C.S.Lewis, You Cannot Be Serious! 1

Clive Staples Lewis
(29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963)

C.S.Lewis' renowned 'Argument From Desire' is one of Christian apologetic's more popular arguments for the existence of the Christian god.

It is also one of his more laughable arguments, of which there were several, and it is of course, like all apologetics, dishonestly presuppositional in that is assumes the answer then inserts that into the argument to make it come out the way the apologist wanted.

And the sheer arrogance of it is breathtaking!

Briefly, his argument was, "Every desire is necessarily a desire for something, and every natural desire must have some object that will satisfy it. Since humans desire the joy and experience of God, therefore there must be a God that will satisfy our desires." And of course that god must be the locally popular one!

He stated it reasonably concisely:

A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called "falling in love" occurred in a sexless world.

C.S.Lewis; The Weight Of Glory (1949)

Why We Need To Understand Evolution.

One of the things a proper understanding of evolution teaches us is humility. When I say a proper understanding, I don't mean to the sort of depths to which a research biologist would go, just the sort of level of understanding that you can get by reading a book or two written by people like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould for people who don't have degrees in biology.

One of the things you learn is just how wrong your pre-conceptions were. For example, I bet most people who thought they knew what evolution was about, and who hadn't rejected it out of hand on religious grounds, thought evolution was all about some sort of 'ladder of evolution' with life arranged in a hierarchy with less evolved creatures at the bottom, leading up through more evolved creatures like reptiles, then mammals with apes towards the top and humans sitting on the top rung as the most highly evolved, and therefore most superior, of all life. Animals which obviously weren't ancestral to humans, like elephants, giraffes or bears, were just left clinging to the sides of the ladder, looking like mistakes and having no useful purpose other than as food, clothing or ornaments for humans.

The 'social Darwinists' took this one step further and arranged human life in the same sort or hierarchy, with, of course, their own 'race', and even their own social class, being the most evolved, so, sitting right on the top-most rung of this ladder of evolution sat the ruling class of the superior race with the others arranged in descending order below them so the lower orders of the lesser races were little different to the animals below them.

A basic understanding of evolution changes all that. With a basic understanding comes the realization that evolution is all about life diversifying like a branching tree and not one species giving birth to a more highly evolved one which in turn produces another 'new improved' model.

A basic understanding of evolution shows us that all species evolve and that every one is at the top of it's own 'ladder' of evolution with the rungs below occupied only by its direct ancestors. Humans are nothing special at all in this respect and the idea that one human race has more highly evolved skin, hair, noses or brains is incomprehensible. Whatever shape or colour we are is merely the result of our particular evolutionary line. We have all been evolving for the same amount of time. And the same goes for every other species, no matter that it has features which were found in our common ancestors. A lizard is not just an under-evolved mammal; it is a fully evolved lizard. A fern is not a plant that hasn't yet learned to grow flowers and bear fruit; it is a fully evolved fern, no less perfectly adapted to its environment than a rose bush or a daisy.

This realisation is humbling. It is humbling to know that, in the grand scheme of things, you are the result of billions of iterations of the perfecting mechanism of natural selection; that you are the descendant of survivors who never failed the fitness test. But mostly, it's humbling to know that so is everything else.

But there is another way in which an understanding of evolution is humbling; and this form of humility is something we are sadly lacking but desperately need right now.

Evolution is not, at its fundamental level, just about evolving genes. All replicators in a selective environment will evolve. As writers like Susan Blackmore have shown, humans, and to a lesser extent other species, have another set of replicators in addition to their genes. We have memes. Memes are units of cultural inheritance which we pass on to the next generation and, like genes, they form mutually beneficial alliances and 'memeplexes' which can behave in many ways like genes for skin colour, hair type, shape of nose or epicathic eye flaps. And of course a component part of most human cultures is a memeplex we call religion.

Our cultures are inherited in our memes but, unlike our genes which are fixed at conception, our memetic cultures are changeable. We can actually change our memes at will. Maybe not easily but we can do it. We can, if we wish and if we make the effort, move to another country, learn their language and songs, adopt their traditions and superstitions.

And this is where a basic understanding of evolution helps us understand cultures. One of the inherited memes common to just about all cultures is that our particular culture sits at the top of a ladder of cultural development, just like the mistaken view of evolution I've just described. But of course we know that, since all cultures are the result of an evolutionary process, and that all cultures have been evolving for the same amount of time, that all cultures are equally evolved.

This means there is no such thing as a superior culture or an inferior culture. And this explains why people get upset when you tell them your culture is the best and that they should become more like you if they want to be fully developed and 'normal'. It also explains why other people get upset when you assume they would be like you if only they had the where-with-all or that they are just longing to be like you if only their corrupt government would let them. And it explains why people get upset when you tell them they have the wrong religion.

If we could really understand this quite simple fact, it would then be less of a shock to find, when you invade their countries to overthrow their government, they don't dance in the streets and greet you with wild enthusiasm, grateful that you've come to teach them better ways, but that they are more likely to try to throw you out at the earliest opportunity.

In fact it should be no surprise that they react in exactly the same way that you would if they invaded your country or told you you have an inferior religion and need their help to learn the right one.

But then, if we understood that we're are all as good and worthwhile as one another, there would not be these wars and invasions in the first place and people would not kill one another in order to find out who has the best imaginary invisible friend and who is the one who knows the real truth.

None of this should really be surprising since human culture is merely an aspect of human biology and human biology is merely biology, of which evolution is a fundamental principle.

If we could only grasp that simple idea which a basic understanding of evolution and of the memetic nature of human culture can give us, we could end cultural chauvinism. Just as we are beginning to understand that we are better than no one and no one is better than us; that our race and our species are better than no other and none are better than ours, we should be beginning to understand that our culture is better than no other and none are better than ours.

Like us and our species and all living things, our cultures are all winners in the fitness test of evolution.

An understanding of physics and chemistry gave us weapons of mass destruction. An understanding of biology might just prevent us killing ourselves with them.

Creationists' Macroevolution Lie

Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs

Bullfinch Pyrrhula pyrrhula

Linnet Carduelis cannabina

Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis

Crossbill Loxia curvirostra

Siskin Carduelis spinus

Okay, let's look at the difference between so-called macroevolution and microevolution with a little mind experiment. There will be a questions at the end, so make sure you keep up as we go along.

Suppose we have a species of finch living in Europe before the last Ice Age and living on, say, various small seeds, pretty much as the goldfinch does now.

The shape and strength of this finch's beak will be determined by a few genes. Maybe one controlling the size and another controlling the muscles which work it. It really doesn't matter for our mind experiment exactly how many or what each does, we can think of them collectively as a 'beak gene' so long as we remember we are using the term 'gene' here as a shorthand for maybe a collection of genes.

As with any other gene there will be slight variations which will be inherited by offspring and which may make the beak better or worse at eating this or that food.

Now, imagine the ice sheets gradually extending from the north as the Ice Age sets in, and pushing the finch's range south, together with some of its food plants, some of which may well become extinct in the process, forcing the finch to adapt to other foods. Also, as its range moves south it may come into contact with new food plants which weren't available in the north.

Our finch will eventually find itself split into two or three isolated populations: one in the Iberian Peninsula; one in Italy and maybe a third in the Balkans, each with its own distinct mixture and availability of different foods.

These food plants will also be adapting, driven by the presence of our finches. Those seeds which have a harder case won't get eaten and so will produce more offspring with those harder seed cases than the soft-cased seeds and the finches with stronger beaks will be able to eat them, so the beaks will tend to get stouter and stronger. So we may have an arms-race developing in, for example Italy which leads to finches with short, strong beaks good at cracking seeds.

Meanwhile in Iberia, another food plant may be be more successful if it can protect its seed at the end of a tube which only the finches with the thinnest beaks can reach, so another arms-race may develop in which the winning finches are those with long, curved beaks.

And maybe in the Balkan Peninsula another arms race has produced finches which didn't need to change much from the original finch.

Now, thinking back to our 'beak gene': all that has happened in our three populations is that variations in this gene have been selected by the different environments in what creationists would call microevolution. Small steps at a time with each generation being filtered by the environment by natural selection so that gradually, and in line with changes in the finches' environments, differences have arisen in the three populations as each had adapted and become specialised for that populations environment. In one population one set of variant will have come to dominate in the gene pool; in another population, a different set will dominate.

Now, have we got three different species, three races of the same species, or three different subspecies? In fact, at that point in the finch's evolutionary history the question is entirely academic and of no biological significance whatsoever because the populations can't interbreed anyway, being physically isolated.

The test will come when the ice retreats and the populations move north again, together with their food plants. If their food plants don't extend their range northwards than the finches might not either, even if they could. But let's assume they do so.

Let's assume also that the only change in their genomes has been in the 'beak gene'. Admittedly, this is unlikely because other environmental factors will have been moulding other genes which will also be microevolving, but, to illustrate a point, let's just stick with the 'beak gene'.

If that has been the only change than the populations would almost certainly be able to interbreed, so at that point in their evolution they would at best be varieties or maybe subspecies, but what sort of beak would their offspring have? The probability is that they would have some sort of intermediate beak. But what use is an intermediate length stoutish beak when you need to reach seeds at the end of a long, thin tube? What use would it be for cracking tough seed husks?

What we would now have is an environment in which the offspring of those finches which DID interbreed were being selected out by starvation whilst anything which acted to prevent interbreeding would be highly favourable and so variations such as different display plumages, mating rituals, territorial songs, etc., which made interbreeding less likely would be favoured. As with 'beak genes', genes allowing interbreeding are now being selected against and variations of those same genes which inhibit it are being selected for, so changing their frequency in the respective gene pools, just as happened with 'beak genes' because of a different set of environmental forces.

So You Think You Don't Believe In Evolution?

It's really very simple.

The problem with creationists is they've been made to believe evolution is either something really complicated and hard to understand, or else it's something really stupid that no sane person could believe, like monkeys having human babies or crocodiles changing into ducks.

It's neither.

In fact it's something so simple that no sane person could not believe it. There are only three things needed for evolution to happen.

1. Inheritance of physical characteristics.
2. Imperfect reproduction of those characteristics to give variation.
3. An environment which favours some variations over others making it more likely they will be passed on to the next generation.

Does anyone seriously doubt any of these? If so which?

Saint Patrick

Written words, for some reason, seem to have added power as though truth can exist in a book, especially when written long ago.

St. Patrick was probably the first Bishop of Armagh. Despite countless stories and legends, very little is actually known about him with any certainty. The account of his capture by Irish pirates and enslavement, then subsequent escape, are taken from his Confession which is the second oldest document in Irish history; the oldest being a letter of excommunication from Patrick to the soldiers of King Coroticus (probably Caracticus who may have been Irish or British) for murdering some of his converts and enslaving others.

According to this Confession, which seems to have been written to the British clergy to justify his claim to jurisdiction over the island of Ireland, he was captured by slave-raiders from Ireland and spent 6 years as a slave before escaping and returning to his home in Britain. He was probably the son of a Roman-British official of some importance whom Patrick says was a deacon, himself the son of a priest. If the slave-raid is genuine this would place Patrick somewhere on the West coast of Britain, probably between Cumbria and West Wales. He seems to have been fluent in Latin and may well have spoke Welsh, then the native British language south of the Scottish central valley and possibly north of it.

Ireland had been completely untouched by the Romans and consisted of a loose federation of warring chiefs and petty kings who nominally owed allegiance to a 'High King' of Tara (a sacred hill in Central Ireland) and subscribed to the 'Brehon Law', a Celtic tradition by which contracts, land disputes, marriage, etc, were settled. Patrick describes Ireland as 'in ultimis terrae' (at the ends of the earth) and 'usque ubi nemo ultra est' (as far as where there is no one beyond). The religion was essentially Druidic where the earth was a spirit with whom the High King symbolically united at his coronation, the ghosts of legendary ancestors stalked the land and an earlier people, the Tuatha Dé Danann, still lived underground.

In his Confession, Patrick claims to have been untaught and lacking in fluency, however, the construction of his arguments and his obvious mastery of Latin in the very document in which he makes that claim have led scholars to doubt this claim.

After his putative escape from slavery he trained for the priesthood and was eventually ordained as a bishop. He tells of a dream in which the people from 'Silva Vocluti' near the 'western sea' were calling him to come and walk with them once more, so he decided to return to Ireland and never seems to have left.

Whatever his motives and whatever the truth of his enslavement was, he quickly seems to have gained some authority amongst the scattered Christian communities which had already been established in the island. He had the backing of the Ui Néill with their considerable military and political power centred on Armagh which became the centre of the St. Patrick cult, one of several Christian cults in Ireland. The primacy of Armagh, and with it the cult of St. Patrick was papally endorsed in 1111.

One of the legendary 'contributions' St. Patrick made to Irish social and political development was the integration of the Brehon Law with Christianity, though this can be seen as a virtual replacement. The probably apocryphal story is that Patrick called all the chiefs together and went through each of the traditional laws explaining to them where they were right and proper according to the Bible and where they needed 'improving'. One of the 'improvements' was in stripping women of the right to property, inheritance, political power and divorce which they had enjoyed under the Celtic traditional law, which the entirely male chieftainship seems readily to have agreed.

The strategy Patrick adopted seems to have been the one the Pope told St. Augustine to use in his mission to the Anglo-Saxons. It was the one which, judging by the multitude of local legendary saints found throughout France, Spain, Wales and elsewhere, seems to have been routinely employed by Christian missionaries, that of converting the religion, not the people.

The Christian Celtic church which Patrick established in Ireland gave rise in turn to the Columban Church established by Colum Cille, or St. Columba, who was himself from the Ui Néill and influential among the Scoti tribe which established the kingdom of Dal Riata based in Antrim, in Northern Ulster and extending across the Hebrides into Western Scotland. The term 'Scoti', originally the Roman name for the Irish, so gave us the name 'Scotland'.

Through St.Columba, Christianity was spread to the Picts of Scotland to establish Christianity in the North of Britain from where it penetrated Northumbria, one of the (then pagan) Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which had replaced Roman rule in England. The Irish Church had also penetrated Wales, especially the South West at St Davids and, so it is claimed, had supplied teachers and missionaries to the emerging Christian church in France. It was probably in France where Patrick had trained for the priesthood.

The Celtic Church, although nominally recognising the Pope in Rome as the head of the church, was for practical purposes, autonomous, and had it's own date for Easter, then the most important Christian festival, and an issue which still divides the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

This issue was eventually settled at the Synod of Whiby, ostensibly called to settle the dating of Easter but actually to establish the authority of Rome over the Celtic Church and so the supremacy of the Augustinian Church based in Canterbury over the Columban Church, the political supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons over the Celts and of Wessex over the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

One of the supreme ironies of Irish history is that the confiscated land of the last Earl of Ulster and last Gaelic Chief of Ireland, Hugh O'Neil, of the Ui Néill, direct descendent of Niall of the Nine Hostages, was the land upon which the Ulster Plantation was established and through which a concerted effort was made by the English to replace and expunge the Catholic Church which Patrick, through the Ui Néill, had originally helped to established.

But maybe the most interesting thing about St. Patrick, certainly from the point of view of an Atheist and anyone interested in how legends and myths grow and develop, are the many stories and legends about St. Patrick's magical powers. Stories about banishing snakes from Ireland, crossing the River Loire using his cloak as a raft and then hanging it on a bush which promptly burst into flower, of healing the sick and curing the blind, of defeating the Devil in combat. There is no evidence for any of these things; they are fanciful stories woven around a historical figure who has been given exaggerated and elaborate powers which exist only in the imagination of the story-teller.

For example, the story that Patrick banished the snakes seems to have been invented in the 12th century by a Northumbrian monk named Jocelyn, whom the wife of the Anglo-Norman John De Courcy brought to her husband’s court in Downpatrick. The Graeco-Roman writer Solinus had already recorded the fact that Ireland was snake-free a good two hundred years before St. Patrick was born.

These stories tell us little of the actual person, but a great deal about the thinking of those who invented them and the culture from whence they came. A culture in which it was believed magic could be done with words and gestures, where animals obeyed the will of humans and a world populated by spirits and ghosts and where the Devil was fully expected to make a personal appearance. When collections of these myths and legends acquire the proclaimed sanctity of holy writ the stories become no more believable and no less magical than when they were invented and written down in the first place and yet many people believe they do.

I wonder what the resulting religion would have been had the stories of St Patrick and his magical powers ever gained the status of holy writ like the legends about Jesus did, instead of remaining attached to the religion and the culture which spawned them.

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Reassuring Christians

It must be reassuring to Christians to read their Bible and discover that Jesus was a hypocrite too.

Where Have All The Miracles Gone?

Mythology is full of stories of divine interventions; of things magically happening before people's eyes; of dragon's teeth turning into heavily-armoured soldiers; of burning bushes talking; of magic trees with magic fruit and talking snakes. We are told of giants rising up from the sea; of kings who could turn stuff into gold by touching it; of wolves rearing human children; of people being swallowed by great fish and walking out of them unharmed three days later.

If these myths are to be believed wooded staves could turn into snakes; whole armies could hide inside a wooden horse; whole seas could be made to open up to allow people to walk across them; laws could appear written on tablets of

A Question Of Integrity

Very much has been written and said over the last few weeks about the Oxford debate between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and senior cleric of the Anglican Church.

Unfortunately, because there was a great deal more said which was of greater interest to both sides of the debate, almost all comment was focussed on Dawkins' acknowledgement that he was actually agnostic about the existence of a god because he could never be 100% certain about anything.

To those who know of Richard Dawkins work and his commitment to the scientific method, and especially to those who have read "The God Delusion", this was no surprise at all because he says exactly that in it. Indeed it would have been astonishing and completely out of character if he had said anything else in response to that question.

No scientist who values his/her reputation for intellectual honesty and integrity would ever claim to be one hundred percent certain about anything. Indeed, uncertainty is the very thing which drives scientific enquiry and hence scientific progress.

Uncertainty is a fundamental scientific principle, and not just at the particle physics level. The door is always left open to the possibility of any scientific theory being shown to be wrong, no matter how unlikely. About the nearest thing to certainty in science is the idea that there are no certainties.

What has gone almost without comment however was Rowan Williams' response to Richard Dawkins' answer, and especially what that revealed about his personal integrity and religion's regard for truth and honesty. One would have expected someone who values intellectual honesty to have applauded his answer and to have complimented Dawkins on his integrity, at the same time having the good grace to acknowledge that he can't be 100% certain that a god does exist.

Instead, Williams significantly passed over that opportunity and laughs along with the audience (1:11:45 in this video) then sits back and smiles beatifically as though he's just scored a point simply by sitting and listening. And so he betrayed his lack of personal integrity and lack of good grace. And this for someone who would claim to be an intellectual and guardian of the Anglican Community's morals!

Why does he do this?

Simply because, for someone in his position, where the whole edifice of the 'faith' he ministers to, and the people who depend on it for their livelihoods, even the slightest admission of uncertainty would be disastrous. To have the Archbishop of Canterbury admitting to being agnostic about the Christian God would be unthinkable, no matter how demonstrably true it may be.

Williams knows full well that selling the delusion of certainty to people who crave it is what the entire Christian Church exists for. The existence of the Church and the perpetuation of that lie is far more important to the priesthood than mere intellectual honesty.

For Rowan Williams, it would be more than his job's worth to admit the simple truth that there is no certainty, even, and especially, when it comes to questions about the existence of gods.

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A Bedtime Story For Christian Children

This nice little bedtime story for children is from the Bible. It is almost guaranteed to make your children grow up respecting priests and loving God.

Once upon a time in the city of Jericho there was a spring without any water, so no one could grow any food because the ground was too dry. So the men of the town told a kind priest who had been given special magic powers by God.

The priest said there was no water because the water was sick so he sent the men to get him some salt which he sprinkled on the ground where water should have been coming from. Somehow, that did the trick and the water was healed so the townsfolk had some water again.

Then the priest went out of the town gates where some children teased him because he was bald so the priest used his special magic powers to make two bears come out of the woods and eat forty two of the children. The children's mummies and daddies didn't mind because they probably thought their children deserved to be eaten by bears for teasing a kind priest just because he was bald.

Then the kind priest went away and lived happily ever after. The people of the town still remember how kind he had been to them and the wonderful things he did.

2 Kings 2:19-25

Goodnight children. Sweet dreams!

Tomorrow we'll have a story about a special fire for burning and torturing people in if they do what the priests say.

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When The Conclusion Is Sacred Facts Must Be Ignored

'Red Deer Cave Man'

Photograph: Darren Curnoe

'Red Deer Cave Man'
From Longlin cave in Guangxi province, China.

Photograph: Darren Curnoe

'Red Deer Cave people' may be new species of human | Guardian

We are in for a treat as creationists show us how they cope with a new piece of scientific data.

A team of Chinese and Australian palaeoanthropologists recently announced the discovery of hominid remains in a couple of sites in South China which "... are unlike recent populations of modern humans in several respects, and the mosaic of more archaic features could indicate the dispersal of a poorly known and more primitive form of modern human that left Africa before the main exodus at about 60,000 years. This dispersal could have reached as far as China, surviving there for many millennia, before disappearing in the last 12,000 years."

These remains have been dated using both carbon dating and uranium-thorium dating to be between 11,500 and 14,300 years old.

The difficulty now is determining how and where these people fit in the Homo branch of the evolutionary tree. I recently wrote about the difficulty taxonomists face when trying to fit archaic specimens into a taxonomic system designed primarily for classifying living organisms.

These undoubted humans lived at a time when fully modern Homo sapiens lived to the south and east of their known range and had already developed agriculture, and yet they may not have interbred with them. This would imply a different species incapable of interbreeding successfully.

Bull's Eye!

Stand a scientist in front of a dart board and he/she will throw the darts at it, then walk up to the board, look at where on the board the darts landed, add up the numbers and declare the score.

Even not particularly scientifically minded people will normally play darts this way too.

What they won't normally do is throw the darts at a wall then draw a bull's eye round them and declare themselves the winner. Well, not if they don't want to be the laughing stock of the pub and get themselves barred for damaging the wall.

Yet religious people, and especially creationists and professional apologists, do exactly that when you try to debate with them. There's you trying to make a point with evidence and explaining what it means and why it doesn't mean something else. Then, often when you've just hit 180 and want double top for out, they pluck a 'fact' from thin air, define it as proof of their god and declare victory.

And you're just left there, bemused that any normal adult ever imagined that was how you played the game, without ever wondering why normal people don't play it that way.

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An Unholy Alliance

Poverty Religion Education Wilfred R Martin

There appears to be an unholy trinity at work in human populations. This trinity results in people being more overtly religious; more fundamentally religious and more aggressively religious.

The three components of this trinity are:

• Poverty
• Ignorance either from under-education or educational under-achievement
• Fervent or militant religiosity

There are several studies into the link between poverty and religiosity.

This report by Barry Ritholtz, More Poverty = More Religion, used polling data from a Gallop study and represents the results graphically. The conclusion was 'The more poverty a nation has, the higher the “religiosity” in that nation. In general, richer countries are less religious than poorer ones.' The study also noted that 'The United States, which has the highest religiosity relative to its wealth on the planet' is an outlier, as is readily seen on the chart.

A 2009 study by Dr Tomas Rees published in Journal of Religion and Society (Vol 11) found 'Income inequality, and hence personal insecurity, was ... an important determinant of religiosity...'

So the apparent anomaly of the United States shown in the Gallop survey may be because, whilst absolute poverty is less marked there, income inequality (that is the gap between the richest and poorest) is actually higher than in many middle-income countries.

The link between education and religion per se is not so clear cut as that between income inequality and religiosity.

In the United States, religious attendance rises sharply with education across individuals, but religious attendance declines sharply with education across denominations. This puzzle is explained if education both increases the returns to social connection and reduces the extent of religious belief. The positive effect of education on sociability explains the positive education-religion relationship. The negative effect of education on religious belief causes more educated individuals to sort into less fervent religions, which explains the negative relationship between education and religion across denominations. Cross-country differences in the impact of education on religious belief can explain the large cross-country variation in the education-religion connection. These cross-country differences in the education-belief relationship can be explained by political factors (such as communism) which lead some countries to use state-controlled education to discredit religion.

Glaeser, E.L. and Sacerdote, B.I.; "Education And Religion"; Journal of Human Capital (2, 2 (Summer 2008): 188-215)

So it would seem that religious belief is not reduced by education as such, but that the propensity for more fervent, fundamentalist religions is reduced in better-educated societies. However, this data is possibly complicated by the association with the more fundamentalist religions being followed predominantly by the less educated social groups, which invariably are also the lower income groups.

It appears that the link between income inequality, or relative poverty and fundamentalism is the stronger of the two with that between (lack of) education and religion possibly being a consequence of the link between them.

The reason for this is probably to be found in the hope that religion gives to people who really have little to hope for in their lives; people who through a combination of race, social status, neighbourhood and/or lack of education, can see what the better off and the super-rich have and know that it's beyond their reach. People who have, for all practical purpose, no realistic prospect of escape from poverty and hopelessness other than by bringing about a fundamental change in the political system; a system which is dominated by the haves and the have mores and from which they have become increasingly distanced and disenfranchised by its irrelevance to them and their resulting apathy towards it.

Is it really surprising that people from whom all realistic hope for a better life in this life has been taken would fall prey to those who sell them the notion of a better life some day in another one, when all it takes is a donation (to show Jesus how much you love him), an hour or so in church on Sunday, and singing a few songs at the top of your voice to shout down your doubts?

It it really surprising that people who are at the bottom of the social order like to pretend to be superior because they have a special friend in a mega-powerful god and a 'personal relationship' with the creator of everything? And is it surprising that people with little education and from a culture resistant to it, find it difficult or distasteful to learn the science and history which would enable them to understand better the superstition they are buying into?

And is it really surprising that there exists a parasitic class of religious charlatans and snake-oil salesmen practically falling over one another to tap into this lucrative market for easy answers, false hope and a false sense of smug superiority?

And is it really surprising that there exists a class of unscrupulous politicians hailing from the very class which needs a large, poor, politically powerless underclass to supply its demands for cheap and compliant labour, which promotes these primitive superstitions with such enthusiasm, to fool the poor and dispossessed into believing they are on their side.

And therein lies another unholy alliance; that between the ruling class, the priesthood and the religion of the people. It's the same as that between the drug producer, the pedlar and the junkie.

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If God Wants Us To Believe The Bible...

If God wants us to believe the biblical account of creation why did he create a universe in which:

• The ratio of the light elements, hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium in the universe is exactly as predicted if the universe resulted from an intense inflation from a singularity?
• The Microwave background radiation is exactly as it is predicted to be if the inflation from a singularity occurred 13.82 billion years ago?
• The large-scale universe is expanding at a rate which is exactly as required to produce a wavelength for the microwave background radiation's as it is today?
• The sun is exactly as we would expect of a second or third generation star in a universe which is as old as the microwave background tells us and has light elements in the ratio which the Big Bang theory predicts?
• The radiometric data from rocks on Earth and of meteorites gives an age of the solar system of 4.57 billion years and and age of Earth of 4.4-4.5 billion years?

So What IS This Soul Thing?

Where on earth did this idea of a soul come from?

One thing we can be sure about is that it's a very old idea. In fact it was probably the reason for religions in the first place as there is archaeological evidence of burials from the the Palaeolithic and burial is generally taken as evidence of some sort of religion and ideas of an afterlife (which implies belief in a soul). There is even some evidence that Neanderthals may have had ritual burials. There is actual textual evidence of belief in a soul from the Bronze Age in the form of biblical writings, Sanskrit Vedas and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So why is this notion that there is a separate entity inhabiting our bodies and which somehow continues to exist after death, such a strong and persistent belief in all human societies?

Can Anyone Explain the Purpose Of Prayer?

"Oh Lord! Won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porche's, I must make amends!"
You see, what I just don't get is how prayer can possibly change the mind of an all-knowing, infinitely wise, all-powerful, omni-benevolent god who has defined right and wrong for us and knows our deepest, most secret thoughts.

Such a god would have ensured only the best for its creation and would have set this in motion right from the start, so the purpose of prayer can't possibly to persuade such a god to change its mind.

What Warning Would You Put In A Gideon Bible?

For those few who don't know, a 'Gideon Bible' is a Bible supplied by the 'Gideons International' to hotels, hospitals, schools and other approved places. You will normally find one in the bedside cabinet in a hotel room. They are distributed by morbidly paranoid theophobic people in the hope that an omnibenevolent imaginary god won't torture them for eternity after they die.

Spreading primitive superstition and resistance to AIDS prevention measures in Africa

In the interest of balance and the welfare of potential victims, I feel that Atheists and Agnostics should insert a slip of paper containing a health warning about the contents of the Bible.

Genocide, Bible style.

This should of course contain a warning about the violence, killing, explicit sexual references, child abuse, objectivisation and dehumanisation of women, aggressively genocidal racism, explicit animal cruelty and incitement to commit murder and hate crimes amongst other activities unacceptable in a civilised society. It should also contain a warning about parental guidance, or at least the guidance of a sane adult being advisable for children and gullible people.

And that's just the first five 'books' in the Bible.

There are obviously very many other things innocent people need to be warned about, and therein lies the problem:

How would we fit this list onto, preferably, a single side of A5 (or maybe centre-folded single sheet of A4) in a succinct message.

So, here is YOUR chance to help spread the good news of Atheism, Humanism and rational thought and to help people understand the harm that primitive superstitions can do and how to avoid being fooled into believing in them and to escape from them if already infected.

Please suggest suitable, succinct, powerful, and above all, complete and truthful wording for such an insert. Copies of the best can be converted to a suitable form for concerned citizens to print off and distribute when travelling.

Freedom from religion. Free at last, free at last!

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Favourite Fallacies - The Straw Man.

One of the major problems faced by creationists and religious apologists is the mountain of science and scientific theories they need to somehow get past and still persuade themselves and/or their target audience that they have a valid, even superior argument. So they adopt strategies designed basically to pretend the evidence against them just isn't there.

All of these strategies are fallacious of course, but perhaps the commonest devise is known as the Straw Man Fallacy. The straw man is a metaphor for something which can be easily and safely attacked and which looks vaguely like the thing they would like to be attacking but know they can't. Usually, the straw man will be constructed in such a ludicrously childish fashion that it is easily dismantled by anyone with very low intellectual ability, and this of course is where apologists gain by using this device because that is usually a characteristic of the audience they are trying to fool with the straw man fallacy in the first place.

For example, you will see the Theory of Evolution misrepresented as a theory which says a monkey suddenly gave birth to a human or a living animal suddenly changed into another species, or that an entire species changed overnight into a different one so you would not expect to see any of the earlier ones around now. You will also see more subtle misrepresentations such implying that biologists recognise a distinction between evolution which results in a new taxon and evolution which results in mere change in frequency or a variable characteristic within a species. The most popular straw man in this respect is the pretence that the Theory of Evolution predicts and requires a complete set of fossils recording every change in every species throughout its evolutionary history and that the Theory of Evolution depends entirely on this requirement.

A common device used is to conflate two or more scientific theories into one, or more often, two or more straw men parodies of scientific theories such as the big bang, abiogenesis and evolution into one and throw stones at that parody instead of the real science. So you will see arguments attacking the idea that life arose in a big bang or that rocks evolved intelligence.

And of course, where this tactic works most effectively is when it is used on those with low reasoning ability and/or low scientific education who lack the ability to recognise the straw man parody and so take it on trust that it is an accurate and honest representation of science. Combined with their naive ignorance, the attacks from creationist charlatans provide them with the perfect excuse to pretend to know better than those who have spent time learning the subject and acquiring the necessary understanding, and all by learning a few simple parodies and some infantile questions based on them. This is also helped in those cultures where it tends to be assumed that those defending religions are honest and can be relied upon to tell the truth.

So we now see unfortunate victims of this deception swarming onto the Internet and infesting the social network media proudly showing off the 'killer arguments' they have picked up from people who've used this technique on them only to find they're making fools of themselves and displaying both their credulous gullibility and ignorance and ending up discrediting the very thing they came rushing excitedly on line to promote.

The other major group of people on whom this technique works, and at whom it it often aimed, are fellow religionists who have invested so much of themselves in their religion that the cognitive dissonance which results in learning science is too difficult to cope with, so avoidance strategies are readily adopted. Very often too these people will be earning their living from religion so will have made more than just a psychological investment.

Look beyond the straw man to the motives of those who assiduously create them and what do we see? We see people who know they need to create straw men to attack in the first place. What we don't see are people who have seriously looked at the science itself and made an effort to understand it, and who may be genuinely puzzled by it or genuinely mistaken about it. We see people who, if they have looked at all, have only looked for things to parody and misrepresent and have obviously had little regard for the way the body of science grows and develops, so that, for example, a book or paper, or even a popular magazine article from many years ago will be presented as current theory. And of course there will be the deliberate confusion of even the meanings of words where there is more than one current definition, such as the different popular and scientific meanings of the word 'theory' and 'law'.


Perhaps more than any other fallacy, the Straw Man Fallacy exemplified both the dishonesty of creationist and religious apologists and the naive ignorance and intellectual indolence of their credulous victims.

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Finding Fossils In The Dark

The River Evenlode

By the age of about ten I knew every path in every wood in the square mile around the small ancient northern Oxfordshire hamlet on the edge of the Wychwood Forest I was born and grew up. The hamlet where Romans had built a villa and named the footpath Via Dessica which we still called Viziker.

I knew not just every path, but practically every tree, spring, badgers' set, rabbit burrow and briar patch. I knew where the wild gooseberries and strawberries grew, which nut trees had the best nuts, where the cleanest spring water was and which crabapple trees had the sweetest apples in autumn.

Have You Written Your Book Review Today?

The Atheist community (for want of a better term) is probably amongst the best educated of any community in terms of the range of interests they have and particularly in the range and number of books they read. Many Atheist will be voracious readers of science, philosophy and even theology. Many will have interests in history, geography, politics, economics, travel, natural history (rather than the science of biology) and classics, and central to our philosophy of life will be a love of free thinking, rationalism, truth and objectivity.

So, who better to write reviews of the many popular religious and creationist books, as well popular science, evolution, humanist and atheist books?  We owe it to potential buyers of creationist and popular theology books to write honest, considered and objective reviews on sites such as Amazon, which positively encourages them. It's worth bearing in mind that you'll be writing for people who read books and are not afraid to own more than one, so not your typical Twitter creationist.

And, of course, we owe it to potential buyers of popular science, atheist and humanist books, to be equally factual, objective and honest.

Here is a link to an article explaining how to write a book review. There are lots of others on the Internet.

Go to it good people. 

Christians! Be Sensible Now And Tell Me This

Okay, Christians, let's be sensible for a moment. Answer these for me, please:

1. You tell me I need your god's forgiveness for something Adam and Eve are believed by some to have done many thousands of years ago. Why should that bother me if I don't believe in your god or the Adam and Eve myth, please?
2. Leaving that aside for a moment and accepting for the sake of argument that I am somehow responsible for something someone else did a long time ago, and over which I could not possibly have any influence or be held to account for, how did a blood sacrifice absolve me of that responsibility exactly, please? Note: I'm not asking whether it did or not; I'm asking how it worked exactly.

Are We Finally Slipping The Religious Leash?

During my lifetime, and mostly since the end of WWI, Britain and the rest of Europe and the USA, indeed all of the developed world and a great deal of the under-developed world, has become increasingly liberal and egalitarian.

Annie Kenny & Sylvia Pankhurst
Womens' Social And Political Union

Although we still have a long way to go we have seen a lessening of the class system in Britain so that we no longer send our spare daughters into the service of the middle and upper classes there to be at the disposal of the men of the house, as in my grandparents day. The once outrageously radical idea of women voting is now taken for granted, even in Switzerland where the last Canton granted women the right to vote and stand for election in February 1971.

1963 Civil Rights March
Lincoln Memorial

Following the Civil Rights Campaign of the Early 1960s and the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, Black people in USA have made major advances in civil rights. Discrimination on grounds of race, religion, gender and ethnicity is now outlawed in the EU and USA. In the EU working people have employment rights far in excess of anything dreamed of by even the most radical socialists of the 1950s and to the intense annoyance of the political right.

Capital punishment has been abolished in much of the civilised world. Women, with access to contraception, now have the same sexual freedom that men always enjoyed, and the right to planned pregnancies and to limit their family size. In the UK, women now have full property rights and can make contracts in their own name where previously they were regarded more as a possession of their husband or father, at least in the eyes of the law as they were in my grandparents day.

Recently the right to civil partnerships between homosexual couples has been established in many countries and the Christian churches are fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent this being extended to full marriage rights. Yet only two generations ago homosexual activity was a criminal offence which meant imprisonment and shame for those convicted of loving the wrong person. And it still is in those countries where religious clerics still wield power, even carrying the death penalty.

There is still a great deal to be done in terms of freedom from discrimination but few people nowadays question the basic principle. When I was a teenager many of the rights we now take for granted were considered radical, extremist, even dangerous and well worth the security services paying them special attention. Some people even advocated that boys with long hair should be arrested and forced to have it cut!

So what's the cause of this? Why have we in many different countries, speaking many different languages and with quite different histories, all arrived at the collective opinion that the right to be treated as the equal of any another person is a basic human right?

Of course, correlation does not establish causality, though it certainly makes it worthy of consideration, but one major social change simultaneously with the changes I have mentioned above, has been the decline in support for religions partly because better education in the sciences has rendered so much of it laughably absurd.

No doubt religionists would dismiss this as a cause unless they are portraying them as showing a loss of morals; a breakdown in society. Then they would undoubtedly point to the same correlation as 'proof' of their claim whilst demanding that they be reversed.

However, I think the hypothesis of a causal link is supported by a number of things, the first being that almost all of these advances has been opposed either directly by the churches or by the political parties and classes which are themselves supported by the church.

In the 1960s we had the Protestant-backed KKK killing civil rights workers and black activists. In 1973 we had the grotesque spectacle of the 'conscience of America', Billy Graham, advising Richard Nixon that Jews should not be regarded as American citizens. The term WASP is still synonymous with right-wing Christian white supremacist male chauvinism, which is almost a definition of political conservatism in America and not far off that of Conservatism in the UK and Christian Democracy in most of Europe.

In the UK, the Anglican church opposed universal adult suffrage and especially votes for for women. In Europe, the Vatican had supported Fascism; in Serbia, the Orthodox Christian church supported genocidal nationalists. Almost universally, the Christian Churches opposed easier divorce, easier access to contraception, better sex education for teenagers. The churches in Britain, Holland, Belgium, Spain, France and Italy all supported colonialism and resisted independence for the colonies. In Northern Ireland the Presbyterian Churches were steadfast in their opposition to equal rights for Catholics and universal adult suffrage and had been directly responsible for setting up an apartheid system there in the first place. In the Irish Republic the Catholic Church effectively killed off tentative moves towards a health service.

In short, almost every piece of social progress towards a more egalitarian, less discriminatory, less chauvinistic, better educated, more liberal and more inclusive society has been opposed by the conservative right supported by the main stream Christian churches. Only now that they are losing their grip and have almost lost it altogether in some countries, have we made any real social progress.

I think the correlation is more than a coincidence. I think we are finally slipping the leash of religion, gaining our freedom and building a better society based on Humanist principles.

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