There are a few problems that I face with teaching science. First of all the only reason given for teaching anything in science is the state mandated standardized test in science. This is only half the problem. 

The other half is that most science teachers don’t know science themselves. 

These problems compound to getting a batch of students who are basically good kids, whose parents have no idea who Carl Sagan was. Their number one extracurricular activity is usually based in Church (probably because its free). Their only exposure to science is fed to them by the ignorant who don’t give too much of a shit about science themselves and they only do it to appease a test which seeks primarily its own market share. 

My states test is definitely made by a private company, and that private company holds a strict monopoly of the whole educational system. 

What do you do?

Most of the stuff I can think off would border on being either unethical or depressing. 

In spite of writing this highly cathartic anonymous blog I do try to maintain a relatively mainstream professional ethic about teaching. 

I wear my goddamn tie, something which I don’t even have to do. 

I mostly get my paperwork in on time. 

I give my principal the benefit of the doubt. 

But I really feel like my legs are broken on getting these kids to love science. 

And let me be clear, my incentive as a science teacher is to cultivate a lifelong love for science. 

People who love science take good care of the world.

I became a teacher because unscientific, mooshy, subjective thinking dominates the world. I want to teach kids to be driven by reason and critical thinking. 

I became a teacher to give youngsters, especially those who are less likely to succeed academically, an edge in life. 

I have a science degree with a great deal of primary scientific research experience. 

I became a teacher to save the world. 

But so far my first three weeks of being a teacher have consisted of being given too much secretarial work to properly prepare my classes or even grade work. I have to have 12 grades by Monday. Actually, technically they are 3 days late on Monday, but thats when the administration starts paying attention. 

I would love to have my grades. I have been gauging what my kids know from class work and discussions that I can watch, but their independent work is what will really show me what they are getting or not.

I need to spend my time assessing student mastery of what is being taught. 

I need to spend my time designing creative lessons and classroom activities that will maximize my student’s  interest and mastery. 

I really want my kids to succeed. I want them to be smarter than anyone ever expected them to be, I want them to be life long learners and leaders. 

My students are 100% latino, they are what is referred to as a “bilingual” class which means (where I live) that Spanish is the language spoken at home. 

On CNN Lou Dobb’s talks about my kids like them and their parents are pests who should be dragged off into camps for stealing jobs, healthcare, and the education that I am trying to provide. 

My kids are seen as “beaners, greasers, wetbacks,” and “spics.”

I became a teacher to save the world. 

By school district mandates, passed on to me by my state legislation I am required to track, process, maintain and write so much paperwork that I have been working 12 hour days to maintain a mountain of this inane secretarial work. 

I need to figure out how to make sure my kids see the links between critical thinking and science. Logic and math, and math and science. 

I get to go through four years of records and make sure that papers that their parents fill out (or often don’t fill out) are turned in and organized. 

I need to figure out how much math my kids missed as it was not properly emphasized since it was not a required state standardized test in 3rd or 4th grade. 

I get to go to dozens of hours of “development” meetings in which former kindergarden teachers treat me and a room full of adults like kindergardeners and call it “modeling.” In these meetings I am taught to use software so basic, as an experienced behaviorist, I am confident I could teach rats to use it.

I need to have individual time with each of my students so that I can help them iron out their academic weaknesses and come up with engaging strategies that I design with them to maximize their potential. 

Instead I have individual time with ” new teacher liaisons” who eat up time and space so that I can meet some criteria decided in a boardroom somewhere by people who haven’t been in a classroom for a decade. 

I became a teacher to save the world.

When i was fifteen i decided to make a leap of faith and became an orthodox Jew. It was a long journey. 3 years later, I woke up in the summer of 06′ somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn, i had a beard that touched the ground, my tefillin (Jewish phylacteries) next to my bed, and my siddur on the cabinet next to me. I was in a Hasidic Yeshiva waking up at 6:00 am on a Saturday to go downstairs and pray. My parents were deeply distressed that I had ended up here (the rabbis had insisted I separate myself from them, especially my father who is not Jewish), my health (mentally and psychologically) had been damaged by the advice of Rabbis who did not even have a bachelor’s degree (Hasidim are not supposed to go to college). I can’t tell you exactly why i fled that day , all I know is I looked around at all these Yeshiva students sleeping in the bunk beds near me, and forced myself to get on a bus back to Philadelphia and never looked back.

I was a member of the very well known Jewish Hasidic movement, Chabad-Lubavitch. Chabad is not only the second largest group of Hasidim (A populist Jewish religious movement that was born in eastern Europe) it is also an international organization that runs educational institutions, has its own publishing house, and sends out its most charismatic students around the world to proselytize to unobservant Jews. It also has its own political lobbying group, with a decent amount of pull in Washington.

I think Chabad’s existence illustrates the need for secular activism, for a demand that religion and state remain separate, a defense of secular humanism, and a sharp critique of arguments based on any sort of divine mandate.

Chabad gains a massive amounts of its funds via charity from non-orthodox Jews (Mainly Jewish people who identify with the reform movement) who are uneducated about many of the things that Chabad promotes: an uncompromising view of Israel’s right to every piece of the Biblical kingdom; a mystical ideology that draws deeply on racism towards Non-Jews; a deeply misogynistic attitude towards women; and finally although the official organization would never admit it, the majority of them firmly believe that their last Rebbe (Grand Rabbi and Leader) Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah and is coming back to save the Jews and punish the gentiles.

So what we have is a religious movement that gains its wealth primarily from the moderates or even those who are only “culturally Jewish.” The money pours into a whole network of institutions that promote ideals that these very charitable people deeply dislike and don’t know they are supporting, convinced by a massive PR campaign that they are promoting Judaism. This is an organization whose ideology is actively promoting hard-line policies in Israel and values  that are deeply unhealthy and destructive. That’s why there needs to be a Secular, Free-thought movement. To make people realize what a leap of faith really is. We need to go to the moderates and the liberal defenders of faith and make them realize what they are defending. We need to show there is an alternative to taking ethics by divine mandate, to  show religion is not making the world a better place, an demonstrate how people are suffering because they are not making the effort to really look and see what the faithful are saying.  We need to show people what faith really is or someone you love might be tricked into a leap of faith and not have a bus to come back home on.

This morning, at about 4 am CST, Rob and Dan were doing a flyover of Nairobi to get footage for the documentary when the plane crashed.  Rob is interviewed in this video.

Now, here’s something interesting.  The Give A Damn documentary promos build up Rob as the atheist who doesn’t give a shit about others.  I know Rob, and while he is often frank and eager to lay responsibility where it should be, he is not apathetic or dispassionate.  All the same, that’s how he has been billed for this project.

However, Rob the uncaring atheist was the passenger that lept out of the plane before it could spiral down (ultimately landing upside down and bursting into flame upon impact before exploding five minutes later).  The gash on Rob’s head would later require six stitches and he also has a fractured leg.  After landing, he went back into the burning plane and pulled out an unconscious Dan, then went back in after the co-pilot.  In the process of unlatching the co-pilot’s seat belt Rob’s arm caught on fire (he has burns up and down his arm from it), yet he still managed to get the co-pilot free.  It was at this point that the locals dragged Rob and the co-pilot to safety.  If the co-pilot lives (he’s currently in critical condition), it may very well be because of Rob’s selfless bravery.  I’m very proud of Rob, and infinitely grateful that one of my closest friends is alright.  I’ve always known that Rob had this type of character.

So for all of you who have ever said that atheists have no impulse to be moral, you can now borrow my crowbar in the interest of dislodging your feet from your mouth – the atheist dragged one of your own from a firey wreckage when god was too busy to do it.

Which brings me to my next point.  Before I get into it, I want all my readers to bear in mind that this event was a tragedy.  I feel for everybody involved, and I had to really mull over whether or not I should say what I’m about to say.  I am not an asshole (in fact, I’m often too caring for my own good – my parents can vouch for this), and believe me when I express that saying what needs to be said even though it may hurt people is not always easy for me.  This scenario is no different.  I realize that some people may brand me as insensitive, and I admit that I can’t blame them.  But if we don’t all learn something from this, then we are not doing anybody a favor.  That being said, here we go…

Dan and Dave are both religious, which is why it was no surprise to see that Dave’s first post on the Give A Damn twitter feed was:

“Thank God for this #miracle of the #Giveadamn #documentary team surviving the #plane #crash.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes.  If it was god that kept Rob and Dan (and possibly the co-pilot) alive, why did he allow the plane to crash in the first place?  Moreover, the pilot of that plane is dead.  Dead. He is survived by a wife and four children.  How could anybody possibly call such a thing a miracle?  This is a travesty, maybe worse.

The truth of the matter is that if god was watching, he left it to the hands of a non-believer to do what he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do.  The reason Dan is alive and that the co-pilot has as high a chance of survival as he does is because a rather exemplary mortal, not Jesus, was watching over the believers.  All the prayers in the world would not have budged Dan one inch further from that wreckage.  Instead, the man who thinks he only gets one crack at life was self-sacrificing enough to dive back into the blaze and rescue them.  Don’t thank god – thank human goodness.

When travesties of this magnitude can be used as evidence of god’s goodness, one can only wonder what could ever possibly be used to establish his wickedness or apathy (or reasonably, his non-existence).  The real inversion of reality here is that many Christians still consider god more worthy than man, including the best of us like Rob.

I am infinitely grateful that Dan and Rob, both my friends, are going to live.  Dan has a broken collar bone, but he’ll recover.  More Give A Damn twitter feeds beseech me to offer my prayers for them.  I will not pray.  If god exists, he didn’t help them then and I have no reason at all to believe he would help them now.  Instead, I’ll give credit where it’s rightly due and when they return home (Rob lives under two miles from my house), I will fry them up some bacon and buy them a beer, and reassure Rob once more how proud I am to know him.

Others say that to be agnostic means to say that we cannot know.  There is much to say about this.  First, and most obviously, why can’t we?  Is it really too early to say that people cannot rise from the dead, and that to accept such a proposition without evidence is indicative of lazy thinking at best (and insanity, at worst)?  I don’t think so.  Even for the ambiguous god of deism, the best I’ve ever heard as a defense for “we cannot know” is that people cannot imagine any other way existence could have happened (forget, for a moment, that god would have had to exist to create all of this).  But that’s not an argument, it’s simply a lack of information (either on their part or on humanity’s part) or a lack of imagination.  You can honestly say that we do not currently know, and that is fine – but you lack the knowledge of the future (amongst other things) to say that we cannot know.  Additionally, to say that we cannot know about god is to treat the idea of knowledge in an absolutist fashion, which I’ll argue in the following section is not the way we utilize that idea.  Anyway, my arguments for how we can know about god’s non-existence with reasonable certainty (which I’ll tackle in the following section) can be found throughout this blog and over at my regular blog.

I’ve heard others say that to be agnostic means to believe there is a god, but to admit that we know none of his properties (although, I’d more associate this with deism).  These people suffer from the same philosophical failings as other believers.

However you view the term agnostic, I will argue that doing so entails misconceptions about the nature of knowledge or a poor analysis of the evidence on hand that, once resolved, will reveal that you are no different from an atheist.

For even our most certain claims, we must allow for the possibility we are somehow wrong.  Even something as simple as 1=1 might not be true (you may be dreaming this life, and in the real world this is not the case).  So what we do is we attach probabilities to truth claims based on the evidence on hand.  While I’m pretty sure that there are no purple, nine-legged insects with heart shaped candy eyes and a radio dial on their forehead on this planet, we may one day turn over a rock and find a colony of such insects.  While this is highly unlikely, it would be wrong to deny it as a (very distant) possibility, and thus my claim that there are no such insects is not absolutely certain.

While it’s not relevant to the discussion on atheism versus agnosticism, it should be noted that even god would be subject to these constraints.  What if he was wrong about being omniscient?  What if a demon is feeding god his every thought?  Such a demon could even make god feel omniscient and god would never be the wiser.  God would have to allow for this possibility, and so even he cannot have 100% certain knowledge.  The point is that what we’re after is not absolute certainty, we’re after reasonable certainty.  Ideas that are so likely to be true that they are as close as we can get.  Atheists accept this.  We are not saying we are absolutely positive that a god does not exist.  What we are saying is that there is no good reason to believe that there is one and plenty of good reasons to believe there isn’t one.  We say the same thing about unicorns, leprechauns, and purple nine-legged insects.  Agnostics also accept this on propositions that allow for it, which gets me to my next point – often, it is how these things are presented that determine our approach to them.

Another claim I’ve heard of agnostics before is that they say “we cannot know”.  To me, this seems euphemistic for “we cannot falsify”, and they’re right.  However, claiming belief in an unfalsifiable proposition which bears no supporting evidence because nobody has managed the impossible is to fall victim to the trap of a self-fulfilling prophesy.  For instance, if you believe in smurfs with no corroborating evidence because we’ve yet to comb our universe to its very edges (a feat that would be tedious and impossible) to prove there is no centimeter of space-time (how’s that for a conflicting idea?  ) where a smurf exists, you will never be able to escape your absurd belief.  Instead, we need to realize that if a proposition of existence, such as that of smurfs, gods, and celestial teapots, has no evidence, then that IS evidence for that object’s non-existence.  Should we ever come across any evidence for these objects, we’ll happily change our minds.

Furthermore, as I said at the end of the previous section, whether we are agnostic (in the sense of saying we can’t disprove a proposition or we can’t know about a proposition) or atheistic (saying that it is so highly improbable as to be considered reasonably certain) about a proposition often has more to do with how those propositions are presented than anything.

Consider two gods, we’ll call them god Pork and god Beans.  They are identical in that they both have power as unlimited as the universe allows and are, in each example, the author of the universe.  Here is the difference.

God Pork uses his limitless power remove all evidence of his existence.  In this case, the absence of any evidence for the existence of Pork IS the evidence of his existence, and every discovery ever made will conform to the idea of this god.  It is impossible to be anything but an “agnostic” about Pork.

But god Beans, he uses his limitless power to provide you with irrefutable proof of his existence.  We lack irrefutable proof of his existence, so it is impossible to be anything except an atheist about Beans.  You cannot be open-minded to the existence of Beans because he is a contradiction of logic.  It would be like saying there is a married bachelor – you cannot have both.

Richard Carrier originated this argument and articulates it better than I ever could.

So here’s my hangup.  Imagine our options for a particular choice are a collection of fruits:

1. An apple.
2. An orange.
3. A pear.
4. A grape.

God could have also given us the option of a pineapple and a kiwi (and an infinite array of other alternatives), but he didn’t.  Free will just means that we get to choose from within our palette of available choices.

On their own, none of these fruits are inherently bad.  Sin isn’t something that existed before god came around and god just happened to be powerless to do something about it.  Even something like lying with man as with woman (gasp, anal sex!) isn’t inherently bad until god decides he doesn’t like it.  No, god decides what is sinful.  So one day, for whatever reason, he decides that chowing down on the apple is a sin and that he’s going to punish whoever does it.

Rather than remove the apple from the list of options (or just leaving it as an ambiguous option in the first place), he leaves it there.  Taking away the apple as an alternative would not violate our free will, just as my inability to levitate doesn’t violate my free will.  We would still have options to choose from.

So what motivation could there possibly be for tainting the apple and leaving it?  The only real possibility is to trip us up all the way into eternal torment, and that’s a pretty mean play on god’s part.

So when the skeptic asks, “Why does god have to give us all these fun, harmless options that he deems sinful?,” the answer can’t be because he loved us so much that he wanted us to have free will – we can have free will without the malignant options.  Seriously, can’t we trade the ability to eat shellfish (Leviticus 11:10-12) for the ability to fly?  How cool would that have been?  That’s some free will I could get behind.

Unless god decides he doesn’t care for flying either.  How fun can heaven really be hanging around this dude?

I recently did a post about how even though faith is often defended by Christians claiming that it gives people hope, that faith is actually a very poor outlet for hope.  Afterward, Ben from War on Error asked me to make a positive case for how hope is better found in reason.  Ok.

Personally, I think this sentiment can be explained in two sentences:  It does not matter how good a belief makes us feel, it will not unmake the realities we are trying to escape.  However, if we have the courage to be honest about unpleasant things, we can make reality more comforting.  However, I’m sure that people will want more elaboration, so here we go.

There is an enormous difference between false hope, hope that doesn’t rely on an accurate assessment of reality (in fact, it exists only by closing our eyes and ignoring reality), and actual hope that if the facts of the universe are not what we want them to be, we can change them.  Through the last several thousand years, we have hoped for cures to diseases, technology to take us to the moon, plentiful food, clean water, etc, and through looking at these problems bravely, without trying to shield ourselves from the unpleasant fact that we lacked those things, we were able to turn our hopes into realities.  However, first we had to admit that we did not have the things we wanted, and we had to take a long, dispassionate look at our problems.

When we hoped to reach the moon, we did not know how we were going to get there, but we didn’t just close our eyes and imagine we had already made it and call it a day: we worked, we thought, and we actually made it happen.  But in order to make it happen, we absolutely had to open our eyes and understand the circumstances before us, whether they were comforting or not, as they truly were.  Faith merely allows people to ignore the very variables of reality we must acknowledge in order to fix them.  It is the panicked shriek of a coward that they cannot bear to look at what frightens them, they cannot bear to face it, and so they just imagine that it’s not that way.  Such people are never held in high regard elsewhere, but yet we consider such behavior to be noble when applied to the finite nature our very life.

Believing that death is not the end of our ability to experience things will not make it so.  But by acknowledging that fact, we can begin to make as much our of our time as we can, rather than sitting around and waiting for the paradise we’ve dreamed up.  We can even join other doctors in dedicating our lives to finding ways to prolong our time on Earth.  In short, we can begin to make the universe the way we want it to be, and we can seek the best possible solution as a reality – not merely imagine we’ve already found it.

In this way, faith – the mere belief in things when reasons fail – is the purest conceivable distillation of false hope.  Because it hinges on not acknowledging reality for what it truly is, it is actually antithetical to genuine hope.

So the next time a Christian tries to paint you as a bad person for taking away their hope, remember that false hope can only be benign at best, and can often make your actual circumstances worse.  Also, remember that genuine hope is not merely a sentiment of an individual; we have collective hopes as families, as societies, and most importantly, as a species – and false hope is merely going to drive us into ground, which is not at all worth the trade off of flimsy comfort we get by ignoring reality.  True hope only comes from having the courage to be honest about unhappy facts and circumstances – it is the only way we can truly conquer them.  Ultimately, we can close our eyes and pretend the train isn’t there, or we can admit we’re in deep shit and at least try to jump out of the way.

Hope doesn’t come easily – you have to have some moxy.  Faith offers us false hope that is easy; it’s for the lazy and the cowards.  You’re upset that I’m pointing out that you have false hope but that there’s actual hope available?  Ok.  I can live with that.  Maybe it will toughen your skin so that you can survive the brush with reality that genuine hope requires.

First, hope does not equate to truth.  The truth sometimes can be downright unpleasant, since it does not conform to our sense of wishful thinking the way religions do.  So you need to ask yourself what your priority is: do you want your beliefs to be true or simply positive?  They cannot always be the same.  There is a very large (and consequential difference) between hoping you have won the lottery and believing you have won the lottery, and failing to draw that difference would be quite a costly mistake.

Second, hope can be found most abundantly not by embracing unreason, but by mapping out reality as accurately as we are able.  Every 200 million years on average an asteroid of sufficient size to annihilate most life on Earth will strike the planet.  No amount of hoping otherwise will alter this fact.  However, by acknowledging this fact, we can then set our collective minds to finding a solution.  It should be clear to anybody that hoping to find a solution through effort is a much more full and meaningful hope than simply hoping the collision event won’t happen.  The hope of religion, in opposition to the unpleasant facts of the universe, is merely the hope of closing one’s eyes rather than facing the oncoming problem.  That is not hope; it is ineffectual cowardice.

Third, an examination of Christianity will reveal that there is very little hope to be found.  We have this idea of Hell, this eternity of suffering so great that every second the agony of it escapes human comprehension millions of times over, exists because god allows it to (he could easily unmake it, being omnipotent and all), and the only way to avoid it is through a lifetime of groveling and thanksgiving followed by an eternity of the same?  This is hope?  These are very similar to the current conditions in North Korea with the cultish atmosphere of worship created by Kim Jong Il.  If you do not grovel and thank him for your very right to eat and live, you are to be punished.  Is this tyrant benevolent because he allows those who bow and scrape to escape the prisons and mortal punishment that are there by his command?  If this is love and benevolence, it is hard to imagine tyranny.  But god’s punishment is infinitely worse, and his standards infinitely more unfair.  To pass god’s test, I must not merely prostrate myself before the dictator, I must also believe that events took place that are admittedly impossible by their very definition (miracles) – a feat that I argue is impossible.  This is hope?

And even if the situation weren’t so terrible, even if Christianity did offer something that really did sound appealing, is it really hope if it’s based on an untruth?  I would argue that hope based on a lie is just false hope, and that it’s nothing to be proud of – especially when actual hope, the kind that can help us face the unpleasantries that exist whether we have the courage to acknowledge them or not, is attainable through intellectual honesty.  We just need to learn that we can run faster without the crutch – as scared as we are to let go of it.

I got to meet DJ Grothe, who will be coming to Skepticon II.  He’s quite a good speaker, very well-informed, and will be a powerful part of the line up.  I also got to tour the CFI – these people are freaking awesome.  They’re doing a ton of good work.

Also, everybody there was exceedingly intelligent (except the two new-age goobers from Cornell.  How those two got into Cornell I will never know).  It was glorious.

I will also be blogging elsewhere soon (but I will still blog here as well).  Some of the CFI bloggers are starting up a schnazzy new blog called Factonista, that looks like it will be very high traffic and informative, and they invited me to blog there.  w00t!

I got to see talks by DJ Grothe, Massimo Pigliucci, and Joe Nickell, amongst others.  I left better informed and inspired to do several things this coming semester:

• Double my efforts for Skepticon II
• Begin a bus campaign here in Springfield
• Push to increase membership
• Begin a letter-writing ring to the local paper
• Fundraising of some sort (not exactly sure how…I suck at this)
• Produce a web page for the MSUCotFSM

It can all be done, and the CFI is willing to lend us what resources they can to help.  I really can’t say enough about Dan Riley, Debbie Goddard, Corey Neil, Derek Rodgers, Adam Isaak, and everybody else up there.  They are fantastic, and affiliating the MSUCotFSM with them was one of the best moves I’ve ever made.

I may also be coming to speak at a location near you.  The San Francisco group is talking about bringing me out there (perhaps alongside Richard Carrier), as is the Stanford group.  The secular group from Stony Brook (in NJ Long Island) is also wanting to bring me up for an event this coming semester, which may wind up as a dual event with nearby Hofstra.  As always, I will keep everybody apprised of my travel and speaking schedule here.

The main thing I want to write about is the round table discussion we had on the final day.  I had many disagreements with my compatriots on the subject of “tolerance”, which I will outline here.

This was probably the biggest area of disagreement amongst the attendees (and one I have yet to video blog about with Ben from War on Error…patience).  There were many groups present whose focus is on clearing up the atheist image by being happy and moral and putting those qualities on display.  I got the impression that some people thought that people like me, who pull no punches in criticizing unreason, are counterproductive to that goal. One attendee, who I had a wonderful time meeting and agree with on every other subject, I think, went as far as to say that appealing to their emotional side was the way to win them over.  I have several contentions with this position, many of which I gave at the time.

First, our goal is not merely to change minds.  Beliefs are the gatekeepers of actions, and there are lots of people out there with unreasonable beliefs engaging in maladaptive actions: poisoning education, attempting to enact discriminatory legislation, etc.  They are threats to individuals, to society, and to knowledge, and we are here to stop them.  This won’t be accomplished by showing them how amicable we are.  Religious people thrive on avoiding criticism, and granting them that wish in order to have a hope of changing their minds is not the solution – it is playing into their hands.

Moreover, many people acted as though reason can’t change minds.  It’s so odd!  We spent a whole weekend paying lip service to the power of reason, but then act as though it pales in comparison to fuzzy feelings of happiness.  Reason is powerful and irresistable, and we need to treat it as such.  It determines our beliefs, no matter what we feel.

Besides, if we get a deconversion solely because they feel good about atheism, what makes us think they’ll stay if a better fuzzy feeling comes along?  We haven’t taught them how to think critically…we haven’t helped them.  Having your beliefs criticized forces you to think (unless you’re content looking like a tool, and most people aren’t).

Part of what religious people have attempted to do is to convince us that any criticism of their beliefs constitutes an “attack” (fellow atheists at the conference used this language and meant it that way).  This is a problem.  Flying a plane into a building, that’s an attack.  Assaulting the very science that has given us a world virtually free of care compared to that of generations before us (and doing so at the expense of the education of our next generation), that’s an attack.  Criticizing bad beliefs is casual and only creates offense in people who want their beliefs accepted without scrutiny – and those are generally the type of beliefs that are anathema to a healthy, progressive society anyway.

We’re not just peddling atheism – we’re opposing unreason (religion/faith just happens to be the most effective engine for unreason).  It’s not about converting people – that’s just a byproduct.  It’s about standing between humanity and the products of delusion.

I personally do not care if religious people see me as a friend.  I very much care that they think about me whenever they think about trotting out their illogic in public.  I want them to have a nagging voice in the back of their conscious that reminds them that if they elect to march into society pushing faith, that I will be waiting on them and that what they say will be scrutinized before the very people that they must keep enthralled in order to win.

I want them to fear me, and around here they do.  It’s the reason we get 1 or 2 evangelists per semester instead of 6 or 7; it’s the reason the BSU has stopped bringing creationists to my campus; and it’s the reason the atmosphere of this university has changed significantly in the last five years.  We have an obligation to criticize unreason when it comes up, and it worries me that some of my colleagues, who admittedly see the danger of religious belief, are content to let it go uncontested for the sake of making nice.  We need not conflate intolerance with intellectual honesty – we cannot afford to do so.

On a daily basis you can find numerous cases of people doing insanely stupid, dangerous things because they were driven by faith. So often we hear cries that the atheist has caricatured faith by pointing these things out. The charge is that we are highlighting a handful of extremists (of course, there’s far more than a handful), and we are admonished to accept that these people have somehow gotten faith wrong. This statement is usually followed by a pablum of condescending sighs and an insistence that the moderate’s faith teaches something completely different than the lunatic in question. But what are religious people really expressing when they say that a particularly dangerous person’s faith is not their faith? Here are some options.

1. My faith is more likely to be true than theirs.
2. My faith is not more likely to be true, but it is more benign.

I can’t think of any other implications we could glean from that sentence. Can you? Leave a comment and I’ll add them if you can.

I think the second option once thought through defaults back to the first. Maybe god wants us to kill certain people (if you’re a Christian, you must admit that he has wanted it before), and if faith can lead us to truth then you must be aware of why your faith is more likely to be true than the extremist’s faith, since you think god wants something different than what the wackos say god wants. Therefore it’s not enough to simply say that your faith is different from that of the extremist – you must show us how the extremist gets faith wrong – you must show how your faith functions on a different mechanic that is “right”, and how that makes your belief about what god wants more likely to be true than theirs. After all, you’re both trying to act in accordance with god’s will, right? You just think that god wants us to do something different.

Of course, faith does not eject the false and keep the true – the notion of faith can embrace any belief. Faith is a horrible tool by which to acquire truth (think of all the people who follow faiths that aren’t yours…most people on Earth must be wrong if you’re right). Faith is a means to circumvent reason and reality. A single person in the 21st century believing that a man walked on water 2,000 years ago would be considered crazy, it is merely the number of people who believe it that rescues the believer from that assessment. As Sam Harris put it, “It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.” Because faith is a means to reject reason and reality when they threaten to obliterate a belief, faith disarms us of our only tools to separate credible truth claims from non-credible truth claims, and often makes bad ideas it allows us to adopt immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. It is clear that the moderate’s faith is no more likely to be true than the extremist’s because they operate on the same mechanics, even if the moderate’s faith is thankfully less dangerous.

Because both faith that leads to murder/discrimination and faith that leads to charity operate under the same principle, it is impossible for me to criticize one but not the other. I am a critic of lazy thinking, and both sides of the theological coin are equally guilty. Citing to me that your faith is different does not rescue it from this accusation, and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not the nutjob got faith wrong – perhaps god really is talking to him and not you.