Top Five Christian Cults

Within religious circles, one man's cult seems to be another man's mainstream religion, but a few things seem to characterise modern 'New Age Religion' cults, apart from mysticism and rituals:

• Autocratic rule. Often claimed by 'divine right'. Usually dominated by one charismatic man regarded as the font of all 'wisdom' and frequently claiming direct divine guidance and instructions.
• Women play a subordinate role. Women are expected to be at the disposal of the senior men.
• Many cults are apocalyptic, believing some great disaster is about to befall the world, or the Second Coming of Jesus is imminent, and their leader is a prophet sent to prepare the world for it or to provide an elite who are to survive the apocalypse.
• Fundraising is a major preoccupation, with members either required to raise money by begging or selling the cult's produce, or to donate a large proportion, even all, of their income.
  
• Extremely rich leaders.
  

In fact, in many ways, the social structure of religious cults closely resembles the social structure of gorillas and the common chimpanzee.

1. 

   Elijah

   Church of Bible Understanding.

   This cult was started in New York in 1971 as 'The Forever Family' by a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian and vacuum cleaner repair man, Stewart Traill, who had been expelled from the Pentecostal Church. He claims to be a reincarnation of Elijah, to know the exact date of the 'Second Coming' and to possess a unique ability to understand the true meaning of the word of God. Members were required to live in a commune and donate 90% of their earnings to the cult. All aspects of members lives are carefully controlled by a process of harsh criticism and public humiliation.
   
   The cult branched out into the carpet cleaning business, with "Christian Brothers Carpet Cleaning", and used van sales. As part of President Bush's 'Faith Based Initiatives' the cult is reported to receive US Federal Government funding for a 'mission' in Haiti where it indoctrinates Haitian children in return for food and clothing.
   
   Stewart Traill is reputed to have amassed a considerable fortune.

2. 

   Shoko Asahara

   Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth).

   A Japanese cult drawing partly on aspects of Christianity, particularly the Bible Book of Revelations. The cult was started by Shoko Asahara in 1984 in his one-bedroom Tokyo apartment, initially as yoga and meditation school.
   
   From this the cult diversified into publishing and, following an intense advertising campaign in which it claimed to offer a cure for physical illness and the realisation of life goals through positive thinking, it became one of the fastest growing religions in Japanese history. It's teachings were a mixture of Christianity, ancient Japanese teachings and the science fiction books of Isaac Azimov. Secretive religious practices involved the use of hallucinogenic substances like LSD, electric shocks and being hung upside down for prolonged periods.
   
   From this, the cult moved into extortion, holding cult members against their will and murder of opponents. Following a failed bid for election to political office as the 'Supreme Truth Party' the cult effectively declared war on society and began to amass weapons and manufacture sarin gas. This was used in a deadly attack on the Tokyo underground on 20 March 1995 in which 13 commuters were killed and up to 5,000 more were affected. On 5 May 1995 the cult attempted to detonate several hydrogen cyanide devices on the Tokyo underground, each of which was capable of killing up to 20,000 people. Asahara and several senior cult leaders were convicted and sentenced to death for the killings but to date, the sentences have not been carried out. [Update: Asahara and six followers were executed in 1918 as a punishment for the 1995 attacks and other crimes and the remaining six on death row were executed on 26 July that year. On New Year's Day 2019, a cult member drove a car into a crowd in Tokyo, to protest the executions, injuring at least 9 people, 1 seriously]
   
   The cult is still in existence, maintained by donations and has officially apologised for the attacks and claimed to have changed its ways. Its existence is guaranteed under Japan's constitutional freedom of religion.

3. 

   God

   The Unification Church (Moonies).

   Invented by South Korean Presbyterian Christian Sunday school teacher and electrical engineer, Sun Myung Moon, who declared himself to be the Christian Messiah, the 'Moonies' believe God has chosen South Korea to create Heaven on earth. One of Moon's practices was to hold mass ceremonies in which tens of thousands of followers were married to partners randomly allocated by Moon.
   
   Being God of course meant that Moon needed as much money as possible, so no donation was ever too large. In later life, he concentrated more on material things like running his multi billion dollar business empire than on the spiritual needs of his followers.
   
   Bizarrely for a god, Moon died on 3 September 2012.

4. 

   David Brandt Berg

   Children of God (now known as the Family of Love and Family International).

   Children of God for formed by 'Christian and Missionary Alliance' pastor, David Brandt Berg amongst the Californian Hippy communities in 1968. It taught that sex, even with children, was natural and right. Female members of the cult were sent out to sell sexual favours to men to show God's love, and to solicit donations to the cult in a practice called 'Flirty Fishing' or 'FFing'. A refinement of this technique was to work through escort agencies ('ESing'). In effect, the cult was an organised prostitution and child abuse ring.
   
   

   I am quite satisfied that most of the women who engaged in this activity and the subsequent refinement of ESing, (which was finding men through escort agencies), did so in the belief that they were spreading God's word. But I am also totally satisfied that that was not Berg's only purpose. He and his organization had another and more sordid reason. They were procuring women to become common prostitutes. They were knowingly living in part on the earnings of prostitution. That was criminal activity. Their attempts to deny this must be dismissed as cant and hypocrisy. To deny that the girls were acting as prostitutes because 'we are not charging but we expect people to show their thanks and their appreciation and they ought to give more for love than if we charged them' is an unacceptable form of special pleading. The 'FFers handbook' told the girls that fishing could be fun but fun did not pay the bills. 'You've got to catch a few to make the fun pay for itself. So don't do it for nothing'. - Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Ward – 1995^[11]
   
   

   Source: Wikipedia - Family International

   
   

5. 

   Jesus' Relative, An Evolutionary Kingdom Above Human

   Heaven's Gate

   Based on the Christian Bible Book of Revelations, Heaven's Gate was the last in a series or renamed and reinvented cults invented by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. Following a heart attack during which Applewhite claimed to have had a NDE he decided that he and his nurse, Bonnie Nettles, were the 'two witnesses'.
   
   

   And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.
   
   

   Revelations 11:3

   
   The cult taught a mixture of apocalyptic Christianity, science fiction inspired partly by the TV Series 'Star Trek', and a bastardized version of evolution. Marshall claimed to be directly related to Jesus and so to be a member of an "Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human". Apparently, their mission was to warn that earth was about to be cleansed, renewed and refurbished prior to recycling.
   
   In three batches over the three days 24, 25 & 26 March 1997, Marshall and 38 Heaven's Gate cultists committed suicide so they could be taken to the 'Next Level' aboard the spaceship Marshall had told them was behind the Hale-Bop comet. Only one member survived, having left the commune a few days before so he could continue the cult's work.

Of course, as we can see from this small sample of Christian cults (weren't all Christian sects, and indeed Christianity itself, once cults?) one essential ingredient for cult formation is a supply of gullible and credulous or otherwise vulnerable individuals ready and willing to suspend their own rational thought processes and so be exploited by the cult leaders, often in return for nothing more than a sense of belonging to a group. For an understanding of how this works, see 'Whatever Possesses Religious People?'.

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Top Five Reasons People Are Leaving Faith

These are my top five reasons why there is such a massive increase in agnosticism and outright disbelief in gods at present.

You may of course have different ones...

Behaviour of believers.

• Access to news

has shown people how religion gives excuses to believers to act in ways which could not be excused any other way. Religion is behind most regional conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Sudan, the Middle East, India/Pakistan, the Philippines and the developing religious tension in parts of Western Europe. International terrorism is now almost entirely religiously.

Law For Creationists

A great deal of Creationism depends on people misunderstanding simple words, which is why the most lucrative market for those who peddle creationism for a living is to be found in the less well educated parts of the world, and why the creationist package includes a mistrust of education and an admiration for ignorance as part of the deal.

An example of this can be found daily in the social media where the term 'theory' is assiduously and carefully 'misunderstood' in it's scientific context and given it's lay meaning. This helps creationists dismiss science as merely guesswork and claim wrongly that the Theory of Evolution therefore does not have any supporting evidence.

Why Religion Is For Bird Brains

If you're wondering why religious people love rituals, the answer can be found in an experiment involving birds - pigeons to be exact.

The great Harvard Professor of Psychology, B.F.Skinner showed how pigeons become religious when given random rewards that have nothing to do with their behaviour.

This was a spin-off from the experiments on 'operant conditioning' where he showed how pigeons can be trained to carry out an action by associating it with a reward. For example, pigeons can be trained to peck a green light if they get a pellet of food every time they do so. Skinner wondered what would happen if the reward was completely dissociated from their actions.

Religion Kills [Updated]

Massacre of the Innocence, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

One of the great lies religious people tell is that religion is a force for peace; that without religion there would be no morality and nothing to stop people rushing around killing one another. Like so many other claims made by religious people the facts directly contradict the claim.

Here is a list of religion-inspired massacres, i.e. a single event of mass killing inspired by religion or specifically of followers of a different religion, often merely a different sect of the same religion as the killers.

This is a work in progress, and probably always will be, as there will probably never cease to be excuses for religious massacres.

The Birth Of Jesus - Southern Version

This is interesting. There seem to be three different accounts of the impregnation of Mary and the birth of Jesus; two Christian ones in the Bible and a Muslim one in the Qur'an. The weird thing is, the then recently-converted Christian King of Abyssinia thought the Muslim one was the authentic version!

What's maybe even more weird is that none of them bear more than a passing resemblance to one another.

First, the Bible versions:

Version 1

And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

The Heavenly Peace Of Jesus

Hong Xiuquan

An interesting BBC Radio 4 program a couple of days ago on the "Taiping Rebellion" in Southern China, 1850-1864. What made my ears prick up was the fact that this rebellion was lead by a fundamentalist Christian zealot.

I'll come on to him later; first a little background:

At the time of the rebellion, China was ruled by the Manchurian Quing Dynasty which was regarded as foreign by the Han Chinese. The Manchus had invaded China from the north east in 1644 taking advantage of the disarray following the collapse of the Ming Dynasty during a peasants' revolt in Beijing.

China, under the Qing Dynasty in the mid-19th century, suffered a series of natural disasters, economic problems and defeats at the hands of the Western powers; in particular, the humiliating defeat in 1842 by the United Kingdom in the First Opium War. The Qing government, led by ethnic Manchus, were seen by much of the Chinese population, who were mainly Han Chinese, as an ineffective and corrupt foreign regime. Anti-Manchu sentiment was strongest in the south among the laboring classes and it was these disaffected who flocked to join the charismatic leader Hong Xiuquan, a member of the Hakka community, a Han-Chinese sub-group that inhabited southern China but traced their ancestries back to northerners in the Song Dynasty. Having arrived too late to acquire the best land, they were engaged in constant conflicts.⁵ Among these serious problems were the prevalence of female infanticide, creating massive imbalances with shortages of women being worst in the primary Taiping centers.

Wikipedia - Taiping Rebellion

Why Science Is Right And Religions Are Wrong

Interesting Huffington Post poll out today. More Believe In Space Aliens Than In God According To U.K. Survey.

Some of the reason given for belief in aliens were absurd, of course, but, in contrast to a belief in gods, there is sound logical argument for thinking that life, and thereby possibly intelligent life, would exist elsewhere in the universe.

The maths is relatively simple: leaving aside Earth, there are so many, maybe half a trillion, galaxies in the universe, each with somewhere around a trillion stars, that the probability of several, maybe very many, stars having a planet on which life evolved approaches certainty.

Even Christians Have To Obey The Law.

Excellent news today from Reading Crown Court where a Christian couple have been ordered to pay compensation to a gay couple whom they had discriminated against in 2010, using their superstition as the pretext for their bullying and denial of basic human rights by refusing to supply them with hotel services on the grounds of their sexuality. See BBC News - Gay couple win Berkshire B&B refusal case.

This case follows an almost identical one in Bristol which resulted in damages being awarded to a gay couple who had been similarly victimised by the Christian owners of a Bed & Breakfast Hotel in Marazion, Cornwall, in 2008. The case was upheld by the Court of Appeal last February. The message from these landmark cases should be crystal clear to Christians, and indeed any other religious minorities seeking to impose their bigotry on the rest of us.

What God Thinks Of Disabled People

Are you disabled in any way? Do you have even the smallest blemish? A mole or a birthmark maybe? Do you know anyone who is? A friend or relative? That girl or boy down the street with a squint? Even just a little bit disabled? How about that lame man or that woman with a harelip or someone needing to wear spectacles?

In fact, given that no one is perfect, doesn't everyone have a defect of some sort?

Here's what the Christian god thinks of imperfect people:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken;

No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.

He shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy. Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.

And Moses told it unto Aaron, and to his sons, and unto all the children of Israel.

Leviticus 21:16-24

Unintelligently Designed Creationists

You have to pity Creationists. If only they would (or should that be 'could'?) think things through!

I blame the leaders of this money-making industry and right-wing political control cult; people like Ken Ham, Duane Gish, Kent Hovind, Michael Behe and William Dembski who feed off these unfortunate victims in return for worthless pseudo-scientific pap, and so release them ill-prepared in terms of reasoning ability and facts, onto the Internet to try to push their lost cause to people who actually understand biological science, as though that was ever going to be remotely possible. It almost constitutes child abuse, even for the chronologically adult Creationist children.

How Christians Lie To Us - Fact And Fiction

This is the second and last blog dealing with Christopher Hitchens' book "The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice". In the first ("How Christians Lie To Us - Birth Of A Myth") I used Hitch's description of how Malcolm Muggeridge invented the Mother Teresa of Calcutta myth almost out of thin air to illustrate how (mythical) sanctity and 'miracles' can be created almost at will for a credulous audience eager for such things.

In this one, I'll use the testimonies of those who witnessed Mother Teresa and her 'Missionaries of Charity' at work to contrast the reality with the myth of tender, loving care for the needs of the sick and dying which the Catholic Church and much of the uncritical media have assiduously manufactured.

How Christians Lie To Us - Birth Of A Myth

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Reading Christopher Hitchins' book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice I came across this wonderful example of how both the myth of a miracle and the myth of sainthood are produced by cynical self-interest and a cavalier approach to truth, honesty and intellectual integrity.

The origin of the Mother Teresa of Calcutta myth can be traced back to a 1969 TV documentary and a 1971 book, both entitled Something Beautiful For God by Malcolm Muggeridge, a pseudo-intellectual convert to Catholicism. Muggeridge had started out as a left of centre satirist but had moved later in life to be a right wing fundamentalist moraliser who, as part of Mary Whitehouse's self-appointed cabal of Christian bigots, had tried to get banned, amongst many other things, The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour on the grounds that it contained the words "Pornographic priestess; boy, you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down".

As we said at the time, Muggeridge was all for a liberal attitude to sex - until he got too old for it himself.

Time To Vote For The Darwin Creationist Twit Award

So the final list of candidates is now complete, albeit with one late entry which was too good to be left out.

Vote by commenting below. By all means canvass for your candidate but only one person, one vote please.

Note to candidates: You should not vote as your vote will not count for yourself but trying to do so might well improve your chances of winning by showing people you think the award is an honour.

Remember, folks, the award if for the best candidate who by a tweet so outstandingly moronic that it helps to reduce the meme of creationism in the human meme pool.

There are 20 outstanding candidates:

Christians! Should You Be Reading This?

From a true-believing Christian's point of view, reading and learning about anything but the Bible is to be avoided. The problem is, it can lead to 'knowledge', the acquisition of which was the original sin for which Christians say we all need to beg God's forgiveness and for which he supposedly sacrificed his son in a bizarre, barbaric blood sacrifice ritual which no one at the time seems to have noticed and of which no one now seems to be able to explain the mechanism.

This time it's mostly in the New Testaments where the Bible shows it's real hostility towards learning and the acquisition of wisdom. Paul particularly, and perhaps understandably so, seems especially worried in his epistles that people are going to learn stuff which might make them question rather than just accept his authority on things.

Do You Agree With God About Slavery?

If you're a humanist and/or an atheist you'll have no doubt at all: abolition of slavery was one of the great social advances and righted a monstrous and hideous wrong. But, if you're a Christian who looks to the Bible for your morals, and you agree with us that slavery was wrong, perhaps you should think again. You either have to believe you have higher moral standards that the people who wrote the Bible, or you believe there is nothing wrong with slavery.

The first thing to point out is, there is not a hint of condemnation of slavery anywhere in the Bible. Throughout the Old and New Testaments there is nothing but acceptance of slavery as a perfectly normal part of everyday life; something that doesn't raise the slightest concern or a hint of a moral qualm. There are even instructions on how to treat slaves, when and how to kill or beat them, who you can own, etc.

In the Bible, slaves are not even regarded as human beings. Take these two passages:

So You Think You're A Christian?

Bible warning sticker.

It's a constant source of amazement and amusement how so many people claim to be Christians whilst acting like anything but a Christian. For example, in Women. Are You Free Or Christian? I showed Christian women should see themselves and behave according to the Bible and the founding fathers of their religion. In this blog, let's look at the way good Christian parents should be treating their children, again according to the Bible and some well-known apologists for Christianity.

Firstly, a warning. Almost all of what the Bible tells you to do to and with your children is very probably illegal, especially if you live in a civilised society. Under no circumstances should you do the things the Bible tells a good Christian parent to do in respect of your children. The least you could expect would be to have them taken into care.

Here goes:

Women. Are You Free Or Christian?

For some reason, good Christian women seem to be abandoning their faith in droves. In fact, it's hard nowadays to find a woman who still holds to her proclaimed Christian faith. Even nuns would probably recoil in horror at the suggestion that they should still believe what their faith tells them they should believe.

The problem is, they're either too afraid to admit they've left their faith, or they don't actually realise they've done so, probably because so few of them read the Bible and no preacher is going to tell them the truth, least of all a male one.

Here's a short list of what Christian women are supposed to believe. Let's see how many actually do believe it. Shout out in the comments section if you're a Christian woman and actually believe any of the following, which I've numbered for ease of reference:

Whatever Possesses Religious People?

Firstly, religion isn't possession. That idea comes from old superstitions which had demons everywhere, taking over people's bodies and even giving them strange magical powers. Thankfully, all but the most primitive religions no longer seem to push that aspect of their faith even though their holy book may be full of it.

The better question is: what motivates religious people? What are the psychological causes of religion and religiosity?

A few days ago I showed in "Why Religious People Are So Atheistic" how, for the most part, religious people behave exactly like perfectly normal Atheists save for a small over-head of additional effort, a little delay for praying here and there before acting, maybe a trip to a special place of collective worship on special days or times according to the particular superstition being subscribed to, and all for no appreciable tangible benefits in terms of normal, everyday living.

Come On! The Bible's Forgers Weren't THAT Bad.

I have to take issue here with an unjustified criticism of Christian fundamentalism. As regular readers will know, I am always scrupulously fair on Creationists.

I found this unwarranted parody of Christian Creationist belief by Tom Weller, author of Science Made Stupid: How to Discomprehend the World Around Us, winner of the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. It was quoted in The Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound by Jack Huberman.

An Easy One For Christians & Muslims

This should be an easy one for Christians and Muslims who both believe in a Hell where Satan lives and gets our souls to torture for eternity in unimaginably horribly ways.

The story goes that God, ever the narcissist, created angels so they could worship and adore him, but, so that they could do so in all sincerity and not just as pre-programmed automatons, he gave them free will too.

For some reason, Satan wasn't convinced by his creator's majesty and perfection and, like an up and coming young ape, or a young would-be tribal leader of Bronze Age hunter-gatherers, he challenged the old silver-backed alpha male, lost, and so was chucked out of Heaven for eternity. It's not clear why he wasn't convinced by a perfect god or why this god created him in the first place when, being omniscient, he knew all along what was going to happen. Nor is it at all clear why this god can't forgive Satan and so end evil, but let's run with the story and not get bogged down too much by its absurdities.

All Arguments For God Refute God

You have to pity religious people who get their religion from a book.

Consider the following statements:

All the evidence for [favourite god] is in [favourite holy book] which is the word of [favourite god].

Well, that isn't much good because no holy book has ever managed to convince anything like a majority of people so it can't have been written by an omniscient god. Besides, it should be manifestly obvious to anyone that no book or mere piece of writing can be proof of its own truth, not even when it claims it is, otherwise anyone could create truth merely by writing it down and saying it's true. For example, this blog is all true because I said so and I should know, I created it. Convinced?

So, no holy book alone can be proof of a god.

Why Religious People Behave Like Atheists

In just about every way that matters in everyday life, religious people behave just the way Atheists do. To watch them, you would be hard-pressed to know if they are real Atheists or not.

Take, for instance, crossing a road. You will never see a religious person standing at the roadside praying for the road to be clear, then just stepping out into the traffic secure in the knowledge that their god has stopped the traffic and made it safe for them to cross. Instead, they behave exactly like an Atheist would.

They check first and wait for a safe gap, or wait for the lights to change. They even behave like Atheists and bet their life on the absence of evidence being evidence of absence just as Atheists do with cars and gods - which is why Pascal's Wager fails to work on people who aren't already afraid of a god.

YES! YES! YES!

Some pieces of writing are so powerful, so right, so full of air-punchingly 'YES!'.

I warn you now not to read Christopher Hitchens', "God Is Not Great" in public because people will think you're strange when you shout out and punch the air!

And I warn you now not to read this piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali entitled "How (and Why) I Became an Infidel". She wrote it especially for Christopher Hitchens' book, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer".

First a little background on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Born in Somalia she witnessed first hand female genital mutilation, clerical cruelty, and religion-inspired barbarism. After escaping to Holland she watched as her colleague Theo Van Gogh was murdered by Islamic extremists for satirizing Islamic repression of women and was told she was to be their next victim. She had initially believed that Islam could be reformed but soon realised that it's 'faith' itself which is the problem.

When I finally admitted to myself that I was an unbeliever, it was because I simply couldn’t pretend any longer that I believed. Leaving Allah was a long and painful process for me, and I tried to resist it for as long as I could. All my life I had wanted to be a good daughter of my clan, and that meant above all that I should be a good Muslim woman, who had learned to submit to God — which in practice meant the rule of my brother, my father, and later my husband.

When I was a child, I had a child’s revulsion against injustice. I could not understand why Allah, if he were truly merciful and all-powerful, would tolerate and indeed require that I stand behind my brother at prayer and obey his whims, or that the courts should consider my statements to be inherently less valid than his. But shame and obedience had been drilled into me from my earliest years. I obeyed my parents, my clan, and my religious teachers, and I felt ashamed that by my questioning I seemed to be betraying them.

As I became a teenager, my rebellion grew. It was not yet a revolt against Islam. Who was I to contest Allah? But I did feel constricted by my family and our Somali clan, where family honor was the overriding value, and seemed principally to reside in the control, sale, and transfer of girls’ virginity. Reading Western books—even trashy romance novels—gave me a vision of an astounding alternative universe where girls had choices.

Still, I struggled to conform. I voluntarily robed in a black hijab that covered my body from head to toe. I tried to pray five times a day and to obey the countless strictures of the Koran and the Hidith. I did so mostly because I was afraid of Hell. The Koran lists Hell’s torments in vivid detail: sores, boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels. An everlasting fire burns you forever for as your flesh chars and your juices boil, you form a new skin. Every preacher I encountered hammered more mesmerizing details onto his nightmarish tableau. It was genuinely terrifying.

Ultimately, I think, it was books, and boys, that saved me. No matter how hard I tried to submit to Allah’s will, I still felt desire — sexual desire, urgent and real, which even the vision of Hellfire could not suppress. It made me ashamed to feel that way, but when my father told me he was marrying me off to a stranger, I realized that I could not accept being locked forever into the bed of a man who left me cold.

I escaped. I ended up in Holland. With the help of many benevolent Dutch people, I managed to gain confidence that I had a future outside my clan. I decided to study political science, to discover why Muslim societies — Allah’s societies — were poor and violent, while the countries of the despised infidels were wealthy and peaceful. I was still a Muslim in those days. I had no intention of criticizing Allah’s will, only to discover what had gone so very wrong.

It was at university that I gradually lost my faith. The ideas and the facts that I encountered there were thrilling and powerful, but they also clashed horribly with the vision of the world with which I had grown up. At first, when the cognitive dissonance became too strong, I would try to shove these issues to the back of my mind. The ideas of Spinoza and Freud, Darwin and Locke and Mill, were indisputably true, but so was the Koran; and I vowed to one day resolve these differences. In the meantime, I could not make myself stop reading. I knew the argument was a weak one, but I told myself that Allah is in favor of knowledge.

The pleasures and anonymity of life in the clan-less West were almost as beguiling as the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers. Quite soon after I arrived in Holland, I replaced my Muslim dress with jeans. I avoided socializing with other Somalis first, and then with other Muslims — they preached to me about fear of the Hereafter and warned that I was damned. Years later, I drank my first glass of wine and had a boyfriend. No bolt of Hellfire burned me; chaos did not ensue. To pacify my mind, I adopted an attitude of “negotiating” with Allah: I told myself these were small sins, which hurt no one; surely God would not mind too much.

Then the Twin Towers were toppled in the name of Allah and his prophet, and I felt that I must choose sides. Osama bin Laden’s justification of the attacks was more consistent with the content of the Koran and the Sunna than the chorus of Muslim officials and Western wishful thinkers who denied every link between the bloodshed and Islam. Did I, as a Muslim, support bin Laden’s act of “worship”? Did I feel it was what God commanded? And if not, was I a Muslim?

I picked up a book — The Atheist Manifesto by Herman Philipse, who later became a great friend. I began reading it, marvelling at the clarity and naughtiness of its author. But I really didn’t have to. Just looking at it, just wanting to read it—that already meant I doubted. Before I’d read four pages, I realized that I had left Allah behind years ago. I was an atheist. An apostate. An infidel. I looked in a mirror and said out loud, in Somali, “I don’t believe in God.”

I felt relief. There was no pain but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure, and carefully tip-toeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out piece by piece—all that was over. The ever-present prospect of Hellfire lifted, and my horizon seemed broader. God, Satan, angels: these were all figments of human imagination, mechanisms to impose the will of the powerful on the weak. From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.

In the next few months, I began going to museums. I needed to see ruins and mummies and old dead people, to look at the reality of the bones and to absorb the realization that, when I die, I will become just a bunch of bones. Some of them were five hundred million years old, I noted; if it took Allah longer than that to raise the dead, the prospect of his retribution for my lifetime of enjoyment seemed distinctly less plausible.

I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I give my life its own meaning. I was looking for a deeper sense of morality. In Islam you are Allah’s slave; you submit, which means that ideally you are devoid of personal will. You are not a free individual. You behave well because you fear Hell, which is really a form of blackmail — you have no personal ethic.

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion — which are to be a better and more generous person — without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.

After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heart-land often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - How (and Why) I Became an Infidel
From Hitchens, Christopher (2007-12-10).
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (pp. 477-480).
Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

copyright © 2007 by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

YES! YES! YES!

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More Einstein On Religion

If there is a scientist who religious apologists love to claim agreed with them it's Albert Einstein. Not only has Einstein become, in the popular imagination, the archetype of what the scientifically illiterate imagine to be a scientist (dishevelled, a little bit scatty, even slightly mad (which he wasn't) and absent-minded (again, not true)), but he is acknowledged as one of the all-time greats; a genius by any standard who showed us that reality can be decidedly counter-intuitive. But he has one outstanding quality from a religious apologists point of view: he is dead and so can't refute the claims they make about him and his views on religion.

Fortunately though, he was never shy to state his views when asked and did record them for posterity.

I have previously blogged about this with Albert Einstein On Religion but here is a much more extensive collection of Einstein's recorded religious views. I originally came across this collection in Chapter 22 of Christopher Hitchen's book "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever", compiled by Miguel Chavez, however the list is almost identical, save for the final two quotes, to one on "The Unofficial Stephen J Gould Archive", to which the bulk of the credit must go.

The list is numbered and tagged for ease of reference. To reference any one of these quotes, simply add a hash (#) followed by the appropriate number (e.g. #22) to the url of this page.

1. "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Favourite 'Intelligent' Design Argument

Of course, all 'Intelligent Design' arguments are simple variations on the argument from ignorance and incredulity. Basically, the argument goes, "I don't know how this works and I can't believe it wasn't done by a god, therefore it was done by a god, and don't expect me to spoil my lovely argument by learning and understanding stuff."

There are a large number of people who make a handsome living supplying people with that level of reasoning ability and intellectual (dis)honesty, especially in the USA where fundamentalist Christianity is a multi-billion dollar industry.

One of the originators of the under-cover wing of the Creationist industry, 'Intelligent Design' was biochemist, Michael J. Behe, who wrote a book called Darwin's Black Box which claimed that there are certain structures which are 'irreducibly complex' and therefore could not have evolved by the small steps proposed by Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection. Michael Behe is a devout Catholic and talks almost exclusively to right-wing conservative Christian fundamentalist groups but denies his argument is merely biblical Creationism cloaked in a scientific-looking disguise which is intended to get round the First Amendment of the Constitution of the USA.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

'Intelligent Design' and 'Irreducible Complexity' are major planks of the 'Wedge' strategy whereby right-wing fundamentalist groups continually try to insert their religion into schools and other government-funded bodies in order to subvert the Constitution and overthrow the safeguard of separation of church and state which underpins freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in a secular society.

Behe's book was, of course, refuted within days of publication by proper biologists and he has never presented his ideas for peer review or to a conference of microbiologists, nevertheless it sold millions to creationists and is still widely quoted as if it is genuine science.

Ironically, one of the main structure he relied on was the flagellum of the motile bacterium Escherichia coli. This is ironic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the precursors of the 'proton motor' which powers the flagellum, and which is the nearest thing to a wheel known in nature, albeit it's the 'axle' which spins round, not the wheel, are known, so very plausible mechanisms for its evolution can be described. See also Evolution of the Bacterial Flagella.

But Behe's claim falls down in another area: the necessary 'complexity' to produce a flagellum is not in the component proteins and how they are assembled but in E. coli DNA. There is no record of Behe having investigated the 'complexity' of E. coli DNA to determine if it is indeed irreducibly complex in respect of the flagellum because he has never carried out that study.

The second irony is that E. coli and its related bacteria are a good example of evolution.

The genera Escherichia and Salmonella diverged around 102 million years ago (credibility interval: 57–176 mya), which coincides with the divergence of their hosts: the former being found in mammals and the latter in birds and reptiles. This was followed by a split of the escherichian ancestor into five species (E. albertii, E. coli, E. fergusonii, E. hermannii and E. vulneris. The last E. coli ancestor split between 20 and 30 mya.

Source: Wikipedia - Escherichia coli

See also Wikipedia - Escherichia coli Phylogeny of Escherichia coli strains.

Thirdly, there is the fact the E. coli is the subject of a long-term experiment in evolution which has already produced some interesting results after some 50,000 generations:

The E. coli long-term evolution experiment is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988. The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010.

Since the experiment's inception, Lenski and his colleagues have reported a wide array of genetic changes; some evolutionary adaptations have occurred in all 12 populations, while others have only appeared in one or a few populations. One particularly striking adaption was the evolution of a strain of E. coli that was able to grow on citric acid in its growth medium.

Source: Wikipedia - E. coli long-term evolution experiment

But my favourite irony in Behe's choice of E. coli as his example of 'Intelligent Design' is in what E. coli can do. One strain is a normal, even beneficial part of our gut 'flora', i.e. the collection of micro-organisms which live in our digestive tracts, the dead bodies of which constitute a large part of the volume of our faeces. E. coli helps control some other organisms which, if they become too numerous may be harmful. However, some strains of E. coli are far from 'friendly' and even our 'friendly' ones are far from friendly if they get into our blood where they can become seriously pathogenic, even fatal. Some strains are highly dangerous and great care must be taken to prevent them getting into our food.

The supreme irony here is that this pathological tendency of E. coli is enhanced greatly by its motility, which depends entirely on its flagellum. If we are to believe Michael Behe we have to believe his intelligent designer designed a mechanism for helping a bacterium make us sick and even kill us, presumably, because it loves us so much.

Untrammelled by little inconveniences like facts, Michael Behe continues to push his brand of fundamentalism to credulous Creationists and sell them books full of long-refuted argument and falsehoods. Such is the level of integrity we find pervading the Christian fundamentalism industry, particularly in the USA where it also promotes extreme right-wing politics and pedals its creed to those at the bottom of the social ladder, and which the Christian conservative right seeks to keep there by feeding them ignorant superstition dressed up as hope.

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Creationism's Laughably Absurd Hypothesis

One of the most dishonest and yet probably the most frequent arguments religions use in support of their own particular creator god is the argument from improbability.

Briefly, the argument from improbability says that such-and-such an event is so enormously unlikely that it couldn't just happen by chance, so there must have been a creator, or, in the words of Creationism's under-cover wing, 'Intelligent Design', an intelligent designer (i.e the god they are trying hard not to mention). Events such as the origin of life, the origin of the first cell, a human body, the human brain, a tree, etc, etc, etc, will be cited ad nauseum. This argument is, of course, used for any god by any religion which has a creator god. The actual god doesn't matter; you're just expected to assume it's their favourite one.

The appeal of this argument seems to depend on both ignorance and arrogance for its success. It seems to give its proponents the spurious satisfaction of having an argument which simultaneously circumvents and dismisses the need to bother with all that learning and yet enables them to present themselves as knowing more and having greater insight and understanding than those who do so bother. And yet, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in "The God Delusion", properly deployed, the argument from improbability comes close to proving that God does not exist.

But it is, of course, invariably a straw man argument combined with a false dichotomy. Biology does not make any claim that cells or bodies, brains or trees, or even the first replicators spontaneously self-assembled by chance. So the choice is not between random and hugely unlikely chance or design/intent. It is between random chance, intelligent designer or a process of natural selection over a very long time. For some reason, religious apologists and Creationists conveniently forget to include Natural Selection either because they don't understand it or don't want you to.

I'll let Richard Dawkins, quoted from "The God Delusion" in Christopher Hitchin's book, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer", explain it:

The Ultimate Boeing 747

The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favor of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument — but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.

The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle, or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist’s favourite argument—an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas—in the relevant sense of chance—it is the opposite.

The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of “intelligent design” (ID). Some observed phenomenon—often a living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself—is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or “surprise value.” Or the argument may invoke the economist’s hackneyed motto: there’s no such thing as a free lunch — and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

The argument for improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define “come about by chance” as “a synonym for come about in the absence of deliberate design.” Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world — cosmology, for example — it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.

A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn’t imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.

Hitchens, Christopher (2007-12-10).
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer (pp. 288-289). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

So:

1. We can agree with Creationists that random chance is far too unlikely to be the explanation. No argument there; it's just too daft for words. Invoking random chance as the explanation for anything of very much complexity is probably the daftest argument you can come up with. Let's call this 'The Laughably Absurd Hypothesis'.
2. We know that there is a perfectly well described and understood process called Natural Selection which we can observe, and which is probably the most tested, robust and evidentially supported theory in the whole of science and which we know is quite capable of producing huge complexity over time. Let's call this 'The Very Probable Hypothesis'.
3. We have a vague, very incomplete and poorly described Intelligent Designer Hypothesis. The problem with this is that it collapses immediately under the weight of the very problem it purports to solve. It requires us to abandon the idea that hugely complex things are very unlikely to spontaneously self-assemble - the thing we were trying to explain - and adopt instead the notion that 'The Laughably Absurd Hypothesis' is not only not too daft for words but that somehow it's now the best explanation available and a vastly complex intelligent designer, complete with all the information necessary to create the universe and everything in it, spontaneously self-assembled and did so before there was anything out of which it could be assembled - which is of course logically absurd on so many levels - and Creationists themselves are forever assuring us that you can't get something from nothing. Let's call this 'The Logically Impossible Hypothesis'.

Now, the task for those Creationists who have managed to get this far before closing the page in embarrassment is this:

Explain please, why your 'Logically Impossible Hypothesis' should be taken seriously by anyone with an IQ higher than that of a thick plank, and in what way it is superior to either of the other two.

If you can't, which of the other two competing hypotheses do you think is most likely to be the true description of how complex things arise: The Laughably Absurd one or The Very Probable one?

Take your time.

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Rapid Evolution Makes Creationists Crabby

Blue mussel (Mytlius edulis)

Here's a nice example of evolution occurring not over the millions of years that we normally expect with a slow accumulation of small changes over time but in as short as fifteen years. And it not quite as straightforward as we might expect either.

It involves our old friend, the evolutionary arms race, this time involving the American East Coast population of the blue mussel (Mytlius edulis) and an invasive species of aggressive Asian crab (Hemigrapsus sanguineus).

In common with other bivalve molluscs, mussels close their shells at a hint of danger and so predators have had to evolve a strategy for opening them. One of these predators is the green crab (Carcinus maenas) which has adopted the strategy of simply breaking the shell of the blue mussel with its pincers.

In response to that strategy, the blue mussel has evolved a neat trick. The obvious way would be to evolve a thicker shell but thicker shells are a drain on the mussels' resources and are not always needed because green crab are not always in sufficient numbers to pose a serious enough threat to invest in a permanently thick shell, so the blue mussel has evolved the ability to detect a chemical in the water given off by green crabs, and only thickens it's shell when the population reaches a critical threshold number.

Neat, eh?

Asian or Japanese shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus

But, in 1988 the Asian or Japanese shore crab was reported in New Jersey into the Atlantic and by 1991 had started to invade the southern parts of the US East Coast where it found a population of blue mussels which had no effective defence against them because they were unable to detect their presence. The Asian crab quickly spread north as far as southern Maine, but no further.

However, fifteen years later, in 2006, two researchers, Aaron S. Freeman and James E. Byers, made an amazing discovery, published in Science. They found that blue mussels had already evolved the ability to detect a different chemical produced by the Asian crab and were now using the same defence strategy as they did for the native green crab.

By contrast, the 'control group' of blue mussels from the northern shores of Maine showed no such ability.

Abstract

Invasive species may precipitate evolutionary change in invaded communities. In southern New England (USA) the invasive Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, preys on mussels (Mytlius edulis), but the crab has not yet invaded northern New England. We show that southern New England mussels express inducible shell thickening when exposed to waterborne cues from Hemigrapsus, whereas naïve northern mussel populations do not respond. Yet, both populations thicken their shells in response to a long-established crab, Carcinus maenas. Our findings are consistent with the rapid evolution of an inducible morphological response to Hemigrapsus within 15 years of its introduction.

Freeman, A.S., Byers, J.S.; Divergent Induced Responses to an Invasive Predator in Marine Mussel Populations,
Science 11 August 2006: Vol. 313 no. 5788 pp. 831-833 DOI: 10.1126/science.1125485

Full article (registered members)

Now, if you're a creationist and have had the courage to read this far, you've almost certainly been looking for an excuse to reject this examples as an example of evolution, or otherwise pour scorn on the idea. You've probably by now decided your best tactic is to dismiss it as an 'example of microevolution' but not of 'macroevolution' and are going to rely in the creationist mantra, 'macroevolution is impossible'.

So, just suppose whatever genetic change involved in this evolution had inhibited the ability of the carrier to breed with non-carriers and produce fertile offspring. We would now be classifying the evolved blue mussels as a different species which appeared to have replaced the non-evolved species along the coast of New England, with the more 'primitive' form maintaining a toe-hold in northern Maine.

What would have been impossible about that?

In fact, this scenario is not at all unlikely given what we already know of the distribution of Mytlius edulis and the hybridisation and subspecies we know about.

Systematics and distribution

The Mytilus edulis complex

Systematically blue mussels consist of a group of (at least) three closely related taxa of mussels, known as the Mytilus edulis complex. Collectively they occupy both coasts of the North Atlantic (including the Mediterranean) and of the North Pacific in temperate to polar waters, as well as coasts of similar nature in the Southern Hemisphere. The distribution of the component taxa has been recently modified as a result of human activity (invasive species). The taxa can hybridise with each other, if present at the same locality.

• Mytilus edulis sensu stricto: Native to the North Atlantic.
• Mytilus edulis platensis ( = Mytilus chilensis), the Chilean mussel: Temperate waters in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Mytilus galloprovincialis, the Mediterranean mussel: Native in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Western Europe. Introduced in the temperate North Pacific, South Africa and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. A distinct lineage native to the Southern Hemisphere also exists.
• Mytilus trossulus: North Pacific, northern parts of the North Atlantic, Baltic Sea.

Mytilus edulis, strict sense

The Atlantic blue mussel is native on the North American Atlantic coast, but is found intermixed with M. trossulus north of Maine. In Europe It is found from the French Atlantic coast northwards to Novaya Zemlya and Iceland, but not in the Baltic Sea. In France and in the British Isles, it makes hybrid zones with M. galloprovincialis, and also is sometimes intermixed with M. trossulus.

A genetically distinct lineage of M. edulis is present in the Southern Hemisphere, and has been attributed to subspecies Mytilus edulis platensis. This includes the Chilean mussel.

Source: Wikipedia - Blue Mussel

So, which creationist of those who have got this far is going to volunteer to explain how this is not an example of rapid evolution over a space of some fifteen years?

Further reading: Understanding Evolution
Musseling in on evolution

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