate need vary enormously according to where the needy of their resources on devising ways to weaken or avoid the happen to be. Clearly the entire system should be overhauled very controls that libertarians maintain would be voluntarily and simplified. implemented in the absence of government regulation. As usual, the libertarian solution is to simply remove gov- Corporations themselves are neither good nor evil. They ernment from the equation. The financial resources freed are nothing more than intellectual constructs conceived, up by eliminating government social programs should enable made legal, and sustained by human beings. Not unlike gods, individuals to fund such programs voluntarily; if voluntary they are assigned characteristics and requirements by their funding proves inadequate for alleviating poverty, homeless- minions, who then subordinate themselves to the imaginary ness, unemployment, and mental illness (as it always has), the creatures they have created. Their prime directive is profit- families of the unfortunate must be ready to take up the slack. ability. Only humans can change corporate behavior, but they The inescapable underpinning of this libertarian posi- rarely do so unless forced. tion—indeed, of all libertarian positions—is that in the end, the fittest (and/or luckiest) will survive, and society will be the he populace can enjoy the benefits of free enterprise only better for it. Concern for those who cannot help themselves, Twithin a reasonably regulated economy. Without such and compassion in general, should be left to those of us (such regulation, the environment will be despoiled, the economy as secular humanists) who are afflicted with such weaknesses. will devolve toward feudalism, and the free enterprise system The same is true for access to medical care. Get govern- will slowly be strangled as giant conglomerates claw their way ment out, say the libertarians, and the absence of regulation toward monopoly. It almost happened here a little over a cen- will reduce medical costs to such an extent that quality care tury ago, and it took government to break the corporate grip. will be readily affordable. Government is already losing its struggle to regulate the This premise may have made sense in Adam Smith’s time, conglomerates. The rich and powerful continue to buy poli- when medical equipment consisted largely of hand tools ticians and fund propaganda to convince the public that its and leeches, and a patient’s likelihood of survival was not own interests parallel those of its exploiters. Yet government greatly enhanced by access to the available medical services. regulation is the only viable bulwark against the specter of However, in today’s medical environment of costly surgical corporate oligarchy. and diagnostic equipment—to say nothing of insurance Values must determine the outcome. Secular-humanist companies determined to weed out any customers who are values include compassion, cooperation, environmental pro- actually likely to need medical services—the probability of tection, respect for other species, and social justice. Libertarians universally available medical care without government reg- regard such principles as either secondary or inimical to their ulation is zero. Once again, the survival of the fittest (that own values of immutable property rights and laissez-faire is, the richest and luckiest) manifests itself as the libertarian economics. The incompatibility is clear. philosophical underpinning. Finally, consider the effects of removing government’s ability to influence business and financial communities in any way. Suddenly regulations pertaining to environmental Dan Davis is a writer and a semiretired sales and use tax-consultant protection, workplace safety, work hours, child labor, truth in with a tendency to overthink things. advertising (already a joke), prevention of monopolies, and

42 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Joseph Ratzinger and the Nativity Legends Etienne Vermeersch

Translated from the Dutch by Stuart Silvers

While conceiving Siddhartha (the young Buddha), his torische Geschehnisse), Ratzinger writes, that is interpreted mother Maya saw in a dream that he entered her womb in theologically. the shape of a little white elephant. All of nature rejoiced: trees and plants blossomed, rivers stopped flowing, and Twelve Years Old, Pregnant, and on a Journey musical instruments played without being touched. At the end of the pregnancy the child came forth painlessly from As an extreme illustration of this gullibility, let us consider the her right side; he could walk immediately and at each step story of the Visitation (Luke 1:39–56). According to Jewish a lotus flower appeared on the ground. practice of the time, a girl’s betrothal was arranged around When Jesus was born in Bethlehem [!] in Judea, as a child of her twelfth birthday, and, hence, so was Mary’s. Nevertheless, a virgin from Nazareth [!], in the time of King Herod, Wise immediately after the “annunciation by the angel,” she visits Men [magoi] from the East came to Jerusalem and asked, her niece Elizabeth in Judea. Imagine that! In a culture where “Where is the new born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and we have come to worship him.” women, not to mention unmarried women, were barely Herod sent them to Bethlehem and then the star that had allowed to leave the house on their own, a pregnant twelve- disappeared for a while [to render the visit to Herod inev- year-old girl sets off, on foot, on a journey of more than one itable, and so enable his murderous decree?] reappeared hundred kilometers through a dangerous region. And for and guided them until it stood still above the place where the child was. what purpose? To pronounce the Magnificat—inspired by a biblical passage (1 Samuel 2:1–10), although in those days —Paraphrases of Buddhist and Christian scripture girls were poorly instructed concerning the Scriptures. Another typical aspect of stories of this type: they confront readers who accept the possibility of miracles with so many o botanist ever wondered how those lotus flowers could anomalies as to induce total perplexity. Let us assume that an grow under the little feet of Siddhartha. But Western angel did announce the virgin conception; that thanks to a Nastronomers did investigate whether the Wise Men dream, Joseph believed this; that the birth did take place and was might have seen a supernova, a comet, or a conjunction of announced to the shepherds by a choir of angels; that a star did planets, as if such a “star” could accompany human beings on lead the Wise Men with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh to a journey and then stand still over a particular place. Bethlehem; that Jesus’s messianic character was emphasized in We consider stories of miracles from other cultures to be the temple by Simeon and Hannah; that in a dream Joseph was fantasies, but when it comes to the Bible, even sensible peo- ordered to go to Galilee; and that “Mary kept all these things ple lose their critical faculties. In 2012 (yes, in the twenty-first in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Is it not strange, then, that Joseph century) Joseph Ratzinger published—not as Pope Benedict and Mary, desperately seeking their wandered-off son, did not XVI, whom he still was, but as a biblical scholar—Jesus of understand the words of the then–twelve-year-old Jesus when Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, the third and final volume they finally found him in the temple (“Didn’t you know Ihad of his Jesus of Nazareth series. One reads eagerly to find out to be in my Father’s house?,” Luke 2:50)? If all of these miracles what Ratzinger has to say about the star of Bethlehem, the did happen, then how can it be that Joseph and Mary had not slaughter of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt. He could realized during twelve years of parenting that their son was have kept it short (“those are legends”); instead, he devotes actually the Messiah, the son of God? According to Mark 3:21, roughly a quarter of the book to their discussion. The rele- Jesus’s family (hoi par’ autou) “went out to lay hold on him for vant texts of Matthew (1 and 2) and Luke (1:5–80; 2:1–52) they said ‘he is beside himself,’” and according to John 7:5, his raise critical issues, and Ratzinger knows it. Yet he does not own brothers did not believe in him. The angels, the shepherds, consider them as “meditation in narrative guise” (which is the prophets in the temple: Was it all to no avail? Had all of this what the best Christian exegetes, including Catholic ones, completely escaped Mary’s mind, or had she never bothered to think nowadays). No, Matthew gives us “factual history” (his- tell her other children?

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 43 An Inconspicuous Preacher from Galilee either case, these chromosomes (their DNA sequences) would Ratzinger also does not seem to realize that often a “mytho- have to code for the normal proteins. “Divine” chromosomes poetic” tendency arises around famous characters. This con- do not exist, for by definition the Christian God is immaterial. cerns the need to narrate myths and legends, either in order Because DNA was unknown in antiquity, a belief in virgin to shed light on the significance of these persons or to fulfill conception, however enigmatic, was not absurd. But in our a deeply human longing for the miraculous. In many cultures, own day? these kings, prophets, or saints perform miracles, and their Jesus’s Brothers births and deaths are accompanied by rare natural phenom- Furthermore, Ratzinger’s book is striking in what it omits. ena: earthquakes, new stars, comets, or solar or lunar eclipses. Whoever discusses Mary’s virginity cannot ignore that accord- Their mothers may be nonnaturally impregnated by a god. ing to Roman Catholic doctrine, Mary remained “always a Especially in relation to religion, this tendency seems to know virgin” after Jesus’s birth (semper virgo). This dogma has no no limits. Quite fittingly did Goethe say: “Das Wunder ist des grounds in the New Testament; according to Matt. 12:46, Glaubens liebstes Kind” (Wonder is the dearest child of faith). Luke 8:19, John 2:12 and 7:3–5, and 1 Corinthians 9:5, Jesus But such stories are also used to support particular doc- had brothers. Mark (3:31 and 6:3) attests that he had sis- trines. After their visions of the resurrected Jesus, his disciples ters as well. In Mark 6:3 and Matt. 13:55, the four brothers considered him the Messiah. But how could an inconspicuous are referred to by name. One among them, James, played preacher from Galilee claim this title? Well, as a descendant an important role in the early church and Paul (Gal. 1:19) of David, he could! Paul (around 56 CE) already knew the tra- calls him “the Lord’s brother” (ton adelphon tou kuriou). dition that Jesus was born of the of David (ek spermatos Moreover, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus stated that Dauid) (Rom. 1:3). Later traditions prefer a virgin concep- in 62 CE, James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,” tion—which if true precludes this continuity of the male line. was stoned. That is why Matthew and Luke (around 90 CE) try to empha- The objections to these statements have been invalidated size Jesus’s kinship to David by situating the birth in David’s time and again. How odd that a pope does not find it fitting city of Bethlehem (in Judea). They do so in quite a bungling to address them. way, however. According to Matthew, Jesus’s parents lived in This brings us to the question: Is Ratzinger foolish or igno- Bethlehem; the Wise Men met them in their house (elthontes rant? Neither, in my view. He bases his beliefs on an unwav- eis tên oikian) (Matt. 2:11); and after their return from Egypt ering faith in the factual reliability of the Holy Scriptures, and an angel has to encourage them to go to Galilee. According if necessary, its truths must be defended in a shrewd way. to Luke, they live in Nazareth, but Augustus’s census sent Some Catholic exegetes solve the problems by distinguishing them to Bethlehem. A “census” in the city of the ancestors the “deeper message” from a time-bound myth or legend. (Luke 2:4)—in the case of David, in the city of one’s ancestors Ratzinger is unable to do so, and odd as it may seem, some as of about a thousand years earlier—is preposterous beyond respect is still due him. imagination. There was indeed a “census” in Judea around A second question regards the way in which our culture, 6 CE, but it affected only current residents and concerned traditionally drenched in Christianity, has to accommodate property taxes. this “demythologizing.” In my opinion, we must distinguish Ratzinger’s imagination resolves this by assuming that between the strictly scientific question of truth and the Joseph owned real estate in Bethlehem. Why, then, was myths, rites, and other cultural expressions that have grown Jesus born in a stable? Luke and Matthew argue for the same up a tradition I consider intrinsically valuable. Handel’s thing (birth in Bethlehem) but with incompatible stories; this Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio do not lose any of their is proof of their utter incredibility. The same applies to the value in consequence of my remarks. “Peace on earth to all family trees that have “father” Joseph descended from David: men of good will” remains a meaningful message, even if it is they diverge nearly completely, both in the names and in the an incorrect translation of eirênê en anthrôpois eudokias. number of generations. In my opinion, even the linking of Jesus’s birth with Herod may have been determined by the Etienne Vermeersch is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University desire to present him as the legitimate successor of this last of , , which he formerly served as vice rector. A renowned great king of all Jews, the temple builder. Belgian moral philosopher and classical philologist, he is one of the In short, Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and we do not founding fathers of the abortion and euthanasia law in Belgium. He know when he was born. The virgin conception arranged served five years as a Jesuit priest, broke with his faith at age twen- by God has no biological significance. A human being has ty-five, and later became an atheist and naturalist. He is also one of the two pairs of twenty-three chromosomes each, half from the leading skeptics in Europe. mother and half from the father. If Jesus was a real human Translator Stuart Silvers is emeritus professor of philosophy at being, he would have received this second sequence either Clemson University. from his father or through (divine) genetic manipulation. In

44 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Cremation and Religiosity Richard G. Dumont

eing diagnosed with severe emphysema, as I was recently, the data reveal notable increases in life expectancy for all has a way of focusing one’s thoughts on the reality of categories, males have made gains vis-à-vis females, with the Bpersonal mortality. To the extent that WebMD can be greatest relative gains accruing to black males: namely, considered reliable, I have about a 55 to 60 percent chance of 11.8 years. still being alive in four years. Needless to say, these odds are Among the most probable reasons for the gender-related better than 50 percent or less, and I plan to use my remaining shifts are the increasing proportions of women entering the time wisely—in contrast to my teen years and early adult- labor force, which subjects them to additional stresses and hood, when cigarettes were an integral component of my anxieties. Gainfully employed women also bear the greater daily life. When I quit in 1974 after some twenty years of burden of housework and child rearing relative to men, smoking, I had acquired a two- to three-pack-a-day habit. thereby further negatively affecting their life prospects. Since the 1972 publication of my The American View Additionally, the smoking rate among women has been on of Death: Acceptance or Denial?, which I coauthored with the increase. Dennis C. Foss, much has changed, including death rates and average life expectancies. While neither death nor dying have been eradicated, average life expectancies have increased significantly between 1970 and 2010 (see table 1). Though “Being diagnosed with severe emphysema, Table 1. Average Life Expectancies 1970 and 2010 as I was recently, has a way of focusing one’s

Category Average Life Expectancies thoughts on the reality of personal mortality.”

1970 2010 Change

All Races Both Sexes 70.8 78.7 7.9 Female 74.7 81.1 6.4 The life prospects for males have been further enhanced Male 67.1 76.2 9.1 by certain behavioral changes, most noteworthy being the Female–Male 7.6 4.9 -2.7 decline in the smoking rate. White Regarding the declining differentials due to race, it seems Both Sexes 71.7 79 7.3 highly probable that attitudinal and behavioral changes Female 75.6 81.3 5.7 accompanying the civil rights movement, including the anti- Male 68 76.5 8.5 discrimination legislation of the mid-1960s, have had salutary Female–Male 7.6 4.8 -2.8 effects. Affirmative action programs have likely played a Black major role as well. Both Sexes 64.1 75.1 11 Female 68.3 78 9.7 o what extent have American attitudes toward death Male 60 71.8 11.8 changed since the publication of my book? Probably not Female–Male 8.3 6.2 -2.1 T much, because the same pressures and inducements to simul- Source: United States National Center for Health Statistics of the taneously accept and deny death persist. To the extent that Centers for Disease Control they have changed, available evidence suggests, but does not prove, more realistic acceptance of death.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 45 Table 2. 2006 Cremation rates for the 50 U.S. states and I believe that the strongest objective evidence for Washington, D.C., presented in descending order. greater attitudinal acceptance of death may be found in increasing cremation rates. Traditional funeral-industry 1 Nevada 68.41% practices of body preservation and burial probably reflect 2 Washington 67.57% and contribute to death denial more than acceptance, 3 Hawaii 65.60% because the apparent intent is to preserve the body 4 Oregon 65.25% following death. (The body is drained of blood, which is 5 Arizona 59.66% replaced with embalming fluid. It is then placed in a casket, 6 Montana 59.40% which is often further encased in a concrete or steel con- 7 Colorado 57.83% tainer before being lowered into the ground or entombed 8 Maine 55.61% in a vault.) In marked contrast, cremation totally destroys 9 Alaska 55.04% 10 Vermont 54.26% the body by burning it to a crisp, so to speak, from whence 11 New Hampshire 53.94% probably emanates the euphemism “crispy critter.” It is 12 Florida 51.78% literally the implementation of the process of rendering 13 California 50.50% ashes to ashes and dust to dust. 14 Wyoming 49.63% Of course, it is also possible that cost differences have 15 Idaho 48.26% accounted for the growing popularity of cremation. 16 New Mexico 47.02% Whereas the price for a traditional funeral may be several 17 Minnesota 40.46% thousand dollars, a cremation can be had for but a few 18 Michigan 38.62% hundred dollars, on average. It seems likely that the grow- 19 District of Columbia 38.26% ing popularity of cremation is due to some combination 20 Connecticut 37.22% of increasing death acceptance as well as its being less 21 Delaware 33.06% 22 Rhode Island 31.77% expensive. 23 Wisconsin 31.53% In the fifty-year period from 1960 to 2010, the cre- 24 Massachusetts 31.15% mation rate in the United States increased from 3.56 25 Illinois 29.56% percent to 40.62 percent, with the National Funeral 26 Pennsylvania 29.09% Directors Association projecting an increase to 51.12 per- 27 Nebraska 28.30% cent by 2025. The overall national rate conceals a great 28 Maryland 28.22% deal of state-by-state variation, however, as revealed 29 Kansa 27.91% in table 2. A cursory examination suggests that crema- 30 New Jersey 27.76% tion rates tend to be lowest in the southern and certain 31 New York 27.72% midwestern states. Those states, as has been shown in 32 Virginia 27.22% recent previous research, tend to be more religious. In my 33 North Carolina 25.10% 34 Missouri 24.83% recently published When Hate Happens, So Does Other 35 Ohio 24.77% Bad Stuff: Respect Diversity—Teach Tolerance—Fight Hate! 36 Texas 23.76% (FriesenPress, 2013), I demonstrated that states exhibiting 37 Iowa 23.33% “extreme religiosity of beliefs and practices” also had the 38 Utah 22.77% highest “hate rates.” 39 Oklahoma 22.72% The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s 2008 U.S. 40 Georgia 22.10% Religious Landscape Survey—the results of which were 41 South Carolina 21.94% published in 2009 and which involved a representative 42 Indiana 21.88% probability sample of over thirty-five thousand adults— 43 South Dakota 20.79% contained a series of questions pertaining to religious 44 Arkansas 20.36% beliefs and practices. 45 North Dakota 19.26% 46 West Virginia 16.56% My original, and novel, composite measure or indica- 47 Louisiana 16.18% tor of extreme religiosity derives from how individuals in 48 Tennessee 15.99% each state responded to five select beliefs-and-practices 49 Kentucky 12.32% questions: (a) they are “absolutely certain that God exists”; 50 Alabama 11.05% (b) they “believe the Bible to be the actual word of God, 51 Mississippi 9.56% literally true, word for word”; (c) they assert that “religion is a very important part of their daily lives”; (d) they “attend Source: 2010 United States Census religious services at least once a week”; and (e) they pray at

46 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org CREMRATE 68.41

62.52

56.64

50.75

44.07

38.98

33.10

27.21

21.33

15.44

9.56 -7.06 -5.38 -3.70 -2.82 -0.34 1.74 3.02 4.70 6.38 8.06 9.74 HIGHREL R(XY) = -0.716. Slope = -3.07. Intercept = - 35.15

Figure 1. Relationship between extreme religiosity, HIGHREL, and the cremation rate, CREMRATE, for the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. (r = -.716; p = .000)

least once a day” (emphasis added). It is calculated as a simple accompanied by a corresponding increase in the popularity of standardized z-score. cremation as an alternative to traditional funerary practices. Figure 1 displays the relationship between extreme Simultaneously, such an eventuality is likely to indicate greater religiosity, labeled as “HIGHREL,” and the cremation rate, willingness to accept the reality of death. “CREMRATE,” for the fifty U.S. states and Washington, D.C. As can be seen by examining the scatter diagram and associated statistics, the relationship is a strong negative one; namely, the higher the degree of extreme religiosity, the lower the Richard G. Dumont is the author of three books: The American View cremation rate (r = -.716; p = .000). of Death: Acceptance or Denial?, coauthored with Dennis C. Foss From the 2008 Pew Forum and Public Life’s U.S. Religious (Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972); Economic Inequality and What Landscape Survey, I also developed corresponding and compa- YOU Can Do About It: A Primer and Call to Action! (FriesenPress, 2012); rable measures of moderate and low religiosity, MODREL and and When Hate Happens, So Does Other Bad Stuff: Respect Diversity— LOWREL. The relationship between MODREL and CREMRATE Teach Tolerance—Fight Hate! (FriesenPress, 2013). He has also pub- showed a moderately strong positive relationship (r = .373; lished in several journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, p = .007), while that between LOWREL and CREMRATE was American Sociological Review, Sociology and Social Research, Journal a strong positive one; namely, the higher the degree of low of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Planning for Higher religiosity, the higher the cremation rate (r = .773; p = .000). Education, Evolutionary Psychology, Journal of Religion and Society, and Free Inquiry. In the latter three, authorship was attributed to his French he findings of the current study suggest that the increasing pseudonym, R. Georges Delamontagne. Tsecularization of American culture and society will be

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 47 Shadia B. Drury Doctoring the Script continued from p. 11 and expanding drone warfare and tak- ing to live in a world where dictators can morality is a willingness to universal- ing the imperial presidency for granted, use sarin gas with impunity. Assad had to ize one’s conduct. But exceptionalism killing “suspected terrorists,” foreign be punished for crossing a “red line.” The allows America to regard itself as an or domestic, along with the usual “col- only justification offered for the strike is to exception to the rules that apply to lateral damage” of innocent children. “punish Assad.” As U.S. Secretary of State other nations. It has huge stockpiles What happened? Is he a wolf in sheep’s John Kerry explained, it will be a “surgical of nuclear and chemical weapons but clothing? Not at all. strike,” which will not oust Assad from has threatened Iran with destruction if Obama’s ability to respond to world power (lest those other guys take over). it makes any progress toward acquir- events in a constructive manner is ham- In truth, there is no such thing as a “sur- ing even a single bomb. When Obama pered by his understanding of American gical strike.” The deaths of more innocent declared that the alleged use of sarin exceptionalism. The fact is that the children would be inevitable. And you gas by the Assad regime constitutes American myth of exceptionalism in can be sure that images of Syrian women the crossing of a “red line” that cannot its moralistic (Democratic) or muscular and children dying as a result of American go unpunished, the world wondered (Republican) form is a dreadful guide strikes would be displayed by Al Jazeera why sarin gas was so unacceptable but to foreign policy. It is both unpractical throughout the Arab world. They would the use of depleted uranium by the and immoral. It is unpractical because be just as sickening as the images of the Americans in Iraq was not; nor was the it makes American leaders ill-equipped children succumbing to sarin gas. So, what white phosphorous used by Israel in to act in a world where there is evil on could the strike accomplish? It could only Gaza. Besides, all these chemical weap- both sides. It forces them to see the satisfy America’s self-righteous moralism. ons put together cannot accomplish world in black-and-white terms—good Just when a strike on Syria was immi- the mass murder of civilian populations and evil, friends and foes. But the world nent, a journalist asked Kerry at a press that was inflicted by the nuclear bombs is not that simple, as the recent case of conference what Syria could do to avert dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Syria attests. such a strike. He said it would have to Insofar as the United States exempts With a civil war raging in Syria, Re­­ give up its chemical weapons and added itself from the law of nations, it under- publicans such as John McCain, Lindsey quickly that this was highly unlikely. The mines the international order. Insofar as Graham, and Eric Cantor urged Obama Russians seized this opportunity to pro- its acts in the world as prosecutor, judge, to arm the rebels and strike the regime vide a diplomatic solution. They would jury, and executioner, this rogue super- of Bashar al-Assad without the approval make Syria give up her chemical weapons power creates a more lawless global of the United Nations, NATO, the to avert a strike. In this way, Obama and environment. Arab League, or even Congress. They Kerry stumbled into a diplomatic solu- It is time for Americans to reflect on refused to countenance the fact that tion—something that had not occurred to their exceptionalism. It is time for them to al-Qaeda, foreign jihadists, the Muslim them as long as they donned the posture wonder if their national mythology has Brotherhood, and other unsavory reli- of the avenging angel of God. been the source of their grief. Has it not gious extremists were fighting on the Naturally, the war party was dis- contributed to the perpetual wars that side of the rebels in Syria. The Muslim appointed. They prefer their enemies have bankrupted the country? Have Brotherhood vowed to exterminate the to be as mad as they are evil. That American soldiers not died needlessly for Alawites (the Shia sect to which Assad way they can use force without trying what can only be described as gargan- belongs) as soon as they were victorious. diplomacy. William Kristol and Daniel tuan political blunders? What about all But American leaders on both sides of the Pipes were giddy with the prospect of the innocent children killed by American aisle insist on seeing the world in black a war on Syria that would lead to a war drones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and white. Democrats are more moderate on Iran. Now they are panic-stricken Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere? Are only because they like their conduct to because Iran elected a reasonable pres- they not the “collateral damage” of appear legitimate in the eyes of the world. ident who is bent on restoring diplo- American exceptionalism? It is time for In contrast, the Republican attitude is as matic relations with the United States. Americans to rediscover a more benign muscular as it is moralistic: America is right, Horrors. Where are we ever version of their exceptionalism. period; the world be damned. going to find enemies? Shadia B. Drury is Canada Research Chair at the University of Obama was paralyzed by the reality Regina in Canada. She is the author of several books, including of evil on both sides. But after the use of s a driver of American Terror and Civilization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Aquinas sarin gas, allegedly by the Assad regime foreign policy, excep- A and Modernity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). She is currently (August 21, 2013), Obama could no longer tionalism is not only working on two books, Socratic Mischief and Chauvinism of resist the weight of his country’s divine impractical; it is immoral. the West. mission. He declared that he was unwill- One of the classic tests of

48 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Ophelia Benson Doctoring the Script continued from p. 7 a God-oriented worldview. Characters secular entertainment. Interesting. all the way down, boring at its heart. pursue their quarrels and love affairs You could say the same thing about Perfection is the opposite of creativity, and investigations in purely secular church, as a matter of fact. For most and death to it. terms. Once in a while there’s a scene in regular churchgoers, it’s confined to an It’s the fact that we’re always needing a church, for a wedding or funeral or a hour per week. Why’s that then? If it’s something that keeps us from standing Christmas reunion, but even then we get so great, why don’t people do it every still and freezing over. It’s terrible, because the trappings but not the honcho who’s day? Why don’t they clamor for more? many needs are not met, and people suf- supposed to be at the center of it all. Why? Because it’s boring, that’s why. fer and die as a result. But if we had no Ah well, that’s to avoid controversy, That’s also why TV doesn’t consist of just needs at all we wouldn’t know what to complications, offending someone, church (and temple and mosque) services do with ourselves. The heart has to keep getting into deep waters—yes, but on every channel twenty-four hours a ticking, the lungs have to keep inflating, that’s my point. It seems fair to assume day. Church is boring, religion is boring, and we have to keep busy. that the entertainment industry thinks perfection is boring. I don’t mean the the public doesn’t want God in its kind of boring that teen- entertainment, and it’s probably right agers invoke for anything Ophelia Benson edits the website Butterflies and Wheels. about that: that’s what’s surprising. The unfamiliar and difficult that She is the coauthor (with Jeremy Stangroom) of Does United States is supposed to be such turns out to be enthralling God Hate Women? (Continuum, 2009), The Dictionary of an enthusiastically religious country, if you put in some effort—I Fashionable Nonsense (Souvenir, 2004), and Why Truth yet Americans apparently prefer purely mean truly boring, boring Matters (Continuum, 2006).

Russell Blackford Do the Best Lack All Conviction? continued from p. 8 parently irresponsible or opportunistic where you rightly feel less so. In a appears to have strong empirical support: or cynically brutal, and in those circum- wide range of situations, the evidence in a wide range of situations that we stances it may well be appropriate to available to us is simply ambiguous encounter, we are not in a position to have strong convictions against them, to or incomplete. Getting to the bottom draw conclusions with much objectively oppose them forcefully, and to unmask of certain claims may be very diffi- justifiable confidence. This can apply to the ignorance, recklessness, opportunism, cult given the limitations on our time, such things as how certain individuals and cynicism of their advocates. cognitive powers, and expertise and really assess or feel about us; the guilt or Surely, though, this is not always the on the evidence reasonably available otherwise of defendants in court cases situation when rival economic policies, to us (or perhaps to anyone at all). that are in the news from time to time; or rival teams of economic managers, Settling the truth of a particular claim many social, cultural, and political claims are up for assessment by voters. All too might require first settling the truth expressed at a high level of generality; often, in fact, there are vast gray areas. of numerous others, and this might and much else. Well-credentialed experts can genu- require settling still others. Such situ- Despite our intellectual progress in inely disagree on what steps should ations are probably more common, or recent centuries, modern societies are be taken and on what consequences even typical, than we’d like to believe, awash with all kinds of one-sided, intel- might reasonably be expected. If we but as rational, reasonable people we lectually dishonest, emotionally manip- are intellectually honest in these cases, just have to live with this. ulative messages—that is, with propa- we should admit that we cannot make Once again, I am not making a global ganda. Worse, our minds start to be the required judgments with any great and theoretical, and perhaps paradoxical, formed by these messages long before confidence. As voters, we can only do claim to the effect that we can never be we have the capacity to recognize them our best in assessing our options; if confident about anything. Some philos- for what they are. At the same time, rival parties seem to offer sincere and ophers have argued for forms of compre- we find it sorely tempting to develop responsible policy alternatives, we may hensive epistemic skepticism and have a view of the world far more compre- be thankful that economic manage- tried to work out the implications for hensive than the evidence really allows, ment is not the only issue that influ- how we ought to live our lives. Perhaps to test new claims in accordance with ences our votes. most famously, this was the approach how far they confirm our existing world- Even if you are confident of your of the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics. I am views (rather than based on the real judgments about economic policy, making a more modest claim that I actu- strength of the evidence), and to cling there should be many other topics ally do feel confident about because it to our cherished understandings of the

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 49 Russell Blackford Do the Best Lack All Conviction? continued from p.49 world with the passionate intensity of we identify, pointing out any grain of but poorly evidenced secular ideologies. conviction that Yeats complains about in truth that we honestly find when we That is just as well, given the track record his “Second Coming,” even when many investigate a raft of what seem to be of comprehensive secular ideologies in of our beliefs have little rational warrant. (and by and large, really are) lies, libels, imitating many of the worst features of Let us then be forthright in our convic- or simple misconceptions. the monotheistic religions—not least, tions where that really is justifiable. But Likewise, I’ve enjoyed reading Peter as Boghossian also recognizes, their let’s also be aware of our biases: it is too Boghossian’s even newer volume from tendency to override ordinary human easy to think that my pet issue is one of Pitchstone Publishing, A Manual for sympathies and to inspire persecutions, the ones where the evidence is all on one Creating Atheists (November 2013). This purges, and atrocities. side and warrants some drastic, perhaps is a brave, clear book whose author is If we are honest, we will face up inhumane or destructive, action. certainly confident in his attack on reli- each day to how little we really know— Recognizing all this, as I think we gious faith. Nonetheless, his insights go enough, no doubt, to exclude belief must, what is to be done? There is much far beyond the book’s immediate focus systems that fit poorly with robust sci- entific findings but far from enough to to be said for a habit of mind whereby on debates about God. Boghossian’s call build new comprehensive systems of we stop and consider what might be for honest, evidence-based thinking can our own that can be adopted with much the strongest arguments against our be seen as a strong challenge to ideology confidence. In some cases, as we face own positions or in favor of positions and propaganda wherever we find them. grave personal and political choices, the that we oppose. Don’t look merely for In particular, he insists that we maintain a evidence will confirm that something weaknesses in your opponents’ posi- posture of “doxastic openness,” a willing- drastic must be done. But in many, many tions; search out the strengths. If you ness to revise beliefs: we should consider other instances, we ought to accept consider those in an intellectually hon- the evidence against our current posi- a reality check and oppose wild plans est way, you may end up modifying tions and accept unexpected truth claims or dramatic actions justified by propa- and developing your views, holding to when this turns out to be warranted. ganda and ideology. them less fiercely (and weighing the This, I suggest, is how fair-minded peo- Sorting out which cases are which is wisdom of acting on them quite differ- ple ought to approach important issues never easy, but that is the task we must ently), deciding to reserve judgment, or that concern them. Boghossian argues, face again and again. That is our mod- changing your mind entirely. This is a correctly it seems to me, that clear, honest ern condition. good start for not turning into a propa- thinking based on evidence gandist, an ideologue, or a fanatic. will nudge people toward Russell Blackford is a conjoint lecturer in the School of In that spirit, Udo Schüklenk and I go atheism. It will also, let’s Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, to some lengths in our new book, 50 take note, lead many peo- Australia. His latest book is 50 Great Myths About Atheism, Great Myths About Atheism, to give the ple away from their com- coauthored with Udo Schüklenk (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). best run we can to each of the “myths” prehensive and comforting

Edward Tabash Atheists Must Not Self-Censor continued from p. 13 sinful behavior by its adherents. and nonbeliever, we pose no threat to power of the state to silence an opponent religious freedom. If religionists see us but must rely on meeting speech they Atheists Are No Threat to the Legal Equal as a threat when we speak and debate find offensive with counterarguments. Rights of Believers in public, that’s their problem. Just as we We atheists would be a threat to the have no right to silence the expression The Application of the Empirical Method religious if we attempted to use the law of religious points of view, they have no Should Be Uniform to take away their freedom to worship right to silence the expression of atheistic There is no reason miraculous claims and to proselytize their beliefs. This is not points of view. that most people would not believe in what we do. Our purpose is to secure the In a society that truly regards free an other-than-religious context must be legal equality of everyone, believer and speech as a core value, the way for the given a special pass just because they nonbeliever alike. We just don’t want the religious to deal with our arguments is to allegedly occurred in the furtherance of a religious to enjoy more government-con- attempt to respond to them with argu- conventionally accepted religious belief. ferred benefits than we have. We merely ments of their own. Those who believe that humans were want the same rights to express our views Every fair-minded person should be miraculously created in our present form in public that they enjoy. As long as we are happy with our First Amendment system and that all of the outlandish magical devoted to the legal equality of believer in which no one can invoke the police events described in the Bible actually took

50 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org place probably would not believe that even though the extent to which one’s idea of an all-powerful being who wants a people, today, can foresee the future or arguments should be philosophically relationship with us. This “divine hidden- are able to project their consciousness sophisticated will depend on the pool ness” is far more likely if atheism is true outside their bodies and read a series of of listeners, that doesn’t mean that we than if theism is true. Accordingly, we are numbers written down in an adjacent ever have to scuttle the basics. Although epistemologically justified in not believing room. Again, claims asserted by religion many people in our culture have unre- that such a deity exists in the first place. should not be evaluated by a different, flectively bought into society’s default Also, if God exists and is all-powerful, less stringent standard just because of position that religious claims are entitled then that God must confess that even their religious nature. to special exemption from the rigorous with infinite power, he/she/it could not On the contrary, we are fully justified scrutiny applicable to the examination have prevented even greater evil with- in subjecting the claims of religious apol- of any other supernatural belief, we can out allowing the horrendous suffering in ogists to the most exacting analysis and begin to chip away at this notion. We question. Or, God must then argue that a scrutiny. It is those apologists who should can begin to discuss with anyone the great good, a good desirable enough to be on the defensive about why the super- uniformity of reason and evidence. We justify such egregious suffering, could not natural events they claim are true deserve can explain how all miraculous assertions have been brought about in any other greater credibility than other types of must be subjected to the same stringent way than by permitting the horrendous supernatural claims, not us. In April of level of inspection, whether the subject is suffering that did occur. Either way, this 1823, Thomas Jefferson, the retired third astrology or the resurrection of the dead. is a pretty high hurdle for a supposedly president of the United States, wrote to We may not reach everybody. However, omnipotent being, who can do anything. John Adams, the retired second president the more people we talk to, the more The Moral Propriety of Our Asserting Our of the United States. Jefferson said: “And seeds of doubt we plant regarding the Arguments Is Clear the day will come when the mystical gen- factual validity of religious claims. eration of Jesus, by the supreme being This is why university debates on To insist that religionists deserve some as his father in the womb of a virgin, will the existence of God are so crucial to special polite leniency—a leniency not be classed with the fable of the genera- causing doubt in the minds of students. extended to adherents of any other kinds tion of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” Students treat such debates as some of belief systems—is to make a judgment Jefferson thus addressed the central issue kind of absorbing intellectual heavy- about political expediency and not one we are now dealing with. Why should weight fight. For those few hours, they based on facts. There is no sound reason the myths of Christianity be considered are completely focused on the argu- to stifle the full force and effect of argu- any more believable than stories about ments. Because they are attentive to ments against the existence of God. ancient Roman deities? the debate as it takes place, a compe- When the religious say publicly that When religious believers protest tent atheist debater can get students everyone will go to hell for not believing that atheists and other nonbelievers are to consider arguments to which they as they believe, we are justified in publicly “bashing” them, they are really trying to might not otherwise pay attention. explaining why there is no heaven and obtain some kind of special insulation for hell in the first place. If we are accused of their mythologies, in preference to other Confronting Evil being “angry atheists” just because we mythologies. Again, we must avoid the We can further challenge religious claims exercise the same right they do to present syndrome of the self-hating atheist who by dealing with the enormous amount our arguments, we can charge our accus- still buys into the notion that religious of evil and suffering that humanity faces ers with being “angry religionists” who beliefs deserve a greater exemption from on a nonstop basis. We don’t have to be are incapable of being happy as long as critical examination, doubt, and ridicule timid when confronted with apologetic they know that others are enjoying liber- than other types of beliefs. If the religion- claims that God moves in mysterious ways ated lifestyles, free from superstitious ist can get away with claiming to hate the and that a being so far superior to us dogma. sin and not the sinner, we can properly may have reasons we claim—and much more credibly—to be can never understand able to ridicule the superstition and not for allowing so much Edward Tabash is a constitutional lawyer in the Los Angeles area. the superstitious. pain. If God wants us He has engaged in formal debates on the existence of God against to believe in her/his/ such prominent religious philosophers as William Lane Craig and Presenting Atheistic Arguments to the its existence and yet Richard Swinburne. He has also filed amicus curiae briefs arguing General Public hides from us evidence for the separation of church and state with the United States and Philosophical sophistication varies of the supernatural California Supreme Courts. He chairs the board of directors of the throughout society. In any given discus- and explanations for Center for Inquiry, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and the sion, the appropriate depth of argument tragic occurrences, this Council for Secular Humanism. will vary with the audience. However, is inconsistent with the

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 51 Church-State Update

Attack of the Education Pseudo-Reformers Edd Doerr

ake no mistake: America’s public ing elections by these privatizers dwarf pins the tails on the jackasses working schools, an indispensable com- to insignificance the paltry sums spent to wreck public education. Mponent of our religiously neu- by the teachers’ unions on advocacy for Once upon a time, the charge to tral (that is, secular) democracy, are children and teachers. weaken public education was led by under serious siege. Hordes of pseu- Education historian Diane Ravitch, religious campaigners who sought to do-reformers, privatizers, voucheriz- author of the important 2010 book The divert public funds to sectarian private ers, charterizers, hucksters, snake-oil Death and Life of the Great American schools—primarily the Catholic bishops. salespersons, privateers, wealthy right- School System: How Testing and Choice While it is true that many public schools wing foundations, billionaire busybod- Are Undermining Education, spells this in the United States had something of ies, hijackers, conservative ideologues, out in fine, well-documented detail a Protestant tinge for a long time, this in her new book, Reign of Error: The faded as our population became more Hoax of the Privatization Movement religiously diverse and ended with the and the Danger to America’s Public U.S. Supreme Court’s school prayer and Schools (Alfred A. Knopf). This may well Bible-reading rulings of the early 1960s. be the most important single book on Catholic-school enrollment shrank from “Hordes of pseudo-reformers, education in decades. 5.5 million students in 1965 to about privatizers, voucherizers, Ravitch shows how the pseudo-re- two million today, and this shrinkage has charterizers . . . assorted formers wrongly portray our schools been due to “changing parental pref- as “failing” when the reality is that erences” (according to studies that the noneducators, and media they have been making steady prog- pro-voucher Nixon administration had toadies are working day and ress, despite being inadequately and done by two Catholic universities) and night to undermine, weaken, inequitably funded and despite years because Catholic parents have grown of incessant conservative sniping. She more content to have their kids attend and destroy our public schools.” shows clearly how the mania for test- religiously neutral public schools. Ravitch ing, testing, testing undermines edu- spends only one short chapter on this cation and forces schools to neglect particular phase of the attack on public science, history, civics, the arts, and education. (In August, while Ravitch’s languages in order to concentrate on book was in press, the annual Gallup/ religious Right gurus, political hacks, preparing students for endless useless PDK education poll reported that 70 assorted noneducators, and media tests; how vouchers, charter schools, percent of Americans oppose vouchers. toadies are working day and night to and virtual or cyber schooling are vastly Similar majorities opposed referenda to undermine, weaken, and destroy our overrated; and how the wholesale clos- divert public funds to private schools public schools. Collateral damage from ing of public schools in cities such as in twenty-seven state-level elections these campaigns will include serious New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia between 1966 and 2012. All these elec- harm to religious freedom, our heri- damages communities and children. tions occurred after the Supreme Court tage of church-state separation, and She names names (such as the execra- ended the remnants of Protestant hege- community harmony in our increas- ble phony “reformer” Michelle Rhee), mony.) ingly diverse society. The tsunamis of identifies the powerful groups under- Where Ravitch really hits hard is funds spent on lobbying and influenc- mining public schools, and generally on the charter-school surge. Around

52 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Poem

1990, American Federation of Teachers “want the students for whom charters Driving to Keene President Albert Shanker and a few were first invented.” But today charters others came up with the idea of “char- have powerful political friends in both on Sunday ter schools” as temporary experimental parties and are swimming in public operations working with local public money. William Doreski schools to try out methods of help- I should note at this point that ing problem students. The experiment Ravitch’s excellent analysis is strongly Snow-banks hedge the road. Driving almost immediately turned sour, as pri- supported by social scientists Michael to Keene on Sunday, I note deer vate corporatizers latched onto to the Fabricant and Michelle Fine in their 2012 tracks stumbling into the woods idea as a moneymaker, conservative book Charter Schools and the Corporate where the herds have crossed in search foundations and think tanks “realized Makeover of Public Education: What’s of fodder. Not much traffic at night that charters were the next best thing at Stake? (Teachers College Press). or else the slaughter of these herds to vouchers,” and conservatives saw Ravitch does not just expose what is would leave the asphalt blood-smeared charters as a way to beat up teacher wrong with the pseudo-reformers and and slick with ice. Today I’ll judge unions. Both for-profit and nonprofit privatizers; she offers common sense, recitations by high-school students outfits, many of them sprawling opera- reasonable, tested ideas for improv- of poems by Tennyson, Byron, ing the already steadily advancing Ginsberg, Olds, Clifton, and Shelley. public schools: serious efforts to alle- No bloodshed, only a tear or two viate the poverty affecting 25 percent when we announce the winners. of American children; prenatal care A plastic cup of punch, a cookie for all pregnant women; high-qual- or sprig of broccoli to honor ity early childhood education for all the occasion. Then I’ll drive home kids; enriched curricula in all schools; to catch the last quarter of a game “. . . Three-fourths of lower class sizes (note that the private between two professional teams, charters are either worse than schools patronized by the wealthy all a game that means nothing to me. The highway widens at the Keene or no better than regular public have small class sizes); revamping char- ter schools to their original purpose as city limits. A burned house sulks schools—this despite their locally run community schools run by behind plywood windows. The smell of charred interior still wafts professional teachers working with, not competitive advantage of being across the road, three months after against, local regular public schools; a able to ‘skim’ students with the fire. I drive more slowly now, full range of medical and social wrap- my aged reflexes processing fewer needs or problems.” around services; elimination of high- the distance more deliberately stakes standardized tests; upgrading than they did a decade ago. the teaching profession (as has been The snowbanks shoulder up and crowd done in Finland); and maintaining the driving lanes. The flaccid light democratic control of public schools. offers nothing. Those bright students A mere discussion of this book can- brave onstage with famous poems not begin to cover its riches. It has to on their lips will astonish me, tions crossing state lines, now run chains be read—by every teacher, administrator, as they do every year: their faces of charters that compete unfairly with parent, and citizen (liberal, conservative, receding like stars still reeling public schools and operate beyond the moderate, whatever) who cares about from self-creation, exuberance control of local elected school boards. the future of our country and our chil- mortals once mistook for gods. In June 2013, also too late to make dren. it into Ravitch’s book, the Stanford As a teacher for years and as an edu- University CREDO study reported in its cation activist and writer for nearly fifty second nationwide survey of charter years, I cannot praise this book too schools that three-fourths of charters highly. Buy it. Read it. Act on it. are either worse than or no better than regular public schools—this despite William Doreski’s work has appeared­ in their competitive advantage of various electronic and print journals and in being able to “skim” students Edd Doerr is president of Americans for Religious Liberty several collections, most recently Waiting for with fewer needs or problems. and a widely published writer. the Angel (Pygmy Forest Press, 2009). “Few charters,” Ravitch writes,

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 53 Science and Religion

Anti-Evolutionism: The Bible Is Not the Main Issue Jason Rosenhouse

n May 2000, I moved to Manhattan, And because I could think of no better Darwin’s work. The second was the Kansas, to begin a three-year postdoc- way of getting answers than to go disturbing idea that God would do Itoral position at Kansas State University. where they were and ask them myself, his creating through natural selection, Shortly after arriving, I heard about a I resolved to attend as many of their a mechanism of singular cruelty and conference for Christian home-schoolers conferences and gatherings as I could. inefficiency. Finally, there was the ques- to be held in Wichita, the state’s largest My new book, Among the Creationists: tion of human significance. Whereas city. Because anything related to public Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Christianity teaches that humans are education in Kansas had relevance to Front-Line (Oxford University Press), is the pinnacle of creation, unique among my job, I decided to attend. It turned out a memoir of my experiences attending the animals for having been created that the conference was largely a cele- these gatherings. Over the past decade, in the image of God, science makes bration of young-Earth creationism. I have learned a great many things humanity seem like an unintended con- about anti-evolutionism—most of them, sequence of an unpredictable evolu- frankly, are not very encouraging about tionary process. the state of science education or reli- There is a whole industry of books gious open-mindedness in this country. defending theistic evolution. In these “If you are interested in studying There were a few surprises, however, books, very clever authors present a especially with regard to the reasons variety of arguments meant to persuade anti-evolutionism up close, then people gave for rejecting evolution. folks that there is no irreconcilable con- central Kansas and my current You see, at nearly all of the confer- flict between evolution and religion. home, in the Shenandoah Valley ences I attended, I found some oppor- My time with the anti-evolutionists has tunity to ask my fellow attendees the made clear to me why so many regard of Virginia, are two excellent blunt question, “What do you find these arguments as unpersuasive. places to live.” objectionable about evolution?” Never Take the design argument, for exam- once did anyone reply, “It contradicts ple. Theistic evolutionists might retort the Bible.” Certainly the Bible was an that no central Christian doctrine rides on issue, especially the pernicious effect the argument’s correctness. Moreover, So began a strange hobby I pursued of modern science on the plausibility while the complexity of organisms can steadily over the next decade. If you are of the Adam and Eve story, but it was no longer be seen as direct evidence for interested in studying anti-evolution- never the issue. It was not as though the existence of a divine supermind, we ism up close, then central Kansas and they viewed evolution as a really neat can instead see God’s creative activity in my current home, in the Shenandoah idea but felt honor-bound to reject it the exquisite system of natural laws in Valley of Virginia, are two excellent because a plain reading of the Bible which evolution plays out. places to live. As a politically liberal tells a different story. These are fine points, but they do nonreligious mathematician who Instead, there were three main not address the anti-evolutionist’s con- accepts the scientific consensus on evo- concerns raised by my interlocutors. cern. For them, the design argument lution, I was curious about how those The first was the demise of the design is only tangentially about bringing on the other side arrived at their views. argument in biology as the result of people intellectually to the reality of

54 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Poem

God’s existence. The bigger issue is its most rudimentary intelligence among emotional role in stressing God’s near- animals, and the role of unpredictable No One’s Buying ness in our daily lives. That organisms mass extinctions in evolution. Perhaps are complex and that design needs a responding to these difficulties, others Art These Days designer are hardly points you need have suggested even less plausible sce- a degree in science to understand. narios. Maybe God is subtly directing William Doreski Transfer the design argument to the the mutations in ways scientists cannot recondite land of modern cosmology detect, or maybe God created an end- Gallery-hopping downtown, and fundamental physics and, even less series of universes, confident that we note ceramic heads smirking leaving aside quarrels about the intel- humans would eventually evolve in at through pursed lips, welded sculpture lectual merits of the argument, you lose least one of them. There is much to waxed to approved shades of rust, all of that emotional resonance. be said against these invented-from- paintings in the favored local style In reply to the problem of evil, the- whole-cloth possibilities, not least the of broad and casual brush stroke. istic evolutionists have come up with fact that there is not the slightest rea- February gnashes in the streets, very little. The most common argu- son, either scientific or theological, for sun-thaw followed by freeze. Tourists ment asserts that God could not have believing that they are true. clog the village museum where achieved his goals except through Mighty treatises get written address- three local glassmakers lecture Darwinian natural selection. For some ing each of these points, and I do not on quartz and fire. We stumble reason, seldom stated clearly, we are to mean to suggest it is all one-way traffic over snow heaps filthy with road sand suppose it would not have suited God’s in favor of the anti-evolution side. What and litter. No one’s buying art purposes to create everything all at I do want to suggest, however, is that these days, but everyone looks. someone who casually says “Maybe once, precisely as the Bible says he did. We retreat to the tea shop. A dog evolution is just God’s way of creating” It is sometimes suggested that it is more on a leash, a modest brown mutt, simply has not thought through the impressive for God to have allowed the watches us with infinite longing issues. There is far more to religious world to create itself than to have cre- only shy little dogs can muster. anti-evolutionism than crazed Bible- ated everything directly himself, but We speak to him, stroke his muzzle. thumping or absurdly literal interpreta- this should be recognized as empty His brown eyes look too deep for art tions of Genesis 1. rhetoric. Those benighted Christian to affix. Bottle-brown and opening scholars toiling in the centuries before Theistic evolutionists have their work Darwin were plenty impressed with cut out for them in trying to reconcile directly into his doggy mind, God’s creative prowess. Meanwhile, science and religion in an emotionally they promise affections bottomless when we ponder the frequently sadistic satisfying way. They labor under the as bogs at the feet of mountains. mechanisms animals employ for insert- burden of knowing that whatever ad We can’t afford the local art ing their genes into the next genera- hoc theory they devise from their arm- and can’t inflict a dog on our house tion, “God is Great” is hardly the first chairs must compete with a very strong full of cats. A cup of tea thing to come to mind. alternative. Specifically, it might be that resolves us. Slightly compromised What can we say about the place science tends to make the universe by milk, no sugar, it dissolves of humans in creation? Some argue seem pointless and uninterested in our aesthetic and canine desires that “evolutionary convergences,” in human welfare . . . precisely because in tannic acid brown as the rust which the same structure evolves mul- that’s the way it really is. on those metal sculptures, brown tiple times in widely separated lineages, but not as deep as those dog eyes, shows that evolution is narrowly chan- and mild enough to embalm us neled into certain broadly predictable with a post-equatorial warmth. outcomes. If this is correct, then it might be that organisms with humanlike intel- ligence are inevitable after all. This William Doreski’s work has appeared­ in is possible, but it strains credulity in Jason Rosenhouse is in the Department various electronic and print journals and in light of the utter lack of evolutionary of Mathematics and Statistics at James several collections, most recently Waiting for directionality in the fossil record, the Madison University. the Angel (Pygmy Forest Press, 2009). extreme rarity of anything beyond the

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 55 Secularity and Society

Public Education Means Secular Education Wayne L. Trotta

ou hear often enough the cry from While I can’t claim that my district is It is commonly known and accepted the religious Right that our schools fully representative, it might still make that some of our teachers gather to Yare teaching secular humanism. a good case study when it comes to pray before the start of school. This What is this all about? the issue of secular humanism in public occurs when no students are around, so Having attended public school for schools. We are located in Pennsylvania, “no harm, no foul.” Although “released twelve years and worked in a public where, you may recall, the state legisla- time” was discontinued some years ago school district for thirteen more, I seri- ture recently saw itself duty bound—in to conserve time for academics, at least ously doubt whether one in ten super- the midst of the most serious economic one of our elementary schools reinsti- intendents, or one in a hundred school crisis since the Depression—to declare tuted the practice just last year. I don’t directors, could begin to tell you what a State of Pennsylvania National(?) think a week goes by when I don’t hear Day of Prayer and to proclaim the someone say something like, “Oh, yes, I year 2012 the “Year of the Bible.” No know that student’s family; they go to doubt you have also heard the quip our church.” And I often find that, just that Pennsylvania basically comprises before leaving a voice-mail message, Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on I am invited to “have a blessed day.” the other, and Alabama in the middle. I think I know what this means, so I “. . . Often . . . I am invited to Well, this district is in the middle of that take it as intended and also with the ‘have a blessed day.’ I think I middle. This is hardly a place that is hos- hope that if a blessed day ever comes know what this means, so I take tile to religion. my way, when it arrives I’ll be at the This is, after all, Amish country, racetrack. it as intended and also with the where respect for religion means one As I write, at least three local school hope that if a blessed day ever needn’t bother about education past boards are being cited for conducting comes my way, when it arrives the eighth grade and where one is prayer before their regular meetings. also free to drive a horse and buggy And we are not very far from the Dover I’ll be at the racetrack.” on a modern highway without hav- school district, where in 2005 a school ing to outfit the vehicle with those board attempted to impose intelligent graven-image orange triangles that design creationism on students in, as it might keep one’s horse and children turned out, spectacularly unsuccessful from getting creamed by a three-ton fashion. Hummer. Tourists think all of this is And yet, even in this area, just men- secular humanism is, assuming they’d quaint, which is all the more reason tion the Dover school board to school ever heard of it. Nobody is preaching, why those locals who refer to Amish officials and the response is likely to be advocating, supporting, or even men- society as something like 200 rules with a head shake and a snicker that says, tioning secular humanism in the district 201 exceptions will cheerfully separate “Oh, those poor fools.” I don’t believe I work for, nor, I will bet, in just about them from their money. my district is perfect when it comes any American school district. Religion is part of everyday life here. to First Amendment issues, but there

56 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org

PB Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org does seem to be an understanding here mere utterance can be substituted for a religion as a private matter in which that religion is a matter for home and cogent argument. government-supported public schools church, not for the public schools. Prior It seems strangely broad-minded of should not interfere. to winter break, for example, teach- evangelicals to call secular humanism a There are also some quite practical ers receive a bulletin created by the religion when they are too stingy to refer concerns, and they’ve been with us Anti-Defamation League explaining to Mormonism as anything but a cult— since the earliest days in the history that holiday displays and activities must certainly Mormons share more with them of the nation and of public school- be chosen with all students’ beliefs in than secular humanists do. So-called ing. Back in 1834, for example, the view, and that even the most tradi- cultists such as Wiccans, Scientologists, Philadelphia Board of Public School tional and popular of holiday rituals Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians—even Controllers responded to a controversy will be exclusionary and even offensive Pastafarians—would all seem to have to some of our students. So, even in better creds for official religion status conservative districts where teachers than secular humanism. In fact, if secular pray and parents wish them a blessed humanism can be a religion, then any- day, the “public” in “public education” thing can, and the word itself becomes is generally understood to mean every- meaningless. body, not just those who share the Noebel is correct, however, to point majority faith. out that both secular humanism and theism are worldviews. He would prob- “. . . Even in conservative he religious Right would indict these ably not object to my adding that all districts where teachers pray Tpeople for teaching a doctrine—sec- worldviews rest on assumptions that ular humanism—that most have never are at bottom untestable. It is perhaps and parents wish them heard of and would reject if they did. In for this reason that Noebel insists that a blessed day, the ‘public’ in the eyes of the Christian Right, neutral- all worldviews are necessarily religious. ‘public education’ is generally ity toward religion amounts to hostility Secular humanists, for instance, are toward religion, even when it is prac- typically committed to naturalism and understood to mean everybody, ticed by Americans who are so thor- theists to supernaturalism, but we can not just those who oughly religious that they practically no more prove that nature is all there is share the majority faith.” assume everyone else is, too. than believers can prove the supernat- But of course the cry from the Right ural real. But if this is the heart of the is not so much that our schools are comparison, it establishes only a triv- teaching secular humanism as that pro- ial similarity, not an equivalency, and hibiting religion in our schools gives Noebel’s assertion that all worldviews preference to the “religion” of secu- are inherently religious comes to seem lar humanism. In their view, secular more like a gambit than an argument. humanism is the default religion of However, even if we could prove over sectarian practices in schools by public schools, thereby bearing the to conservative believers that secular issuing a set of resolutions. They noted government’s stamp of approval and humanism is in reality the polar oppo- that because parents alone bear the leaving schoolkids with the impression site of religion, they would still argue responsibility for the religious upbring- that traditional religion is just not all that excluding religion from public ing of their children, the rights of that important. schools unfairly favors a secular world- parents “ought not to be interfered How does the religious Right justify view. They could also go a step further with, especially by a body exercising calling secular humanism a religion? and make a case that religion can con- its authority by virtue of the laws of David Noebel, president of Summit duce to good morals, that good morals the commonwealth.” The Board went Ministries, has written (Free Inquiry, make for good citizens, and that, there- on to state its firm conviction of the March/April 2012) that secular human- fore, religion in schools would support “utter impossibility of adopting a sys- ism is a religion because it is a “religious one of the primary secular purposes of tem of religious instruction that should worldview” with a “theology—athe- public education. George Washington, meet the approbation of all religious ism” and its own “religious symbol,” the John Adams, and even Ben Franklin societies.” Further, because people of Darwin fish. Noebel uses the word reli- would likely agree. However, while the all sects paid taxes in support of the gious a lot, as if he thinks this adjective idea may sound reasonable, it is still public schools, “the introduction of any carries such evidentiary weight that its the case that the Constitution protects religious or sectarian forms . . . must

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 57 have a tendency to impair the rights of religious beliefs. Secularism is the lan- religious minorities, is that in order to some,” while, on the other hand, injury guage of the classroom because it is be true Americans they must be not to anyone was easily avoided by “con- also the language of the courtroom only religious but, preferably, religious fining the instruction in our schools to and the exam room, of the marketplace in just the way that most of their peers the ordinary branches of elementary and the polling place. Because of its are. education.” So it appears that, even foundation in reason and evidence, a A public education must be a sec- ular education. The religious Right 179 years ago, intelligent and articu- secular education is the only education knows this, and thus they would prefer late Americans had a full appreciation that can inculcate the critical analy- sis, dispassionate argument, and prob- to undermine public education itself of the principle of the separation of lem-solving skills that are repeatedly through voucher programs, promoting church and state and of its practical cited as the key abilities for students homeschooling, injecting Good News importance in a pluralistic society. entering the wider world in the twen- clubs into public schools, or crying to ty-first century. the Supreme Court about “viewpoint The secular language is the com- discrimination.” They are currently sup- mon currency in which ideas can be ported by a political climate in which exchanged and debated and in which anything public seems evil and by con- the best ideas can win out. Secular servative politicians in whose minds arguments have the distinct advantage carpooling is a form of socialism. “In the eyes of the Christian of being at least potentially resolvable. Do religious conservatives really Right, neutrality toward religion Religious arguments, based as they are believe that schools such as mine are amounts to hostility toward on unfalsifiable claims, are not. This is, actively promoting secular human- of course, one of the reasons religion ism? Do they really believe that secular religion, even when it is is so divisive. Whatever you or I may humanism is a religion? I suppose any- practiced by Americans who are feel in our hearts about a particular one who believes Earth is only six thou- so thoroughly religious that they proposition, when objective evidence sand years old could believe anything, but I suspect that, to right-wing theists, practically assume everyone has the last word we have a chance of coming to an agreement, even if agree- it doesn’t matter whether they believe else is, too.” ing means one of us must change his or what they say or not. All they have her mind. Religious arguments usually to do is convince enough people and don’t end with minds being changed. exploit the political power that comes with great numbers. In this, they may How could they, when one’s personal be their own worst enemy. As author identity hangs in the balance? And yet, John M. Barry recently wrote in The as Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith, Nation (May 21, 2012), “When you mix the capacity to change one’s mind in ince their founding in the early nine- religion and politics, you get politics.” the face of new evidence and new Steenth century, public schools have Our democracy depends today, as it arguments is the hallmark of a rational been a major force for unity in our indi- always has, on public education. being—exactly the sort of being that vidualistic society. As Benjamin Barber Education that is truly public must be we want every one of our students to put it in The School Administrator all-inclusive, something that is only pos- become. (May 2004), our common schools sible as long as a public education is a No school should prevent anyone put the common in commonwealth. secular education. from praying or reading the Bible, as Introducing a divisive force such as reli- long as the practice does not disrupt gion would undermine what is possibly the school program. And all schools the most valuable role public education are perfectly free to teach about reli- can play for our nation. A public educa- gion (and about secular humanism, tion must be a secular education. too). But schools that include religious Schools are preparing students to observances must realize that live in a world in which the secular these are inherently coercive. Wayne L. Trotta is a psychologist and freelance writer who language is the language common to The message to nonreligious lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. all, whatever one’s religious or non- students, or to students of

58 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Reviews

Of Facts and Fictions William Harwood

resident Ronald Reagan’s first sec- retary of the Interior, James Watt, P“told the U.S. Congress that pro- tecting natural resources was unim- Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, portant in light of the imminent return by Loren Collins (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012, of Jesus Christ.” Until I opened Loren ISBN 978-1-61614-634-4) 267 pp. Softcover, $19.00. Collins’s book, Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, I had believed that Watt really said that. Now I learn that he denied ever say- ing anything of the sort, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Because I consider myself quite scrupulous in ver- ifying questionable information before ally challenged as Scientologists, they lack ous surveys. repeating it, I have to concede that a charismatic leader who guides them The claim that “absence of evidence is even scholars on the right side of his- into believing what is fact and what is not evidence of absence” can be rebutted tory can be sloppy about information fiction. at the point where evidence would exist that conforms to their preconceived The objectively falsifiable claims of if a claim was valid but does not. But how mind-set. religion, such as creationism, intelligent does one counter doublethink when “one I had also never heard of David Icke design, Noah’s flood, and a six-thou- of the difficulties of debating a conspir- before reading Collins’s report of his the- sand-year-old universe, are discussed, acy theorist is that the lack of evidence ory that shape-shifting reptilians were appropriately, in the chapter titled to support the conspiracy theory is so taking over the world by impersonating “Pseudoscience.” The same chapter also often treated as evidence in support of prominent politicians, as in Invasion of deals with cryptozoology, alternative the conspiracy theory”? Also, “anecdotes the Body Snatchers. Wikipedia confirms medicine, and visiting aliens. would suggest that faith healers like Jim that Icke really does make the claims While many writers have recognized Bakker can heal the , but no serious Collins quotes but suggests that, after that published statistics tend to report researcher would accept that as good his less-fantastic conspiracy theories had nontheism as far less prevalent than it evidence.” made him a laughing stock, he invented actually is, Collins explains the reason “When we do look for new informa- the reptilian body snatchers as a joke, for the underreporting: “survey questions tion, we put our best efforts toward find- perhaps in the hope of getting the last can get different results based on noth- ing information that supports the things laugh if people took it seriously.* ing more than how the questions are we already believe,” writes Collins. When I was initially surprised that Collins worded.” I can attest to that. When I I took my first ancient history course and made no mention of L. Ron Hubbard. But pointed out to Gallup that a survey on learned of the abundance of virgin-born on reflection, I recognize that Collins’s religious beliefs would obtain a more resurrected saviors who preceded Jesus, I recommendations for refuting conspiracy accurate result if the questions stopped sought diligently for evidence that would freaks who believe their own lies are not implying that a particular answer was enable me to remain a believer. That necessarily applicable to heads of move- politically correct, I was told that reword- was not the way it turned out. In con- ments, some of whom are mainly moti- ing the questions would make it impos- trast, “alternative medicine advocates vated by the desire for personal profit. sible to show how the answers changed regularly must deny the myriad of studies While Holocaust deniers are as intellectu- over time. In other words, “Have you that show their treatments are no bet- stopped beating your wife?” could not ter than placebos.” Furthermore, “studies *Wikipedia.org, “David Icke.” According to Icke, George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth, and be changed to, “Do you beat your wife?” finding that acupuncture performs no Brian Mulroney are all reptilian humanoids. because that would invalidate all previ- better than a placebo are often wrongly

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 59 reported as ‘acupuncture works.’” The prayer.* . . . Money that is spent on study- as perhaps the most culpable dissemina- solution: “Pointing out that a rumor ing distant prayer or coffee enemas or tor of the falsehood that vaccines con- began as sheer speculation, or that it acupuncture is money that isn’t being tribute to autism, her rationale being was first introduced by a disreputable spent on finding a cure for Alzheimer’s or “post hoc, propter hoc” because her son is autistic. Collins repeats the statistics that individual, can do far more to undercut a vaccine for HIV or on better detection methods for pancreatic cancer.” failure to vaccinate in a five-year period that rumor than can pages of counterar- There is still a widespread belief that caused 102,961 preventable diseases and guments.” expertise in one field constitutes exper- 1,016 preventable deaths and that the Collins’s reporting is a combination tise in everything. Not so: “Isaac Newton number of autism diagnoses scientifically of good news and bad news. The good . . . tried to calculate the date of the end linked to vaccination numbered zero. He news is that, when the British doctor of the world from supposed clues in the does not mention that the number of who first published the Big Lie that vac- Bible.” And Linus Pauling, a double Nobel deaths from starvation and AIDS that can cinations cause autism was found to Prize–winner, claimed that large doses be attributed to the prohibition of con- have falsified his data, he was stripped of vitamin C could cure cancer. “Scientific doms by the last two Catholic popes may be (including some not yet dead) as high of his medical license. The bad news is expertise does not always translate into as sixty million people. that “criminal prosecutors have relied expertise, or even adequate skeptical Collins echoes Carl Sagan’s warning on claims supposedly made by autistic thinking, in other fields.” not to be “so open-minded that your Collins recognizes that programming patients through facilitated communi- brain falls out.” But he also recognizes on the History Channel “left no doubt cation. . . . One case even resulted in a that skepticism likewise has limits: “As lit- that its new mission statement firmly conviction. . . . The judge even denied a tle as I think of David Icke and his theory embraced unabashed pseudohistory.” request by the defense to ‘blind’ the facil- of shape-shifting reptilians, if I were to Unfortunately, he did not mention that itator during trial testimony.” This hap- watch President Obama turn into a liz- the same is true of the Learning Channel, pened despite the fact that, when the ard-man during the State of the Union A&E, Discovery, and other pretend doc- facilitator and the patient were shown address, I would be forced to reconsider umentary outlets. And he does not cite my previous stance.” And if God were to different pictures, the supposedly facil- references to God as more real than float down from the sky in the middle of itated patient described the picture Mother Goose on alleged World News a Super Bowl game and turn the football shown to the facilitator, not the picture broadcasts. into a flying pig, I would reconsider my shown to the patient. Actress Jenny McCarthy is singled out conclusion that he/she/it does not exist. The correlation between the wasting *These are the same Let us say that neither of us will be hold- of taxpayer money and the ignorance government agencies ing his breath. of politicians and civil servants should that spent a compara- ble amount research- not come as news. Collins spells out the ing whether parapsy- William Harwood has been published in skeptical and freethought extent of that correlation: “$666,000 was chologists could spy on journals around the world. The newest of his fifty books is titled Soviet military installa- spent on a study to determine whether Disinformation: Bullshit the Media Encourage You to Believe (World tions by “remote view- Audience, Inc., 2012). AIDS could be healed through distant ing.”

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60 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Earth’s Evidence Refutes the Flood Wayne L. Trotta

eflecting on his reading of Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of RGeology, Charles Darwin remarked that Lyell’s work had been the basis of “everything which I have done in The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates science.” Among other things, Lyell had Noah’s Flood, by David Montgomery­ (New York/ provided Darwin the vast expanses of London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, ISBN 978- geologic time he needed for his theory 0-393-34624-4) 301 pp., Softcover, $17.95. of “descent with modification” to work. According to Lyell, with enough time, today’s valleys could have been slowly carved by ancient rivers. This observa- tion dealt a fatal blow to earlier geo- logical theorists, whose investigations became the seminal work of flood are any indicator, Montgomery’s book sought to find evidence for a six-thou- geology. This was not exactly a work is apparently being marketed as a sci- sand-year-old Earth and for a single, of pure science, as the authors freely ence-religion love fest. According to Noachian, flood that had shaped the admitted. Like that of early geologists, David Sessions, for example, this book entire planet’s topography. the efforts of Whitcomb and Morris is “an excellent example of how a seri- In his book The Rocks Don’t Lie, Uni­ constituted backward science because ous . . . engagement with religion need versity of Washington geologist David they did their science backward. They not threaten reason or compromise sci- Montgomery carefully documents the made what they call a “spiritual” deci- entific integrity.” Montgomery himself growth of geology from its beginning sion to take the “revealed framework offers a final chapter titled “The Nature as handmaiden to Genesis to its modern of history” (Genesis) as their basic of Faith,” in which he asserts that the status as a fully developed science. Serious datum and then tried to “see how all history of flood stories provides two geologists no longer question that Earth the pertinent data can be understood different ways of viewing faith: “faith is closer to four billion years old than to in this context.” In other words, they in a method . . . (like science) and faith six thousand years old. Virtually all would stood science on its head. As religion- in a particular idea . . . like scientific agree that the topography of the entire theories or religious beliefs).” Can he planet could not have been shaped by any ists are prone to do, they started with single catastrophic event. Montgomery their own conclusions and then forced seriously be equating confidence in the makes clear that the story of Noah and the data to fit. Montgomery praises scientific method with religious faith? his ark is only a more recent reworking Whitcomb and Morris for what was, at Montgomery is not happy with those of flood legends to be found in ancient least in part, a perceptive critique of the he refers to as “militant atheists.” He Sumerian and Babylonian writings. problems of 1950s geology. He then accuses them of assuming that all believ- And yet, surprisingly, until recent goes on to explain, however, why the ers are fundamentalists, but his bibliog- times, geologists persisted in the search catastrophic flood theory fails to solve raphy gives no evidence that he has for an Earth whose outer surface could the problems Whitcomb and Morris tried to acquaint himself with the work be interpreted as confirmation of raise while creating insurmountable of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, the Genesis account. Creationists, of problems of its own. Flood geology, as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, or course, continue to insist that all the Montgomery makes plain, is not only any of the other secular thinkers whose indecipherables of Earth’s topography wrong; it is catastrophically wrong. ideas he has apparently set out to rebut. are made comprehensible with a true Montgomery’s critique of creationist In any case, atheists do not assume that understanding of Noah’s flood, or of geology is withering. But, similar to Ken all believers are biblical literalists, only “flood geology.” In the early 1960s, Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, this book that they are all suborning irrationality. Old Testament scholar John Whitcomb combines an irrefutable case against But Montgomery’s point seems to and hydraulics engineer Henry Morris creation “science” with an unconvinc- be that Christian moderates have been combined their talents to produce a ing attempt to harmonize science and willing to reinterpret holy writ when volume titled The Genesis Flood, which religion. If back-cover endorsements new scientific evidence made doing

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 61 so unavoidable. Unfortunately, and as been improved when refashioned to something of genuine value? the fundamentalists recognize, dogma conform to religious dogma? To be sure, Montgomery is as passionate about is not supposed to be progressive. If advances in geology were made in the science as he is about geology. As he says, Genesis is allegorical, then what hap- quest to confirm the Genesis account. But the “story of the origin and evolution of pens to original sin? Was Jesus cruci- suppose that I believe in unicorns and, in life, of the vast sweep of geologic time, fied for a myth? There are numerous my search to find one, I become the first and the complexity of the processes that pre-biblical stories of the dying and person to stumble across and describe shaped the world we know today inspire risen god, usually tied to the resur- the African zebra. Does this mean that more awe and wonder than the series of gence of life in spring. So, is the Easter more people should believe in and go one-off miracles from Genesis.” He fully story just one more adaptation? Is the searching for unicorns? Does my discov- realizes, too, that religion has been more resurrection a fiction? If so, is there any ery add even one ounce of credibility to often a hindrance than a helper to sci- ence. What he ultimately appeals for is point in keeping Christ in Christianity? my belief in unicorns? Should I conclude that both sides of the religion versus sci- What Montgomery refers to as a rich that my faith in the unicorn was the cause ence debate keep an open mind. history of cross-pollination between of my discovery? Or was it simply a happy science and religion seems a bit of wist- accident that my illu- ful thinking. Has a scientific theory ever sory belief led me to Wayne L. Trotta is a freelance writer in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.­

DC 2014 Regional Conference | January 31 – February 1, 2014 Following the success of its historic 2010 event, the Center for Inquiry–DC is proud to host the African Americans for Human- ism DC 2014 Regional Conference. This year’s event has been expanded to a full day of panel discussions and talks on Satur- day, February 1, at the newly renovated Hill Center, steps from Barracks Row and Eastern Market. In addition, dinners will be held nearby for attendees on Friday and Saturday night. The MC this year will be Debbie Goddard, director of African Americans for Humanism and the Center for Inquiry’s director of Outreach.

Speakers Mark Hatcher, founder and president of Secular Students at Howard University Ronnelle Adams, author of Aching and Praying Sikivu Hutchinson, author, activist, teacher, and founder of Jamila Bey, host of “Sex Politics and Religion Hour” on Black Skeptics Group Voice of Russia radio Anti_Intellect, educator, activist, essayist Debbie Goddard, director of African Americans for Human- Alix Jules, activist, historian ism and director of Outreach for CFI Anthony Pinn, author, professor at Rice University Aisha Goss, deputy director at the Secular Coalition for Donald Wright author, organizer of the National Day of Soli- America and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason darity for Black Non-believers and Science

Registration – Early Bird (prices increase January 10 at close of business) Saturday conference admission: $60 public / $50 CFI members / $20 students Friday/Saturday dinners package (save $15!): $105 Friday: Busboys and Poets( 5th & K) dinner + open bar, $55 Saturday: Cava Mezze buffet dinner reception + open bar, $65 Boxed lunch for Saturday conference sessions: $10

For more information and to register visit http://bit.ly/aahdc2014. People with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may e-mail [email protected] in advance of the event.

62 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Speaking—at Last!—of Forbidden Things Tom Flynn

o call this book overdue is a high understatement. Editors Philip TCafaro and Eileen Crist have assembled a masterful anthology chal- Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, lenging environmental activists to reen- edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, with a foreword by gage with the issue of overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia As Cafaro observes in his epilogue, “less- Press, 2012, ISBN 0-8203-4048-0) 342 pp. Hardcover, $69.95, ening the human footprint is insepara- softcover, $24.95. ble from limiting the number of human feet.” Tragically, that is a radical obser- vation. “[T]he activist community has become balkanized,” notes contributor Tom Butler, “with NGOs focused on over- sustained. No matter how badly we are population being essentially shunned by Let’s face it, some of us put humans conservation and environment-related willing to ravage the Earth, even for first without regret; others see much nonprofits that should be their natural today’s global population to live and to admire in deep ecology. Some view immigration policy through the lens of allies.” Contributors Don Weeden and consume like Americans we would need fairness, not demography. For some, dis- Charmayne Palomba put it more starkly. four Earths, and in short order we would cussion begins and ends with a certain “The word population” has “become make them unlivable. sonnet by Emma Lazarus, as if poetry an anachronism, taboo, and virtually Life on the Brink bridges the gap equated to policy. Life on the Brink invites unspeakable” among greens. between­ environmentalism and popula- thought and discussion, both worthy What happened? A critical milestone tion activism, marshaling twenty-six dis- replacements for the imprudent silence was the United Nations Conference on tinguished contributors to drive home lately shrouding an issue that demands Population and Development, held in the message that greens—like everyone the attention of us all. Cairo, Egypt, in 1994, whose agenda else—must face foursquare the need to Here’s my take. Whether you are stressed female empowerment over stabilize, then to lessen, human numbers. attracted or repelled by a future in which demographic concerns. Increasingly, The diversity among green activists the whole of Earth’s biological output is environmental activists assumed that is well-represented here. Some contribu- turned to the support of human needs, tors base their arguments for restraint on more autonomous women would end even that will not be sustainable if cur- principles of human benefit; others hail overpopulation simply by choosing to rent population and consumption trends from so-called deep ecology, contending have smaller families. Raw human num- continue. If you yearn instead for a future that other creatures or the biosphere as bers were no longer the problem, this in which humans coexist among the rest a whole merit moral standing equal to logic went; the real crisis lay in excessive of nature, living perhaps in islands of consumption by Westerners. or greater than humankind’s. Some even civilization carefully scattered about a But the problem doesn’t lie solely in argue from a politically liberal perspective re-wilded planet (as contributor Roderick Western consumption, excessive as that for greatly reducing immigration into Nash envisions), then it is only so much is—if only because Western consump- the United States, both in order to curb the more urgent that the issue of over- tion rises in proportion to the number of American overpopulation and to avoid population no longer be neglected. Westerners. Meanwhile swelling num- our nation’s serving as a safety valve for What can I say? Read this book. bers in the developing world aspire to the shortsighted demographic policies of Western-style patterns of consumption. other nations. Fairness says they deserve their chance; These issues are, of course, Tom Flynn is the editor of Free Inquiry. ecology tells us that future cannot be controversial among humanists.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 63 In Praise of the Science-Guided Life Daniel M. Kane

ennis R. Trumble is a proj- ect scientist in the Circulatory DSupport Laboratory and an adjunct professor of biomedical engi- The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview, neering at Carnegie Mellon University. by Dennis R. Trumble (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013, ISBN 978- He holds many patents for biomedical 1-61614-755-6, ebook ISBN 978-1-61614-756-3) 346 pp. Softcover, devices and has published numerous $20.00. research articles in peer-reviewed sci- entific journals. His book, The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview, brings the scien- tific method and some of its yields to date into the realm of the very exciting. Trumble’s lively discussions of well- most fundamental level of the physical sive arguments, however, I discern some known and less well-known scientific dis- universe the gods really do appear to be sweeping generalizations and missing coveries inspired me to reread Charles playing dice.” data. He blames educators for students’ Darwin’s Origin of Species. Consider Some of the faithful oppose the shortcomings in scientific literacy and Trum­ble’s illustration of a remarkable advance of science, viewing it as cold, excellence. Let’s face it: inspiring student facet of Darwin’s theory of natural selec- inhuman,­ and antireligious. Science is interest in science can be quite a chal- tion: the discovery that traits no longer not inherently antireligious. As Trumble lenge, and educators are as diverse and explains, “science holds no a priori pro- individual as their classroom members. hibitions against the kinds of things that Some teach with contagious enthusiasm. religious people tend to believe—even Some do their best but are still not partic- ularly motivating. Some are just putting “Trumble cautions that no the really crazy stuff.” Religious principles, like any other hypotheses, can be tried in their hours until they can retire. The discovery in science is and tested, proven or refuted, and dis- student, I suggest, is equally account- inherently easy to missed when evidence does not exist. But able. Some students have socioeconomic issues that affect their performance, and comprehend or accept.” he has decided that the only good Earth is a godless Earth. While he explores some succumb to distractions and temp- the pros and cons in his discussion, the tations that they find more appealing than science class. urgency for a freethinking world yester- Later in the book, Trumble makes a day or sooner remains the same. compelling argument for the advance- Trumble discusses some failings of necessary in a species will be biologically ment of space exploration: only 0.5 per- scientists, one of which is that from eliminated over time. “Scientists would cent of the federal budget is dedicated time to time some do not follow their later discover dozens of . . . biological rel- to it (chapter 13). However, he ignores own principles. He relates the case of ics in human beings, including remnants the economic considerations that affect one scientist who published findings of a tail (caudal vertebrae), atrophied funding of this and other research. of a genetic predisposition to religious muscles formerly used to rotate the ears, I recommend reading this book for its faith. His results were unceremoniously and a rudimentary third eyelid (nictitat- entertaining discussion of many fascinat- debunked because he had completely ing membrane) still found fully formed in ing scientific discoveries that are perhaps bypassed the peer-review process of sub- cats and other land vertebrates.” not widely known. Proceed with caution, Trumble cautions that no discovery jecting one’s discoveries to the scrutiny of however, to avoid the potholes in this in science is inherently easy to compre- the rest of the scientific community prior book’s road to scientific progress. hend or accept. For example, he advises to publication—a cardinal rule of profes- that in the field of quantum physics (a sional research. relatively nascent field of research), “if you Trumble makes a fantastic Daniel M. Kane lives in Middletown, Pennsylvania. He is are looking for meaning in this world it is argument for the pursuit of sci- a regular contributor to Free Inquiry. best not to look too closely because at the entific knowledge. In his persua-

64 Free Inquiry December 2013/January 2014 secularhumanism.org Books in Brief

Listing here does not preclude a full review in a later issue.—Eds.

Christian Nation, by Frederic C. Rich 978-0-312-59489, e-book 978-1- of Islamic Totalitarianism, by Andrew (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 250-03439-7). 432 pp. Hardcover $26.99. G. Bostom (Amherst, NY: Prometheus 2013, 978-0-393-24011-5) 342 pp. The author examines the child sex-abuse Books, 2012, ISBN 978-1-61614-666- Hardcover $25.95. What if the McCain/ scandal in the Catholic Church and how 5). Notes and Index. 735 pp. Hardcover Palin presidential ticket had been vic- it unfolded over three decades: he con- $32.00. The author expands upon his two torious in 2008? What if McCain died demns the church culture of secrecy as previous compendia, The Legacy of Jihad and Palin became president? So begins well as the crimes. and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, the realization of the dream of some with this collection of essays on sha- Christian fundamentalists—and it Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary ria. He explains the religious principles is a nightmare for the United States. Origins of What Divides Us, by Avi behind sharia and the consequences of Constitutional protection is dismantled Tuschman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus its application, focusing on contempo- and authoritarian law takes over. Books, 2013, ISBN hardcover 978-1- rary illustrations. He examines studies 61614-823-2, e-book 978-1-61614-824- and polling data on Islam and finds the Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the 9). Appendices, Notes, and Index. 543 use of sharia to be growing, and he gives Intersection of Politics and Religion, pp. Hardcover $24.95, e-book $12.99. voice to Muslim freethinkers as well as by Steven Gimbel (Baltimore: The Johns An evolutionary anthropologist traces believers who find sharia incompatible Hopkins University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1- our political orientations to clusters of 4214-0554-4). 245 pp. Notes, Bibliography, measurable personality traits that shape with modern, Western-derived concep- and Index. Hardcover $24.95. Gimbel, attitudes toward such things as tribalism, tions of universal human rights. an award-winning teacher, author, and inequality, and human nature. One chap- chair of the Philosophy Department at ter examines “Religiosity vs. Secularism.” What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, by Gettysburg College, presents an exam- John Corvino (New York: Ox­ford Uni­ ination of how beliefs, background, and Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and versity Press, 2013, ISBN 9780199856312) environment influence the work of sci- the Quest for the Historical Jesus, 170 pp. Hardcover $22.95. The author entists, as well as the official reception of by Richard C. Carrier (Amherst, NY: is an associate professor and chair of their work. His focus is on Albert Eintsein Prometheus Books, 2012, ISBN 978-1- the Philosophy Department at Wayne and the Nazi’s denigration of his theory 61614-559-0). Notes and Index. 390 pp. State University who speaks and writes of relativity as “Jewish science.” Hardcover $28.00. Most scholars have frequently on LGBT issues. In this lat- come to the conclusion that the Jesus of est book, he sets the parameters of God and the Folly of Faith: The Incom­ the Bible is a composite of myth, legend, the moral debate and argues that the patibility of Religion, by Victor J. and some historical evidence. But the right to same-sex marriage is an issue Stenger (Amherst, NY: Prome­theus Books, conceptions of the original Jesus differ of public as well as private morality, and 2012, ISBN 978-1-61614-599-6). Notes, greatly. In this book, the author proposes why same-sex relationships are good. Bibliography, and Index. 408 pp. Softcover Bayes’s theorem to solve the problem of Along the way he explores many topics, $20.00. Through an historical survey establishing reliable historical criteria. including religious arguments against from ancient Greek science through the homosexuality and their relevance to Renaissance and Enlightenment to con- Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the morality and public policy. temporary ad­vances in physics and cos- Lost Gospel Novels, by Robert M. Price mology, Stenger refutes the argument (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011, ISBN What You Don’t Know about Religion that religion, especially Christianity, helped 978-1-61097-075-4). Footnotes and (but should), by Ryan T. Cragun (Durham, the development of science. Instead sci- Bibliography, 349 pp., Softcover $39.00. NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013, ISBN ence was held back for nearly one thou- The discovery of a lost gospel has been hardcover 978-0-9852815-3-3, soft- sand years and only experienced the scien- the focal point of many works of fiction, cover 978-0-9852815-4-0). Appendix, tific revolution in the seventeenth century with varying plot turns. The “discovery” after the power of the church began to is a hoax and the tension lies in whether Notes, Bibliography, and Index. 278 pp. wane. Even today, however, religion that will be revealed in time; it is genuine Hardcover $24.95. Sociologist Cragun can foster destructive antiscientific atti- but risks being covered up by corrupt lets the scientific data answer common tudes. church officials, etc. This book looks at questions about the nature and state forty such stories and what popular cul- of religion. Why are people religious? Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of ture reveals about challenges to faith Are they happier? Are people becoming Catholic Scandal, by Michael D’Antonio and the effects. more or less religious? Atheists as well as (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. religious fundamentalists may find the Martin’s Press, 2013, ISBN, hardcover Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy answers surprising.

secularhumanism.org December 2013/January 2014 Free Inquiry 65 Letters continued from p.15

And as “having as much expertise in bib- lical criticism” as said Harwood claims to have in Etruscan, namely none. Statement of Ownership, I am, in fact, a professor of Near Management, and Circulation Eastern Studies at the University of

California at Berkeley and a very Date of filing: September 17, 2013 well-published scholar, including in bib- Title: FREE INQUIRY Frequency of issue: Bimonthly lical criticism. Because the conclusions Complete mailing address of known office of publication: that I have argued for in my book dis- FREE INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 please your reviewer, he thinks that it’s Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: same as above fair to simply refer to them as mistakes Complete mailing address of headquarters of publisher: that prove my ignorance rather than Council for Secular Humanism, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 arguments and interpretations that he Editor: Thomas Flynn, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 is invited to disagree with (I am, in fact, Managing Editor: Andrea Szalanski, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, a humanist—more than he, it seems). NY 14226-0664 Owner: Council for Secular Humanism My book The Jewish Gospels: The Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders: None Story of the Jewish Christ makes no argu- ment whatsoever about the truth claims Aver. no. copies No. of each issue during copies of the Bible, the Talmud, or the New preceding single issue 12 months August/Sept. Testament, as any reader should be able 2013 to divine (horrors!) by reading it. It is a. Total no. copies printed a book about the history of traditions (net press run) 26,815 24,934 b. Paid circulation by mail and outside and where they came from and seeks the mail to disprove—with argument—the state- 1. Paid Outside County 17,883 16,800 ment of your writer that “Christianity 2. Paid In-County Subscriptions 0 0 3. Paid distribution outside the mails including is essentially paganism with the names sales through dealers and carriers, of the gods changed.” Not to argue for street vendors, and other paid distribution outside USPS 2,141 1,937 the truth of Christianity but simply to 4. Paid distribution by other classes of mail account for it historically; but, of course, through the USPS 28 77 Harwood already has all the answers c. Total paid distribution 20,052 18,814 d. Free or nominal rate distribution by mail and anyone who disagrees with him is and outside the mail just plain ignorant or even depraved. 1. Outside County 509 506 Some humanism! 2. In-County 0 0 As for my moral depravity, it is occa- 3. Other classes mailed through the USPS 1,303 430 WRITE TO 4. Free distribution outside the mail 214 214 sioned by the fact that I write “B.C.” e. Total free or nominal rate distribution 2,026 1,150 and “A.D.” rather than Harwood’s f. Total distribution 22,078 19,964 preferred BCE and CE. I prefer not to g. Copies not distributed 4,737 4,970 TOTAL (Sum of f and g) 26,815 24,934 take the Christian era and refer to it as the Common Era, preferring rather to Percent paid 90.82% 94.24% acknowledge that it is a Christian era. Send submissions to Perhaps bad judgment, but “morally Andrea Szalanski, Letters Editor, depraved”? FREE INQUIRY, Professor Daniel Boyarin P.O. Box 664, Amherst, UC Berkeley NY 14226-0664. Berkeley, California Fax: (716) 636-1733. E-mail: [email protected]. Erratum In letters intended for publication, From Joel Kirschbaum, author of please include name, address,­ “Teaching Tolerance to the Texas city and state, ZIP code, Textbook Committee” (FI, October/ and daytime phone number November 2013): “13.8 billion years is (for verification purposes only). the accepted age of the universe, not the 13.4 billion I wrote in the article. In Letters should be my early drafts, I had 13.7 billion, but in 300 words or fewer attempting to be current and increas- and pertain to previous ing the age by 0.1 billion years, I wrote Free Inquiry articles. the incorrect age. I am sorry about my error.”

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