Children and fools are suffered to speak truth; priests and ministers, as men engaged in politics and advertising, are suffered to speak untruth. Like parents who deceive their children about Santa Clause, the men of God enjoy a dispensation to deceive their folds for their own good. Publicly, the shepherds give every appearance of believing what in conversations with philosophers they claim, of course, not to believe at all.

-Walter Kaufmann, from his introduction to Europe and the Jews

That the so-called ‘New Atheists’ do not waste their time engaging with sophisticated theologians is one of the most common, most pointless objections raised against Dawkins and his fellow nonbelievers. This objection, most often raised by sophisticated theologians, is based on the crucial assumption that there is something to be gained by such engagement. That this assumption is false is so evident that hearing it raised is frankly disenheartening: one imagines an unpopular schoolboy picking fights with bullies just to get a little attention. Or, more fairly, one imagines “West Side Story’s” scrawny Anybodys: all bluster, no muster, but hungry nevertheless for an attentive ear.

PZ Myers reminds us that the Emperor may be the subject of an in-depth biopic from an esteemed and respected fashion publication, but he is still naked. This “Courtier’s Reply” is the heart of any sustained attack on the flagging cult of theology. Theology is done in academic journals that nobody reads, in encyclicals that do nothing but support beliefs and practices that are already in place, and in quiet conversations between theologians outside of churches. No religious people listen unless the theologian errs in his exposition of doctrine, at which point the theologian is useful only as an example of the dangers of reason. In either end, the purposes and doctrines of the churches remain intact. The theologian makes no difference to the church, yet the theologian considers himself the apex of and spokesman for that church.

Superfluous for the believer and irrelevant to the non-believer, certainly, but is theology truly without redeeming content? Yes. The embarrassing role of the theologian is this: defend doctrine at all costs. The theologian can claim to be in the business of truth, and sometimes they even deign to conflate themselves with philosophers since their role is both academic and argument-based. This dishonest equivocation is betrayed by three simple facts. First, theologians rarely (if ever) come to conclusions that genuinely dispute the dogmas laid down by their employers. Second, on the rare occasions when they do end up disputing dogma, churches are not changed, they are simply one theologian less shortly thereafter. And third, the methods of argumentation employed in theological circles are so poor that to call them real philosophy is a slander against the rest of us.

Where there is a mystery to be resolved, such as why God permits so much evil in our universe, their defenses are either deliberately obtuse (Plantinga) or insultingly dissatisfying (Swinburne, et al). Where there is a mystery that cannot be defended even poorly, theologians do not give up doctrine, they simply state it as fact (watch Aquinas and Augustine wrestle with the contradiction of the Trinity and you’ll see what I mean).

For the theologian, it is often enough to simply drop a verse of Scripture and call the matter settled. Most of the rest of the time, theologians retreat to ancient and fallacious proofs, subtly re-brand them, and think themselves victorious when the theistically-biased journals in which they publish refuse to publish skeptical ripostes. To be called a ‘Great Light of the Church,’ Aquinas needed little more than arguments cribbed from Plato, the Bible, and decades of free time. This proud tradition continues to this day, and theologians claim their own value on these grounds.

Theology is irrelevant

We are quiet here without strife and disputes since above all else we honour the privilege of silence which is without peril.

-St.. Gregory

This brings us to one good reason that atheists needn’t bother with theology, which is that theology has no meaningful impact on the beliefs or practices of any religious people. Atheists need not engage theologians any more than they need resolve disputes with Raelians, because like Raelians, theologians worship a god or other highly impersonal abstraction that is completely unfamiliar to any religious person. Jews do not say that they worship “knowledge knowing itself,” they worship a real person with moods and emotions named YHVH. Yet Maimonides earned his stars as the greatest Jewish theologian in history worshiping just such a god. Catholics do not recite the lengthy expositions of Aquinas or Augustine, they say the Apostle’s Creed and they are content with it. Theologians make themselves into heretics in their attempts to make ancient superstitions palatable to modern audiences, and in this sense theologians are nothing more than evangelists of a new religion to undergraduate college students.

Churches trust these evangelists-to-the-educated precisely as far as they can throw them. Church authorities can out of one side of their mouth proclaim the proud intellectual lineage of their church while using the other side to condemn the same intellectuals for “erring” on crucial dogmas. Hans Kung might be of extreme use to the Catholic Church as a prop, a smug demonstration that wise men can fill a pew as well as anyone else, but this doesn’t stop the Church from calling Kung a heretic for his views on condom use and female ordination.

Conversely, a loyal theologian can work his way through an elegant proof for each step of such a Creed, but this is nothing but a dusty curio in the Church’s attic: no one reads the proof, or if someone does, he has gained nothing but the satisfaction that a man with a PhD is as comfortable parroting the Creed back at the priest as he is. No one recites creeds because their truth is demonstrated; people recite creeds because the priests says they should and everyone else in the congregation is doing it. Where religious practice is concerned, the most a theologian can do is give you a very complicated reason for doing what you are doing already.

In this sense religious beliefs are immunized against the influence of theology because such beliefs have had centuries to dispense with heretics. If someone disagrees with a core doctrine, they are not welcome in the church, and it is that simple. Given that this is the case, how could we expect a theologian in the employ of, say, a Catholic college to give us an unbiased argument against Catholic doctrine? We could not expect it, and they do not provide it, because their paychecks depend on their faculties being deployed exclusively in defense of what the believer has already been told for his entire life. If a Catholic theologian did come up with a good objection to the Catholic position on female ordination, we can expect that such a theologian would not get to call himself Catholic for much longer. It is noteworthy that the current Pope’s previous job with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a modern pseudonym for the Office of the Inquisitions) was to deliver threats of excommunication to such theologians. An exhaustive list of those thusly threatened can be found in the brilliant, anonymous Against Ratzinger.

The Catholic Church serves as an excellent example of the fact that modern religions are institutionally immunized against philosophical discourse. When asked to justify, say, a fundamentalist anti-homosexual dogma, or a dogma against condom use, or female ordination, or that the Eucharist host is literally and substantially the body of Jesus, no Catholic authority gives you an argument. They just tell you the page and paragrap where you can find the dogma spelled out in the Cathechism. The same is true of the vast mythology of any Christian sect: they will either tell you that a belief is good because it is the belief of the elders, or if they are in a sporting mood, they will give you a verse from the Bible. Argument and discussion is not the point, the point is the propagation of tradition. When the tradition itself is called into question, the heretic is appropriately dealt with and the conversation ceases.

Not only are religions thus immune to the kind of discourse that the whiny critics of ‘New Atheism’ demand we have, many strands of religion are explicitly anti-theological. One need only spend a moment in works like Peter Ruckman’s Anti-Intellectual Manifesto or such tracts as “The Chaplain” and “Who Is He?” to realize that good credentials and academic prestige are anathema to these believers. (While Jack Chick is on the board, it would do us well to ask if there are any theologians more widely-read than he is.) The theologian can arrogantly assume a position as a spokesman for his denomination, but the atheist knows as well as the religionist does that the theologian is just blowing smoke.

It is just as evident that theology is irrelevant because nobody reads it. If you took together every book and commentary written in defense of Biblically-adduced doctrines, would they equal even a minute fraction of the sales of the Bible itself? Of course not. People who believe in the Bible do not do so as a point of reason; reasons fall into place to support a pre-existing belief.

But why stop with the Bible? Take every book ever written by Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and any other great lights of Christendom you please. Will their readership ever equal the readership of insultingly simplistic tracts printed by the millions and scattered at random? No. Religions do not spread with elaborate arguments, they spread with simple messages, and in fact an overly complex, overly theological religion is doomed to fail (this is why early Christians had so little difficulty out-competing Gnostics and mystery cults). The theology is an interesting accessory to be taught to an esteemed few after the religious belief is deeply entrenched in a society. It does not cause religious belief, it sustains it virtually no believers, and it never furthers belief.

This is an admission accepted as readily by the theologian. In his God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga makes a furiously rigorous case for the existence of God adduced from an ancient proof, but prefaces this proof with the disheartening maxim that “few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling.” Self-deprecating confessions of this sort abound in theology.

Churches ignore theologians just as plainly as believers do. How many theologians have, with their philosophy hats on, attacked the superstitious worship of relics, or fables about miraculous healings and dancing suns and demonic possessions? Many have, but who listens? Protestant churches will take your tithes at the revival meeting just the same.

Theology is about dishonesty

Although it is quite true that the existence of God is to be believed since it is taught in the sacred Scriptures, and that… the sacred Scriptures are to be believed because they come from God… nevertheless this cannot be submitted to infidels, who would consider that the reasoning proceeded in a circle.

-Rene Descartes

Like all great religious liars, theologians try to claim God for themselves, dismissing critics as targeting not “their” Christianity or “the real” Jesus. The god written about in the works of theology is an alien, an idol, a demiurge meant to satisfy the superstitions of their elders with the fashionable rationalism of their contemporaries. Theologians can toss around Biblical metaphors and tell us about the “Ground-of-all-Being” (Tillich) or the “Being-Itself” (Heidegger) or the “knowledge knowing itself” (Maimonedes) that they worship alone. They can whittle away the God of folk religion to a metaphysical abstraction so slender that it is unrecognizable. In fact, these are the skills at which they excel. Few are better at discrediting organized religion than those who claim to be using rational methods to defend it. This is how the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, a giant of our century second in his academic prestige perhaps only to Niebuhr, can deny the truth of the Bible but still count himself a Christian, or how Rudolf Bultmann called himself the same while denying the very thing that makes Christianity more than a Sparknotes version of Judaism, that is, the eternal damnation of those who fail to accept Jesus.

Theologians like to call themselves members of religions because they are dishonest. For six days a week, they write essays for poorly-circulated academic journals expounding elaborate and nuanced positions on matters of faith, but on Sundays they switch their Philosopher hat for their Religionist hat and say the same creeds everyone else does. Paul Tillich excelled at this: he advocated lying as an esteemed theological enterprise. If the simple folk religionist could be easily assuaged in his doubts, than a dutiful literalism should be encouraged. But if the questioner showed the least intellectual stamina, only then would Tillich share what he really believed and thereby keep the doubting Thomas in the faith by appealing to his intellect. Walter Kaufmann summarizes:

Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself consdiers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beleifs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable. [Kaufmann, Walter. The Faith of a Heretic,]

Tillich believed that religious belief ought to be dumbed down, if the “questioning power” in a particular believer “is very weak and can be easily answered.” (See Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper, NY, 1957, Torchbooks. (c)1958. p.32-34) In his academic writing he excoriated simple-minded literalism, but thought it better that the flock be simple-minded literalists than have them exposed to the dangerous complexities of the cult of the theologian. Dishonesty this profound does not merit conversation, and how could atheists engage with such a person if their claims fluctuated with schizophrenic alacrity depending on what kind of believers were eavesdropping?

But don’t think that Tillich is the only one so guilty. This is the way of all theologians; Tillich is worthy only of such attention because his theological co-cultists hold him up so highly. Most theologians are not clergymen, and those that are do not refine their practice based on their philosophical speculations. They toe the party line in public, and in their private speculations they either do away with God entirely (as the atheist does) but use such convoluted language that nobody notices, or else they do all in their power to defend the dogma just in case an authority happens upon their writings. These cases are opposites, but they both support the conclusion: theology is a dishonest practice.

The Protestant theologian William Lane Craig is as good an example. Recognizing the poverty of his arguments, he has set himself to refining the rhetorical style with which he presents the same tired red herrings year after year rather than find new arguments. He is often described as one of the most talented theistic debaters of our time, but this is precisely the point. He can be refuted as often as he likes, as he has been in person and in writing. John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and Bart Ehrman have all refuted the dramatic misrepresentations of Biblical scholarship of which Craig is so fond (such misrepresentations include the howler that most Biblical scholars agree that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were historical events); this has not changed his arguments. Nor does it change the arguments of any preacher or evangelist who has met a stumbling-block, and this proud tradition of feeding the same malarkey to different audiences goes all the way back to the Book of Acts, in which Paul is said to have been confounded by Greek sophisticates and then just continued on his merry way with the same message.

Churches are as dishonest as the theologians are; this is why Anselm was touted as a genius for his ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God, but the first contemporary to refute his argument (a fellow Catholic named Gaunilo) was utterly dismissed and only rediscovered in modern times through the work of skeptics. In this case, the Church was not interested in the truth of the matter about the ontological argument, they were interested in the propagation of doctrine. How can a conversation be had with such a mindset? Atheists cannot engage meaningfully with such institutions because these institutions have spent centuries signalling their dishonesty and their insincerity. The case of Gaunilo is one of thousands; why should we hail John Calvin as an intellectual great while ignoring his cooperation with the Inquisition in disposing of heretics who disagreed with him? Why should we take seriously a Church that coyly dangles the Shroud of Turin in front of us without taking a stance on its authenticity, saying only ‘believers can have their faith strengthened by it whether it is real or not?’

Catholicism is not alone in this regard. The Buddha himself simply dismissed all questions of theology and metaphysics as “questions that tend not toward edification.” The inventor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went a step further, calling the use of reason to question religious dogma “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy.” Luther’s arguments came from scripture alone, and the dogma of Sola Scriptura is one of which his intellectual descendants are the most proud. The circle is thusly established: Scripture provides the answers, and where Scripture is questioned, the faculty being employed is just a tool of Satan so do not even worry about what good sense tells you.

Even Tolstoy, thought to be one of the greatest assets of his type to Christendom until CS Lewis, shrugged off his doubts, coyly remarking that “[w]hat is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” And like that, all mystery is gone. As long as the core of the religion is accepted, peripheral anomalies in dogma are inconsequential. This is a common technique of modern apologetics: get people to swallow the message, and doubts about the message will simply solve themselves.

Another common technique is obscurantism. William Lane Craig prides himself on the simplistic, easy-to-understand character of his arguments, yet when asked to solve the ancient Euthyphro Dilemma, he simply bellows in response “God IS goodness!” As if that solved the matter. But oscillating from simplicity into obscure language is helpful because it gives the believer a catchphrase on which to hang his own doubts, and against which to smash the doubts of the skeptics around him. The catchphrase need not make sense. It need not really answer the question. But it is helpful because one can make a creed out of it.

Theology is without substance

In my speeches and sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.

-Paul, I Corinthians 2:4-5

Whether or not all of the above is enough to dismiss the cult of theology, there is still the crucial assumption that theology has some ultimate substance with which to engage. Even if this substance is presented dishonestly, is without practical impact, and is presented from the obvious bias of “faith seeking understanding” (Aquinas’s motto), we are often told that these intellectual greats have something to contribute that atheists should take seriously.

Paul, father of Christianity, disagrees. He told generations of early Christians that genuine inquiry was insubstantial, and that is how the Patristics and the other early leaders of the Christian religion closed the ears of their congregations to Greek philosophy and other troublingly intelligent doubters. This gave rise to a whole new method of engaging with arguments: ignore them at best, and at worst treat them as dangerous. The Christian crowd that butchered skeptical philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria alive was just following orders from above.

It took until the Middle Ages, when most of the heretics had already disappeared, for Christians to think it okay to engage with the arguments of their enemies. This engagement took a hollow form: parrot a crusty proof from the Greeks or perhaps the Arabs and call it a day. It does not matter how often the traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential; the proofs are presented so repetitively that they are easily cubbyholed into these simple categories) are refuted by skeptics. The elegant responses by men as diverse as Guanilo, Walter Kaufmann, and John Mackie have never stopped the religious demagogue from thundering about creationism because truthful engagement with arguments is not their business.

Even when great religious men trash the arguments of their co-believers, nobody takes notice. The greatest philosopher in continental history, Immanuel Kant, spends a good deal of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason simply feasting on the traditional proofs for God in ways that have not been satisfactorily refuted since. Yet to this day theologians build careers defending these proofs. The popular Protestant theologian Alvin Plantinga has reformulated the ontological version of these arguments ad nauseum, always in ways that traditional rebuttals are just as successful, and William Lane Craig isn’t going to let go of the cosmological argument no matter what he is told from the religious or the skeptics about its futility. They do not care to make novel or solid arguments, nor can they.

So when the religious critic of atheism demands that we atheists engage with all levels of sophisticated theology, what are they really saying? They are saying that we should copy and paste established refutations in our books and essays to their satisfaction. They are saying that we should waste as much time cribbing from the dead as they do. When one attempts to prove God’s existence from their personal experiences, how many times do we have to point out the inherent unreliability of such experiences? Until the religious person is able to read them? Until the religious person is able to understand them? Until the religious person accepts them? The first step is rarely reached, the second even more rarely, and the third step often makes the headlines (see Charles Templeton) on the rare occasion when it does happen. It is fruitless.

It is fruitless not only because religious believers usually either don’t read or don’t accept the counterarguments, but also because religious believers seem particularly adept at forgetting them. Kai Nielsen explained to William Lane Craig what is wrong with the moral argument for God decades ago, yet Craig continues to use it in his lectures and debates around the world. And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t about honesty, he’s about conversion. And so with his colleagues.

Where theologians attempt to wrestle with evil, things get even uglier. Dawkins famously points out that Richard Swinburne, a celebrated theologian, is fine with the Holocaust because of how bravely it permitted the Jews to act in the face of persecution (which doesn’t matter, because in the theology of Swinburne’s religion they’re all going to hell anyways). JP Moreland’s epic Scaling the Secular City aims to defend God’s existence from skeptical inquiry while dealing with the problem of evil in a single paragraph that concludes unsatisfactorily with “Evil is traceable to the free will of God’s creatures.” The immediate question of why God would value Hitler’s free will over the lives (and, by extension, the free will) of millions of other creatures of God is obvious, and completely unanswered in the whole literature of theology.

When the religious believer cries out for God in times of distress, they do not want Plantinga’s empty assertion that God and evil are merely possibly logically compatible, they want a real answer. And the British bishops who blamed flooding and hurricanes on the sinfulness of the English people or the American televangelists who blamed the attacks of September 11^th on feminists and homosexuals do not provide this answer. When a quarter million innocents are washed away by a tsunami in the southwestern Pacific, the survivors rightfully demand an explanation. They do not get one, they get platitudes. Why should atheists waste time and pages dealing with them when their inadequacy is so painfully obvious?

Theology, like all religious institutions, demands respect where none is earned. Historically they serve only the functions of defending dogma to no one in particular, providing cover for the rare believer who comes to doubt the various absurdities of his faith, and of optimistically regurgitating the failed arguments of previous theologians. There is nothing here with which to engage. There is no novelty among them to treat with new counterarguments.

Show me a proof for the existence of God whose origins are less than five hundred years in the past and perhaps we can talk. Show me where a theologian has genuinely comforted the mother of the massacred or otherwise disposed-of child and I will reconsider. Until then, do not waste my time of the time of others claiming that theology is an accomplishment to be regarded with straight-faced serious argumentation. Quit whining about your obscurity, theologians: it is your own fault. Stop complaining about how you are treated unfairly and start earning the privilege of serious treatment. Until you redeem yourselves from a long, boring, obscure, dirty history of defending dogma, you are not worth the effort. Until you get your churches to stop appealing to magical talismans, supernatural relics, and other folk superstitions, the futility of your writings is apparent. Until you get the religious con-men who refer to you only in the improbable circumstance of the one intelligent doubting believer to stop shouting “but where’d all this stuff come from?” or “but why’s this stuff look so pretty?” or, as Job’s friends were so fond of saying, “your suffering is your fault,” you have not made enough of an impact to warrant our attention. The God you worship is either unfamiliar to religious believers, in which case you are a heretic, or he is completely congruent with established creeds and dogmas, in which case you are irrelevant.

Now that that’s settled, I say we atheists get on with our lives and resume chuckling at the poor schoolboy who smacks us in the shoulder just to get our attention. He is a petty, lonely boy who craves a moment in the sun, nothing more.

There were well over 200 skeptics, and we caused a back-up at the “museum”. Despite the lines, the crowds, and the outright misleading information, people seemed to be having a good time. We were surrounded by people who were of similar ideas and thoughts on science and religion. Ironically, it was here in a place of religion over science that many of us felt as if we belonged. It is no secret that skeptics are a marked minority, for now. Many student and community groups have trouble breaking 50 members, many of whom are never really active. To be immersed in such a large crowd was a shock. Everywhere I looked, I saw the black and white SSA sticker. We didn’t have to make noise or rattle the cage or cause a stink; our mere presence was enough to get the message across loud and clear.

I would like to state that I’m not knocking the work that many like PZ do. Until skeptics are acknowledged as part of society, attention is necessary, even if it’s bad attention. We can’t let people pretend that we aren’t here. This wasn’t the case August 7th. The need to get attention was no longer needed, which left more room to be respectful and polite. I saw many skeptics quiet their snickers and move aside to let the families on vacation look at the exhibits. I know many would say they shouldn’t have to do that. Those people are right. They don’t. But they did. And although that might have meant they missed the chance to try to convert someone, they did something that is by far more important. The skeptics showed respect to the believers. They proved that we aren’t evil, rude, immoral hooligans; they proved that even when we hold the majority we still respect the minority.

PZ Myers is amazing at what he does. He can bring a small news story to the front of the internet is less than a day. Anything posted to his blog is circulated within minutes. His controversies bring attention to the skeptical movement. He even admits he loves causing so much outrage. There is no question that his tactics are needed at this point in time and, unfortunately, for some time to come.

I find it mildly amusing that the “bad cop” of the movement made so many “good cops” simply by visiting some obscure place in Petersburg, Kentucky. Bad attention is better than no attention, and can obviously have positive effects. Just remember that you also need enough good attention to balance it all out.

If I had a soul, this is what it would look like.

Who is the Punk Teacher?

I decided to create the pseudonym “Punk Teacher” first and foremost so that I could write frankly about my new teaching career without risking drama, or worse, my job.

I am literally started my teaching career this year, summer 2009. My first experience was doing about a month of student teaching with Latino 5^th graders who had failed my state’s standardized test.

I am completely thrilled to be a teacher. It is my dream career. Yet there are a lot of problems with the educational system, and I have no intention of turning a blind eye. In fact I think my perspective is uniquely honed in such a way as to cut through bullshit in a refreshing and relevant way.

Even in my limited experience I already have much to say and many stories to tell, but I will try to stay focused on introducing my motives and myself.

I am a 29 year old Latino male who has lead a sketchy enough life that I feel that “punk” is the best adjective for it. The word “punk” has many connotations which include everything from French situationism to homosexuality in gang culture. But I hope the word invokes some more common imagery. I hope it calls forth images of angst ridden dirty kids with mowhawks, of anarchists and skinheads, full of rage at a society that they are struggling to understand. I hope that it invokes this imagery because this imagery describes my own youth, which still permeates its influence into my adulthood.

My own story with education is mostly a failed one.

I am the middle son of a college professor.  By the time I was 13 I had enough traumatic childhood experiences which ranged from just growing up in a repressive Latin American dictatorship to being sexually abused. By the 5^th grade I had been psychiatrically hospitalized, by the 7^th grade I had been placed in a school for troubled kids who’s security was so high that teachers watched the students urinate to prevent the smuggling of drugs and weapons. My classmates were hardcore gangsters.

By 9^th grade I was going to school drunk or on drugs, by 11^th grade I dropped out with a GPA beneath a 2.0.

I had but one refuge in life; it was the punk subculture, which I will define as the collective youth cultures, which based themselves in anti-establishment music, clothing, philosophy and lifestyle. My favorite bands growing up were the Dead Kennedy’s, The Misfits, Black Flag, Bauhaus, Skinny Puppy, Last Resort, Brutal Juice,  The Business, Neurosis, and other classics of hardcore, Oi!, industrial, and old school punk.

By the time I was 18, I was working professional as a tattoo artist and facing felony charges for organized crime. Though the two are completely unrelated it does give a good impression of what kind of background I have.

A few years later I underwent an intense religious conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. This may seem like a strange dichotomy, but if one reads the book Righteous by Lauren Sandler , it is clear that the evangelical religious right has invested a great deal of resources at massive campaigns to co-opt anti-establishment youth cultures and is quite good at it. I never quite fit in well with my fellow fundamentalists due to bad habits like identifying myself as a Christianarchist; I reasoned that the Christ like life should lead one to an anarchist utopianism.  My brothers and sisters in Christ did not agree.

Right smack in the middle of my evangelical Christianity I panhandled my way across the United States, and enjoyed a great deal of volunteer work with the Anarchist community of Santa Cruz, California. I will never forget attending a training camp where many of the attendees where veterans of the notorious Seattle WTO Riots, where anarchists basically shut down Seattle, Washington in protest of globalization.

At the tail end of my evangelical Christianity my politics took a slightly right wing shift when I became a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist party which counts among its slogans “Don’t Vote, Revolt!”

So don’t assume that in my religious days I was somehow wearing my trousers up to my chest with coke bottle glasses sitting around in pews singing 100 year old hymns. Though my education was marginal I was a voracious reader and studied Church history, and varying and competing theologies, including the Liberation theology of Latin America and the Social Gospel espoused by Martin Luther King. I also merged these ideas with a traditional southern Pentecostalism which teaches that God is a very active and evident supernatural entity which manifests miracles on a regular basis. The traditional view of this latter theology is called by its proponents “Charismatic Christianity.”  If it sounds like I was insane and dangerous I will not disagree.

But I will say that I believed that poverty was the product of social immorality and I wanted to fight it. I just happened to believe, like all Charismatics, that Jesus was talking to me inside my head and guiding my actions.

It was working with a youth ministry at my church where the congregation was mostly white middle class and the youth and children’s ministry was mostly black neighborhood kids that I began to develop my current worldview about education. As I got more and more involved with the kids and got to know their families, situations, and attitudes I realized that what they needed was a way out of a cycle of poverty and that education was a more realistic vehicle for that than prayer. This caused conflicts with my church and me and caused me to leave, never to return to a Charismatic congregation.

Shortly after that I started college, realizing that I needed to take my own advice.

College changed everything. Learning became my new addiction. It was hard as hell to get in and the whole process terrified me. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it, but the financial aid turned out to be enough. I made the lowest possible ACT score to be accepted into the University, but I was accepted nonetheless. Within 1 year I had a high GPA, laboratory research experience, and was the member of two prestigious academic organizations including HHMI, which is one of the world’s biggest supporters of biology research.

This December I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience.

What college did for me was powerful. My formal science education along with my own voracious reading habits caused me to abandon my religion. This was not a passive process for me but a deep internal conflict about the ethics of truth, the death blow to my religion was inflicted by Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion which caused me to accept either I believed science and evidence were the best and most reliable road to truth or that willful faith was. The two were epistemologically incompatible, and anyone who has a science education and denies this is like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Since I came from a punk-anarchist background it was deeply entrenched in my habits and worldview that when I see such a major problem with the world as the destructive power of religion I had to do something about it. So within a few months I became an active member of the secular and skeptical movements and remain one today. My activities have included podcasting, organizing campus clubs, traveling to conferences and blogs like this one. I don’t feel like I do enough and consider it one of my goals to increase my output; this is a very punk way to deal with a beloved cause.

I am now a 5^th grade bilingual math and science teacher.  As someone who believes that the most powerful force in democratizing our society is education I believe that I am in the trenches of the culture war.

In this blog I hope to communicate effectively what my experiences are as an educator and hopefully to inspire and inform people on how they might act to improve education in this country.

H.R.3458-7-31-09

I think it’s great that social networking isn’t split across many different platforms, even though I’m usually in favour of less centralized control.  Facebook, so long as it continues to provide more privacy features, allows what Piere Levy calls “totalization without control.”  That is, we can communicate with one another through and around any institutions, so long as they allow Facebook.  Now one might counter by saying that having only one major networking site makes it easier for governments to censor them, but I would argue that the easier access by so many others (others without much knowledge of how to use the internet), in so many free countries, outweighs its censorship in few countries, but only if their still remains other more spreadable and tougher to censor forms of social networking, and especially when Facebook can cross-platform with these other forms of social media.

What do you think?

But now we can throw a wrench into that cycle. By “we” I mean my generation—those who are currently just above or below twenty years of age. It is we who will inherent that brilliance of the scientific method, we who will finally stand up to the ghosts of the past, and we who will carry forth the ignited flame of reason. We are the first generation to enjoy a compounded sentence of life with the sequencing of our genome. We are the first to experience the Large Hadron Collider and the power and potential it beholds. We can experience the wonder and beauty of the macrocosm and the intricacy and complexity of the microcosm.

From one pole to the other, our senses swing in a prevailing storm of wonder. Yet in the gaps between we are faced with those who would wish God into our society. With so much to be in awe of, so much to wonder over, why on Earth (please notice the pun) should we care about a being who is “one but three”? How will knowing how Muhammad drank a glass of water solve the lack of clean water in Muslim African countries? Travailing through the sinuous undergrowth of tortuous theological pap, the easy wonder and beckoning of beauty in the natural world withers into sterility.

No doubt this call to arms is made often. Each generation hopes it will at last overthrow the grips of gods and bring liberty to humankind. I make no such claim. Instead what I propose is awareness and realization. We are at point where we can—not completely but exponentially—severe the ties of superstition. Here’s why I am optimistic.

J.B.S. Haldane famously said: “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Einstein said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” That is, what we can bring to the forefront of our minds is not limited by the immediate environment. We can make ghosts out of curtains and gods out of stars with all the reckoning of a mad wizard because of the power of our
minds. If nothing else, we can appreciate the creativity behind such claims as walking on water, demons in the sand, and winged horses.

All that need occur for us to render religion as the myth it is instead of the “truth” that believers want it to be is to reduce the penchant for acceptance. I do not mean acceptance of the claims but from where they stem—a need to explain life, the cosmos, beauty, and meaning. Those of us who reject religious explanations have found meaning in other things, but it is meaning nonetheless. By accepting that we all are longing for meaning and answers, Yahweh can be seen as simply another creative concept, like Zeus.

People are not stupid to hold such irrational beliefs; they are fulfilling their role in the cycle of unreason. While we are guided by the realization that the cycle works through natural forces, the believers invoke invisible gods pushing that same cycle along. We are both travelling and going forward, but when the cycle breaks down, who is more likely to  know the reason? While we would face and fix the problem, the believers would pray and simply hope things get better.

My generation, those who will be passed the torch from “godless luminaries,” as Richard Dawkins calls them, is in a better position than any to adopt a more assertive approach. How can I be accepting yet strident against belief? I respect people too much to allow irrational beliefs to dominate their lives. I want the members of my generation to bear this in mind as they face a present and future where most of us will not be punished because we do not believe.

We must not squander what the giants of the past have given us. We need to be strident in opposing irrationality for the simple reason that we care about our species. We have science, reason, and the ethics of humanism to achieve a fulfilled life, find meaning, and transmute exclamation points into question marks. My generation has learned that it is not a mark of insanity, pessimism, or distrust to not believe; we know that an attitude of questioning and skepticism is far more satisfying than the backdoor explanations of the faithful.

With this in mind, it is high time that we straighten our backs and walk proudly forward. No, we do not have all the answers and I, for one, would be disheartened if we thought that we did. Answers are full-stops but wonder is an ellipsis. It fills me with hope to keep moving forward, and my generation, those who are the next lot of great scientists, intellectuals, politicians, and human-rights activists, needs to grip the unveiling future with a white-knuckled ferocity. We cannot let the future be pulled from under our feet. We must be stronger and more eloquent in our dismissal of unreason in society, especially when it affects individual lives. We must be less accepting of those who would claim truth in religion, astrology, unproven medical treatments, psychic abilities, divination, and exorcisms.

In this day and age, in a civil society in which parents have let children die because they prayed instead of seeking medical help, we must not be moderate in our approach. When these sorts of parents claim that their child died because “they didn’t have enough faith,” we cannot dismiss it as crackpot and fringe mindsets.

I believe that most human beings are inherently caring, loving, and helpful people and that the religious as well as the nonreligious would be horrified by the actions of such parents. But we must not be passive and tolerant and excuse these actions. No. The need to protect human life takes precedence over the need to be “nice” and accepting of everyone’s beliefs. I urge you, my generation, those who have looked to the luminaries of the past and present—from Nietzsche to Russell, from Sagan to Dawkins—to rise up, armed with the ammunition of knowledge. We can create a better, more beautiful world. But to do that we must be more assertive and not defer to our elders. We must let go of the hands that helped us walk and begin taking our own hard strides into the teeth of superstition and dogma.

It has to happen at some point, and it is better to start right now, while we still have these elders’ support, than later, when they are gone.

Secular Humanist Bulletin Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2009

I believe…

• …nothing is sacred and the attempt at sanctification brings nothing but dogmatic human assertion onto an otherwise neutral world. This is not to be confused with not thinking certain thing highly important: for example, I do not believe in the “sanctity of human life” but I believe very strongly in fighting for people’s autonomy, freedom and their pursuit of happiness.

• …many current governmental policies, even in “Western” liberal democracies, are premised on knee-jerk emotional responses which cater to the masses. We need a thorough reassessment based on evidence rather than emotion if we wish to help our fellow Man. Thus, our policies on drugs, capital punishment, education and the automatic respect for religions to dictate on important moral issues needs at the most rescinding and at the least thorough consideration.

• …suppression only worsens rather than ameliorates most social problems. Thus, we should legalise drugs (from marijuana to cocaine), prostitution, pornography, abortion,  euthanasia and similarly related constituents of “immorality”. Conservative moralists tend to consider a slippery-slope that as AC Grayling put it works like this: “If you eat two bananas, you are going to want to eat a million.” We can already see the irrationality of such an approach. Firstly, if people want drugs, abortions and euthanasia, they will usually find a way to get it. Secondly, we already have arbitrary instances of various allowances of these prohibitions: we have legalised alcohol and nicotine (both of which are far worse than other drugs, like say marijuana); we don’t blink when we give a pet a good death (the literal meaning of euthanasia) but shudder when the gaze shifts to one of our own. This again goes back to considering something sacred, rather than looking at something humanely – that is, it is more important for someone to have life, even if it is filled with suffering, than to have no life and therefore no suffering. Also, those who chant the mantra “drugs are bad” should remember that for the most part, even alot of so-called hard drugs when taken in minimal circumstances do little to no damage.

• …when entering the public sphere, all ideas are open to criticism, debate, mockery and scorn. If we eliminate the stupid notion of sanctity, we can allow that ideas are man-made and therefore fallible. The point is to weed out the bad and keep the good but that can not be done if certain ideas are beyond criticism. For too long we have lived under the shadow of a respect for people’s faiths but no longer must that be the case. We should care more about people and creating a better world, than hushing our own important criticisms which could better more lives by being spoken rather than placating dormant lives with silence.

• …we should not be afraid to defend our point of views strongly, but more importantly we must be able to utter 2 three-word sentences: “I don’t know” and “I stand corrected”. Sure, we may feel like imbeciles when we vehemently defend a view which turns out to be wrong. We should then apologise and say so, rather than making the situation worse by deluding ourselves into naive dogmatism. Nobody really cares anyway because no one is keeping tabs on how often you were right. Also you will be right by acceding to your opponent or antagonist (even if there are say, your brilliant philosopher girlfriend), because you will be able to correct those who shared your previously held view.

• …religions are a disgusting affront to human sensibilities and are perverse for accruing various properties. It is both tedious and mortifying to constantly read about religious groups opposing abortions, same-sex marriages, prostitution, drugs, freedom of speech and expression, liberty, and so on. In each case, we can probably name a few cases where religious people who deem their actions sanctified (there is that notion of sanctity again!) by a god have killed someone who is part of these movements. Religious people often refuse to face facts and evidence, as is the case with for example evolution and contraceptives, and instead point to arbitrary passages in their arbitrary (sacred) book.  Religions not only reward people for horrifying actions like the slaughter of innocent people, but also rewards people for believing without evidence. It also rewards people for peering into other people’s private lives which, if ignored, would not hinder their own lives at all (how could a happy homosexual couple going about their business make the lives of say a normal family horrid, unless they were Christians and told by their holy book that homosexuality is an affront to god?)

• …the most disgusting affront to our species and the biggest fight we have is the continued emancipation of women and bringing their hands to tightly clutch the banner of liberty. Especially in such places as Africa, where we know that when women are allowed charge over their own bodies, we can end poverty. Poverty will not be solved solely though charity – we know that will not work. Instead, we must seek charity’s root, namely karitas or the love of fellow humans. This means liberating women which reduces poverty by not dealing out already low resources to an inestimable number of offspring, who themselves grow up to continue to breed and create more people to suffer needlessly. Aside from poverty, we need to push back the patriarchy of society to realise that women (who do better than the male counterparts in education) are human. Religions also aid this patriarchy by giving men a divine sanction to use their wives as nothing more than cattle. There are too many instances to name in Islamic countries that they might collectively be called Misogynia. By combating these arrogant and stupid men who think women are lower than themselves, we will be pulling the carpet from under the feet. The biggest wake up call that Muslims states could suffer would be a woman, wearing clothes of her choosing, smiling and enjoying her own mind and body. A respect for the minds and their bodies should be welcomed, not solely for the purpose of the male related urge to have sex, but also for the appreciation of the beauty of both. Personally, women are the better sex and it is often said that if god was a woman, the world wouldn’t be in such a mess – perhaps the only statement of an anthropomorphic god I could agree with.

• …we need a re-evaluation of why we procreate. To the Greeks, everything was an ethical dilemma: even the clothes you wore. To them the ethical life was a life well-lived and living ethically was a life-long challenge. We tend to forget this view, with its importance on self-reflection. Applying this to all spheres would end a lot of social problems but it needs to be consistent. Thus, to be consistent, there has yet to be a good reason laid out for the procreation of  our species. As I write this, I am of the opinion that it is immoral to create new people, since it is by definition impossible to have a child for that child’s sake – because the child does not exist when you conceive him. Parents do not know their children for quite some time, so it is impossible to say that parents have children for that child’s sake. To have a child is simply a selfish act, a biological need (arguably the most prominent and therefore the most overlooked!). Why have kids? It is a bizarre question to most people, but as of yet there has not been a satisfactory answer. To continue the human species is not good enough either, since I do not care for those who do not exist. I care and apply my moral sphere to those who exist. Those who do not exist do not suffer. Also, we must remember that our species will die out eventually and we only prolonging the inevitable. It seems harsh and to some horrifying, but it is rather simple. For this reason, I at this moment will not have children. Instead, I think our efforts in helping people to procreate and the “sad” fact that people are sterile, needs shifting to aid children who are already alive. That is, instead of focusing on children who do not exist, focus on those who do! Perhaps this is what irks me the most – there are so many children who need loving families and I do not doubt that people who want kids simply want a child to love. Therefore, they should not add to our overpopulated word, but simply adopt. Psychological testing has shown time and time again, there is no difference in affection and love between children who parents adopt and children born to biological parents. I believe it a human duty to shift our silly polices on those “unlucky people who are sterile” and who can not create new people; and instead promote the humanity and importance of adopting people who already exist.

• …reading is the gateway to living the good life and engaging in discussion with ideas its path. Epicurus was the embodiment of this, who thought the highest aim in life was sitting beneath a tree discussing philosophy. Whilst we can not reasonably expect such a life today, we can approach it with the same considerations. Reading is a joy and should be shown to young people when their minds are finding fruition and goal. Like education, reading should not be promoted by forcing children to read certain books, but how and why they should read in the first place. People find their hunger grow when reading and the acquisition of “knowledge” becomes a life long goal. There is nothing pretentious in reading Tolstoy and Faulkner’s books, indeed they are beautiful and actually simple writers. They are classics because even the general reader is able to enjoy its beauty, whilst stuffy introverts like myself could dissect it for in-depth literary criticism. There is also much joy to be gained in reading opposing viewpoints, thus reading books for and against evolution, for and against god, for and against postmodernism, and so on. We enjoy debates for their entertainment value and watching one side get overturned by the brilliance of the other; but we also allow people in better positions than ourselves to criticise more eloquently and with better information. It is a joy: try (really try) for example reading a work by Derrida (perhaps a short one) than try Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense or Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s Why Truth Matters.

• …by studying philosophy, I hope to bring it further into the public sphere where it belongs. Much is to be gained from the history of ideas and discussion within philosophy. Not least the clarification and use of critical thinking so important to this discipline. Moral philosophers need to be higher placed within our society than say, bishops and rabbis – for the simple reason that moral philosophy is not moralising – i.e.: it is not about setting out a list of “Thou shalt…” and “Thou shalt not…” but the clearing of verbose emotional reactions and alternate paths not previously considered. The first person journalists should contact when an ethical dilemma arises from medical advancement should not be the public or a religious don: it should be a bioethicist. After outlining all the paths and conjectures surrounding the topic, others can contribute more coherently. This should be the job of the philosopher in general, to clear the path for discussion to continue maturely.

• …sex is overrated. In nearly every sense, sex finds itself at the top of the list for both those who consider themselves godless liberals in their “FOR” list, and for the conservative moralisers in their “AGAINST” list. If sex was less the topic of focus, it could be allowed to be the healthy, enjoyable actualisation of affection two (or three or four) people have for each other.

• …I am not intelligent or bright. I reserve such terms for those who deserve it and find it a particularly insulting when an important property finds itself attached to me. As an example, I did terribly in high-school, barely passing. I did even worse in a tertiary institution, only managing firsts in English literature – a degree, nearly anyone could do well in. I am not exceptional in any way, save that I am particularly good-looking.

• …that last sentence was a lie.

I hope that by next year one of these would have changed, either to be replaced with something more informed, or elucidated more clearly. For example, I hope to be able to say that I am working from a tertiary institution. Until then, let us see what changes the world makes upon itself.

One might look at this and say “So what?”  We all know both Megan Fox and Michael Bay are always in the spotlight based on their visual merits and not their intellectual ones (Bay blowing stuff up, Fox blowing…well…never mind, maybe that’s just my imagination).  But there’s a serious logical fallacy playing itself out in this confrontation – appeal to age.

I understand they aren’t arguing about something that has any real value, but still – when someone claims another person is wrong, or just shuns them away, because they think their own age makes them more authoritative on a claim – it is an insult to human reason.

I once had a similar experience.  I was arguing with a professor of mine about the existence of God.  Her arguing for, me arguing against.  As I pushed her on the subject I must have struck a mental brick wall, one which she would let no one beyond.  She knew I had her back against that wall and so she ended the argument by saying that since she was older she was more likely to be right.

Of course, I called her out on her appeal to age.  Unfortunately, she just remained silent, which continued into an agonizingly long awkward silence…

However, it appears that the BSG finale – with Baltar proclaiming that some things are meant never to be explained and that the Colonials and non-Cavil Cylons were basically following the word of God – seemed highly contrived and basically thrust upon the audience as more or less of a cop out. That and they gave up the frakking spaceships and reverted back to being cavemen…

Then again, English class in high school was never my forte and I pretty much sucked at identifying metaphors and that kind of stuff. Your thoughts?

Their success has not gone unnoticed. Host Cenk Uygur has been an invited guest on a number of major news broadcasts (e.g., CNN), contributes to the Huffington Post, and has received a flurry of endorsements and support in his self-declared candidacy for a spot on CNBC primetime.

Of particular interest to the freethought community is Uygur’s advocacy for reason and secularism. He will flat out say on news media that the religious right is out of its collective mind. He has stated flat out that our religions are not reasonable belief systems. And most recently, he reported on the size of the nonreligious segment of American society (15% according to the just-released study out of Trinity College in in Hartford, Conneticut), and how the nonreligious are the third largest and the fastest growing religious/nonreligious group in the country. He also acknowledged the nonreligious minority’s history of being marginalized, distrusted and denigrated and the imperative that this block of society mobilize. After stating his membership in this community, he reached out to his co-non-religionists and declared

“Lets stand up and be heard. ‘Cause they’ve run over us for too long. We’re the logical ones. So lets be heard.”

On the other side of the page, he exclaimed that those members of the religious right who are so far gone as to be wishing for the end of the world are the ones that we need to be marginalizing.

Here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkqeLuWsSrA

I encourage everyone to check out TYT’s YouTube channel.