Refuting Creationism - How Social Norms Evolve - No God(s) Required

Fig. 3: Behavior-specific and situation-specific global everyday norms.

A A color-coded matrix illustrating the global appropriateness ratings (averaged over 71 societies) of fifteen behaviors in each of ten situations. B Scatter plot illustrating appropriateness ratings of fifteen specific behaviors aggregated across various situations (centered on the mean across behaviors) and their strong negative association with the sum of behavior-specific concerns about vulgarity and inconsiderateness. The index ‘b’ indicates that measures refer to behaviors. C Scatter plot illustrating appropriateness ratings of 15 behaviors in ten specific situations (n = 150 situated behaviors, centered on the mean across situations for each behavior) and their strong negative association with the sum of situation-specific concerns about inconsiderateness and lacking sense. The index ‘xb’ indicates that measures refer to situated behaviors. Gray shading indicates 95% confidence intervals.

Eriksson, K., Strimling, P., Vartanova, I. et al.(2025).

Global study reveals similarities and differences between everyday norms - Mälardalen University

An important new study, led by researchers from Mälardalen University (MDU, Sweden) and the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS), in collaboration with over 100 researchers worldwide, sheds light on how social norms vary across cultures yet share fundamental commonalities.

As someone who has travelled extensively in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, Kuwait, Oman, India, and the USA, I can personally attest to cultural differences that extend far beyond language. Everyday activities such as driving, for instance, reveal how deeply embedded these norms are. It can take several days to adapt to local expectations, and even then, you may still be greeted with an indignant horn or an icy stare for something entirely unremarkable in your own country.

Creationists often claim that morality is a divine gift — that without their god, we would have no concept of right and wrong. As an atheist, I grow weary of being told that I “hate God” because I supposedly “want to sin”, or that I lack a moral compass. Such accusations typically reveal more about the accuser than the accused. Many fundamentalists who level these charges online seem less concerned with moral reasoning than with projecting their own supposed moral superiority. The stench of hypocrisy is rarely far away when piety becomes a performance.

Ever since Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” — a unit of cultural inheritance analogous to a gene — in The Selfish Gene, we have had a clear framework for understanding how cultural traits evolve. Memes form complex structures known as “memplexes”, and some of these can behave parasitically, using their hosts to ensure their own propagation.

Just as evolving organisms form clades with shared major features but differing details, human cultures share foundational moral principles — prohibitions against needless killing, reciprocal respect (“treat others as you would want to be treated”), and the protection of children, among others. What varies are the details, both across time and geography.

Bearing False Witness - Why the American Religious Right Are Lying Again.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr

The MMR vaccine doesn’t contain ‘aborted fetus debris’, as RFK Jr has claimed. Here’s the science

In recent years, vaccine misinformation has become an all-too-familiar feature of public discourse, often amplified by prominent figures with political or ideological agendas. One of the more persistent myths involves the claim that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine contains material derived from aborted foetuses—a claim most recently repeated by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement.

In the article below, reproduced with permission under a Creative Commons licence, Professor Hassan Vally—a public health expert and epidemiologist—carefully and comprehensively dismantles this falsehood. Writing for *The Conversation*, he draws on decades of scientific research and vaccine development history to explain precisely why this claim is misleading, how vaccines are actually made, and why they remain one of the safest and most effective tools in modern medicine.

This piece is a timely and important correction to the misinformation circulating in some circles, particularly those aligned with religious or ideological opposition to vaccination. For readers unfamiliar with the scientific details, Professor Vally’s article offers a clear and accessible summary grounded in evidence and public health best practice.

First, an AI analysis of the reasons Kennedy and his far-right religious allies are deliberately misleading the American public and casually risking the lives of American children with a characteristic callous disregard for the children who will inevitably and predictably die as a result of this disinformation:

Christian Hypocrisy News - SBC Pastor And Former Seminary Professor Lied To The FBI To Protect Sexual Predators

Pastor Matt Queen preaching at Friendly Avenue Baptist Church
Greensboro, N.C., May 5, 2024

Pastor Matt Queen, preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, March 2023

Matt Queen, SBC pastor and former seminary professor, pleads guilty to lying to FBI

The fundamental principles of Christianity are supposedly the rules allegedly handed down to Moses by God in the form of the Ten Commandments, although there is some confusion over which ten commandments is the because the only set of ten rules called The Ten Commandments in the Bible are all about what food to eat when, what to sacrifice when, etc., (Exodus 34:17-26) and nothing to do with human interactions - the basis of society.

The rules allegedly give to Moses in the form of writing on two 'tablets of stone' are what are normally referred to as The Ten Commandments, although there are two different versions (Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:7-21), differing especially over the reason for 'keeping the sabbath holy'. Apparently, God changed his mind on that point.

But incorporated in these latter commandments is the Golden Rule almost certainly plagiarized from neighboring cultures because no culture could succeed without a form of it - Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. In other words, do something that fundamentalists seem to find baffling - use your innate empathy ability to work out how to behave in any given situation.

that rule obviously covers killing, stealing, etc., so renders them redundant in any list of rules of civilised behaviour, so perhaps the second most important rule is 'no lying', or, in biblical terms, no bearing false witness against others and no trying to fool people into believing thongs you know aren't true.

You could argue of course that lying to someone, or to paraphrase Mark Twain's, "trying to fool someone into believing something that aint so", is really covered by the Golden Rules because you wouldn't want someone to trick you into believing some thig that aint so, so you shouldn’t try to trick them.

So, given the readiness of Christians to lie for their faith, it is very clear that scant regard is being paid to the rules they would like to impose on the rest of us if ever they regained the power over us that they once had. In fact, piety is used as an excuse to self-licence an exemption from the rules they insist other should live by, demonstrating yet again the truism that religions provide excuses for people who need excuses. They're not only trying to fool us with false witnessing but they're doing something to us that they wouldn't want us to do to them. In other words, they're being something that Jesus allegedly forbade them from being - hypocrites. (Matthew 15: 7-8)

It should come as no surprise than that a leading Southern Baptist has been exposed as a lying hypocrite. Indeed, its's almost as though he believes there is no omnipotent god who will one day judge him, with special scrutiny on how faithfully he's complied with the God-given rules, or not. This particular hypocritepious Christian is none other than a Southern Baptist Convention pastor and seminary professor, Matt Queen, who has just admitted lying under oath to the FBI and creating false documents in order to deceive those investigating allegations of sexual abuse.

Alphons Mucha - Slav Patriot, Mystic and Art Nouveau Master

After the Battle of Grunwald

Alphons Mucha (1924)

The Celebration of Svantovit on Rügen (1912)

Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau: 100 years after its creation, his work is still a balm for a world in upheaval

Some readers might have been surprised to see me posting an article about an acknowledged mystic who saw a close relationship between Slav nationalism and religion, but to me Alphons Mucha is very much like the Irish patriots who identified Catholicism with Irish nationalism, not because they believed in Papal authority and the divine right of priests to meddle in national affairs but because Catholicism was a part of the identity of the Celtic Irish. So, Mucha saw the struggle for Slav self-determination as closely tied to the struggles against Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and later Germanic Protestantism.

Like Irish History, Slav history too can be seen as an illustration of how religion poisons everything, as the Czech people seem to have realised, since they are now second only to France in the proportion of the population who openly self-identify as Atheists.

So, it's interesting to read the following article by Will Visconti, a member of the teaching staff in the Department of Art History, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, introducing an exhibition of Alphons Macha's work in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. I've reproduced it here under a Creative Commons license as a sort of sequel to my earlier article om Mucha's Slav Epic. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Religion In The USA -The Decline Gathers Pace - Two-Thirds Of Baltimore Catholic Parishes To Close

Baltimore Archdiocese's Proposal Could Cut City Parish Locations by Two-Thirds - The Tablet

In contrast to the view we in Europe sometime have of the USA where fundamentalist religion and far-right Christian nationalism seem to be growing, especially in their political influence, the reality is that religion in the USA is following Europe's lead and losing its grip on the population.

Symptomatic of this decline is the recent announcement that the Catholic diocese of Baltimore, Maryland, is to close about two-thirds of its parishes and amalgamate them with others, because the numbers attending church services has declined too far to make them economic to keep open, with their own priest.

They are now facing a similar problem to that experienced in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. The biggest problem for the Anglican Church in the UK is what to do with all its unused and boarded-up churches? Many of these are listed buildings, having special historic or architectural significance and the burial grounds are protected by law, so the owners (the C of E) have a legal duty to maintain the buildings that can't be demolished, sitting on land that can't be built on.

In Baltimore, the problem has been getting increasingly acute for several years now. As the Catholic online news magazine, The Tablet, reported on 18 April 2024:

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy

Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children

Cardinal Enrique Pla y Deniel, Successor to Cardinal Gomá
Seen here giving the Nazi salute alongside Geralissimo Franco

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain.

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.

Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

How To Spot A Militant Secularist

With all the dire warnings now in the media on the dangers of militant secularists and the imminent threat they pose to the fabric of society, law and order and life on this planet as we know it, I thought I would produce a handy print-out-and-keep list to help people recognise these individuals and show why it's important to resist their perverted ways.

The first thing to remember is that most militant secularists try to look like perfectly ordinary people. They wear the same sorts of clothes and may not even look particularly scruffy. They may have a proper job, even a well-paid one. They may even live in your street and drive around in cars or use public transport just like normal people.

Are you sure your neighbours or even members of your family aren't militant secularists? What about aunts and uncles, even cousins or the mailman or school bus driver, even that friendly neighbourhood policeman? They do not have green or purple skin and very rarely have red eyes. In fact, in most respects they look just like you or me and are not easy to pick out in a crowd - unless you know the signs.

It is important to remember that, just like socialists, they may look like perfectly respectable, ordinary people!

However, there are a few tell-tale signs that, try as they may, militant secularists are not able to keep hidden for long. If you learn these they can become fairly easy to spot even across a crowded room.