Post by Jim Newman

_________________

According to the Public Religion Research Institute, most Americans, 56%, do not believe religion is under attack but 39% believe it is threatened.

•  Tea Party types feel the threat the most; whatever happened to those Libertarian Tea Party folks?
• Millennials are the least worried.
• White Evangelical Protestants are the most worried religious folks.
• Just over half support Gay marriage and 63% feel Gays should be able to adopt.

The wacko distinction to me is a majority of religious people do not feel an employer should have to provide medical insurance that includes contraception coverage—though a majority of Americans want it. This means to me that national health is more important than ever. It also shows how cruel these religious people are. It’s one thing to insist that they be allowed to do weird things like not be taxed, and display commandments everywhere public but that they will impose their beliefs on others.

How would they like it if secular and atheist employers insisted that employees not wear crosses, or any other sacrament, at work, nor use religious terminology, or even be employed because I worried they would pray for an answer instead of using reason or working harder? What if as a health care provider I didn’t allow patients or staff to pray because I know it is a waste of time and it is against my world philosophy, which apparently needs to be a religion for legal protection?

What if I refused to provide kosher foods at secular work environments where employees can’t leave for lunch? What if I insisted that there are no exceptions to the Amish for building code violations or refusing to educate their children past 8^th grade? The first because I may find it cruel to bleed an animal to death, the second because they don’t have the right to trivial exceptions and bigger violations because they can’t build unsafe houses (why can’t a Native American still live in in a Teepee or Wigwam), and the third to protect children as many of them will leave their community and need the basic tools to survive in a bigger world. Why can’t I homeschoool my kid and have them graduate at 8th grade, even if I have a Phd in education, or a Teaching Certificate or ?

If religious exceptions are good for religious reasons, why can’t I after study, research, and a great deal of thought choose not to install smoke detector alarms in my house because I am willing to take the risk because it is my world view to do so and I believe in it strongly—and not because  “it is the devil on the wall”? Why do I have to say I belong to a religion to have more freedom than everyone else? Why is belonging to a religion a privileged status to have greater freedom than everyone else no matter how sincerely or strongly we hold our world views? Why can’t I legally form a new religion, a secular religion, to gain these freedoms?

The survey below

• Majorities of Tea Party members (72%) Republicans (60%), and seniors (56%) believe that religious liberty is being threatened.  White evangelical Protestants (61%) are the only major religious group that believes religious liberty is threatened in America today.
• On the other hand, majorities of Democrats (69%), Independents (58%), and Millennials (73%) do not believe that religious liberty is being threatened today.  Majorities of Catholics, minority Protestants, white mainline Protestants and the unaffiliated also do not believe the religious liberty is being threatened in America today.
• When Americans who believe that religious liberty is being threatened today were asked to explain in their own words how religious liberty is being threatened, only 6% mention the recent debate around the contraception coverage mandate. The most frequently mentioned reasons are the removal or God and religion from the public square (23%), government interference in religion (20%), and hostility toward Christians or religion (10%).

Americans are divided over whether the principle of separation of church and state is being threatened in America today.

• Self-identified liberals are more likely to believe that the principle of separation of church and state is being threatened today than to believe that religious liberty is being threatened (45% and 25% respectively).
• A majority of conservatives believe that both the right of religious liberty and the principle of separation of church and state are being threatened (53% and 55% respectively).

Religious Liberty and the Contraception Mandate for Employers

With the single exception of churches or other places of worship, majorities of Americans believe that employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception at no cost. However, there is more agreement about this requirement for some types of employers than others.

• Roughly 6-in-10 Americans say that publicly held corporations (62%) and religiously affiliated hospitals (57%) should be required to provide employees with health care plans that cover contraception. A slim majority of Americans believe that religiously affiliated colleges (54%), privately owned small businesses (53%), and religiously affiliated social service agencies (52%) should be required to provide employees with health care plans that cover contraception.  Only 42% of Americans say churches and other places of worship should be required to provide this coverage to their employees.
• Catholics overall are generally more supportive than the general public of the contraception coverage requirements. Nearly two-thirds (65%) say that publicly held corporations should be held to this requirement.  Roughly 6-in-10 report that religiously affiliated social service agencies, colleges, hospitals, and privately owned small businesses should be required to provide health care plans that cover contraception.  Less than half (47%) say churches and other places of worship should be required to provide this coverage.

◦                     White Catholics make few distinctions between churches and other religiously affiliated employers. Less than half of white Catholics believe that churches (43%), religiously affiliated colleges (43%), social service agencies (44%), and hospitals (48%) should be required to include contraception coverage in their insurance plans. However, a majority of white Catholics believe that non-religiously affiliated employers, including privately owned small businesses (55%) and public corporations (61%), should be required to provide employees with contraception coverage.

• White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group that opposes requiring any type of employer to provide their employees with no cost contraception coverage. Majorities of white evangelicals believe that most types of employers should not be required to provide health care plans that cover contraception, including religiously affiliated colleges (56%), hospitals (55%), and social service agencies (59%), privately owned small businesses (56%), and churches and other places of worship (64%). Half (50%) believe that publicly held corporations should also not be required to provide employees with contraception coverage.
• With the exception of publicly held corporations, less than half of Americans who attend religious services at least once a week believe that other types of employers should be required to provide employees with health care insurance that covers contraception.

Religious Liberty and Adoption by Gay and Lesbian Couples

More than 6-in-10 (63%) Americans say that religiously affiliated agencies that receive federal funding should not be able to refuse to place children with qualified gay and lesbian couples. Roughly one-third of Americans say agencies that receive taxpayer money should be able to refuse.

• Americans are divided over whether religiously affiliated agencies that receive no federal funding should also be able to refuse placing children with qualified gay and lesbian couples. Half say they should not be able to refuse, and 44% say they should.

Religious Liberty and Same-Sex Marriage

A slim majority (52%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, and 44% oppose.

• Among religious groups, majorities of Catholics (59%), white mainline Protestants (65%), and the unaffiliated (75%) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.  Minority Protestants are divided, with 45% in favor and 48% opposed.  In contrast, among white evangelical Protestants, 71% oppose allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, compared to only 26% who favor.
• The survey also found religious liberty concerns were active among a subset of those who oppose same-sex marriage. When Americans who initially oppose same-sex marriage are asked whether they would support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry if the law guaranteed that no church or congregation would be required to perform marriages for gay and lesbian couples, support for allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry increases 6 points, from 52% to 58%.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com and www.frontiersofreason.

Tip to The Friendly Atheist.

Yeah!  More great news for civil rights!

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution supporting gay marriage at a meeting of its board of directors in Miami, saying it opposed any policy or legislative initiative that “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

I would like to think they did this simply because they recognize the right of all people.  I’m sure that it part or it.  However, I wonder if they just wanted to make sure that Obama had their support so more of their members will vote for him.  Is it the case that the idea of a GOP president scares them more than gay marriage?

I know that is the case for me.  The idea that Mitt Romney could be president, scares the fuck out of me.

“The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

One more reason for the tea baggers to bitch about the 14th Amendment.

After much begging and pleading I was able to get access to a few photos from the Madison Freethought Festival 2012.

There are more but for now, I can only post pictures with just me in them.  Once everyone signs release forms I put up a few more.

Here are a few of me- what do you think?  Which one is the best?

Post by Jim Newman

————————

I hated Dante’s “Inferno,” the first volume epic allegory of a journey through hell. I was supposed to see it as a watershed literary event where heaven, hell, and purgatory were all beautifully expressed in the vernacular; the Latin vernacular that is.

    I’d rather drink Starbucks!

For me, I much preferred Virgil’s Aeneid though it was written not as high art but as a tale for school kids in classic Latin. Aeneid is the epic dactylic hexameter poem of Aeneas, a Trojan, who is the ancestor of the first Romans. But then Virgil left Rome to farm and do Pastoral poetry, so there you have it.

I just couldn’t get my head around the Christian struggles of Medieval Europe and was glad I survived Medieval Latin because it was all just tedious religious bullshit ensconced in pretty, if you like poetic slang, but bastardized art and words. I’d rather read Charles Bukowski any day for a vernacular.

John Lee Hooker has it right, ain’t no Burnin Hell.

Another version of this fine song is with Canned Heat (Hooker n Heat) just before Alan Wilson died.

Perhaps you remember the fluffy, girl chasing, Welshman Tom Jones of famous pop song stature (my sister had such a crush on him). Here’s his version of Burnin Hell. I include it because it’s not his hit song “She’s a Lady.” And he has a voice. I was too young to appreciate his puffy shirted, curly haired, deep voiced masculinity but I’m trying to forget. Aaah, he’s alright. He dared to wear ruffles and sweat on stage.

John Murawski over at RNS through Huff Post has written a fine piece noting that the early Christian church wasn’t Christian but a kind of  reformed Jewish, which had no heaven or hell. In fact, the damned bible has no notion of Heaven or Hell. It’s all bullshit made up in medieval times, which might as well have been the Dark Ages Redux as far as humanistic culture is concerned. I couldn’t stand Michelangelo either. I respected him I guess but the Sistine chapel with the hand of god touching man is just tedious. Shoot me now. I’d need two hits of windowpane to get over that noxious allegory.

 Anti-nudity is recent bullshit.

Here’s John Bonamassa’s version of Burnin Hell at 2006 Rockpalast.

“The oft-cliched Christian notion of heaven — a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels — has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments will go on as to who will or won’t be “saved,” surveys show that a vast majority Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.

Robert Graves, the famous Classicist, (I, Claudius) who wrote the fine  Watch the Northwinds Rise noted that medieval heaven would be a god damned boring place.

“But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

Yeah, Jesus wasn’t starting a new religion. That was Paul’s bullshit. Jesus wanted to reform Judaism. That’s why the Christian nonsense that they don’t have to follow the old testament is just that, nonsense. You’d think Pentacostals and Apostolics in particular would know better but then they harken to 200-300 years later which is a really long time back then.

“The most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist NT Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored Christian misconceptions about heaven in previous books, but now devotes an entire volume, “How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels,” to this trendy subject.

I suppose it takes a softy Anglican to be willing to actually intellectually explore rather than historically justify.

“Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

It’s not a turning point for secularists, We’ve been saying it for 2,000 years. And the Jews have been saying it during that time as well. There is no heaven or hell in Judaism. In fact, you can be an atheist Jew. You ever hear of an theist christian, an atheist catholic, or an atheist Pentecostal? Except as a castigation?

“This is a very current issue — that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

No, it’s finally a pop Christian issue.

“Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy. Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

Yeah, surprise, surprise, people are getting tired of their relatives describing heaven (of course you wear underwear in heaven) and then telling them they are going to hell and then saying they love you anyway–it’s OK, they don’t judge.

“An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.

Duh, dumber than that bent nail on that there fence post. Thank idiot Calvinism, with the New Thought positivity reaction in a New World to breed hybridized American Christianity. First we were all damned, then we were all fucked anyway, and then we were all happy because it was all in our minds, and now we’re just trying to be happy for all. The path from Calvinism, to New Thought, to Positivism, to New Age, to Multiculturalism is one long peripatetic adventure through recovering from religion.

 Calvin looks so innocent for being a predestined, dour, the world sucks ass.

“Wright and Morse work independently of each other and in very different ideological settings, but their work shows a remarkable convergence on key points. In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s Kingdom — a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

 Isn’t that Disneyworld? Where’s the Hidden Mickey?

Yes, that’s it. It was originally about heaven on earth. A return to Eden so to speak. Not another world. Nor above us. That’s syncretic paganism. All this crap about an after life was just that. It was originally about a prophet returning to earth and making the earth pure. The sky religions of pagans during Hellenization looked upward. As did Native Americans. They pray looking to the sky. This submission crap is the slave history of Christian religion.

 Okey, dokey. Do ya really think Jesus prayed this way?

“This represents an instance of two top scholars who have apparently grown tired of talk of heaven on the part of Christians that is neither consistent with the New Testament nor theologically coherent,” said Trevor Eppehimer of Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina. “The majority of Christian theologians today would recognize that Wright and Morse’s views on heaven represent, for the most part, the basic New Testament perspective on heaven.”

“First-century Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah also believed he inaugurated the Kingdom of God and were convinced the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes, Wright said. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God’s people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled.

That is what makes the second coming incoherent. It was supposed to happen 2000 years ago! But hey, if it’s late, blame god’s clock—shoulda gone digital.

“Once the Kingdom is complete, he said, the bodily resurrection will follow with a fully restored creation here on earth. “What we are doing at the moment is building for the Kingdom,” Wright explained.

Mormons think they get this part. They say the streets will flow with blood as the evil separate from the good, when the latest, greatest, bestest prophet god incarnate returns. Rapturists sort of get it. I don’t get it but at least I read my history. Well, I had to because religion got pushed in my face. Otherwise, I’d rather go hiking or listen to music or make love to my partner or read or just about anything.

“Indeed, doing God’s Kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” This Hebrew phrase is a “close cousin” to the ancient beliefs embraced by Jesus and his followers, Wright said.

“It’s the recovery of the Jewish basis of the Gospels that enables us to say this,” Wright said. “We are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first-century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a very long time. And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries.”

This is bullshit. Scholars have known this all along. Classicists and secular anthropologists and archaeologists have been repressed by religiots proving the bible as they wanted it to be for their day. When you’re so busy proving how great the suicide of 600 and some Jews at Masada were, you’re denying the classicists saying the Jews were taking over Rome, denying Paganism, and were being a total pain in the ass—even though the Romans were getting fat and lazy. Rome needed a kick in the pants not a new religion. Frankly, Christian zealots made Jehovah’s Witnesses look like Barbie Dolls and the Jews were already a pain. And those damned Egyptians. Immigration run amuck with everyone wanting power.

 Masada, great place for a mass suicide. But Hey Scott Atron is right, no one’s mother is proud of their son committing religious suicide–Okey, dokey, Scott. We’ll just make a holiday of it.

“Christianity gradually lost contact with its Jewish roots as it spread into the gentile world. On the idea of heaven, things really veered off course in the Middle Ages, Wright said.

That’s why they call it the period of Hellenization and anyone reading about Alexander the Great knows the Greeks weren’t too happy about his spending so much time in the East. Then it just gets worse when he died.

Hell, even Maimonides the great Jewish scholar was in the court of the Muslim Saladin (the man who defeated Richard the Lionheart and stopped the Crusades). And we wonder why Maimonedes gets so funky Eastern with his description of the trinity.

 Would you let him on an airplane?

“Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament,” Wright said. “A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in.”

If you have never read Asterix and Obelisk, you should.

“Wright notes that many clues to an early Christian understanding of the Kingdom of heaven are preserved in the New Testament, most notably the phrase “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” from the Lord’s Prayer. Two key elements are forgiveness of debts and loving one’s neighbor.

I’d like to bring back that forgiveness of debts thing.

“While heaven is indisputably God’s realm, it’s not some distantly remote galaxy hopelessly removed from human reality. In the ancient Judaic worldview, Wright notes, the two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.

Huh, lost me here. So I will instead post Gibbons who noted that decadence is what killed Roman culture but took 4 volumes to prove it–scribble, scribble aiih, Mr Gibbons.

“Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have “eternal life.”

You have to hate King James, who mistranslated the bible intentionally for his political goal. Was that a secret? What do they teach in school? I guess that’s why college isn’t about snobbery but to correct all the bullshit from bad public schools, for the middle class and the aspiring working class.

From Wiki:

“James gave the translators instructions intended to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.

Those Goth and Celtic pagans just had to change the bible. It’s a living document. How did we get so stuck in American intransigence? Literalism bred close reading and goes what–it’s propaganda.

“Wright offers a translation that radically recasts the message and shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century. To hear it today is to experience the shock of the new: God gave his son “so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.”

“And so it’s not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught,” Wright said. “It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world — that will be the age to come.”

Ok, time for this secularist to have a beer and go patch the roof. Nothing pithy here except I couldn’t catch all the pigs for castration so that’s another day.I won’t chase them I will entice them with food.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com and www.frontiersofreason.com

Post by Phil Ferguson

————————

NOTE:  This post is part of an ongoing education series.  This information is for educational purposes only.  This information does not constitute investment advice.  No rational person would make investment decisions based on a blog post.  Please consult with your financial advisor before taking any action.  If you wish to have specific advice for your situation please contact Polaris Financial Planning.

via CNN.

Foreclosure filings in April fell for the third straight month to the lowest level since July 2007.

Total foreclosure activity for April, including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, was down 5% from March, according to RealtyTrac.

They are still high but the trend is in the right direction.  (Note the numbers in the chart below are units not dollars as marked)

While the total is down, some states are still having serious problems.  The best improvement seem to be in states that were the hardest hit.

In Arizona and Nevada, for example, bank repossessions were down roughly 70%. In California, they were more than 50% lower.

With a little luck this is a sign that home prices will stop falling and provide greater confidence with consumers.  More people are buying houses and fixing them up.

Post by Jim Newman

————————

David Sloan Wilson through Huff Post is promoting what he calls a “modern version” or the “new kid on the block” (which is it?) of evolution research, Evolutionary Religious Studies (ERS). Why the acronym? Trademark?

There are several puzzling aspects to his article.

He claims:

“atheism is a disbelief in gods”. And “…new atheists are an exceptionally active group…”.

Atheism is not a disbelief in gods. Atheism is the knowledge, certainty, and trust there are no gods; there is insufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that there are gods. By using the term disbelief Sloan poorly defines atheism. Atheism is not just another belief. To quote Cristina Rad, I am as sure there are no gods as I am sure there aren’t invisible elves living up my ass; I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there are no elves there. Atheism is the knowledge, certainty, and trust that, due to lack of sufficient evidence, that there are no gods. Unless you wish to support epistemological relativity (no truth), or subjective idealism (no material reality), you’re going to have to admit atheists have knowledge and not belief as best as science can provide.

The Four Horsemen (FH, or Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) are not exceptionally activist scientists; in the same activist way Sloan and EO Wilson promote their book, “The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time,” they too wish to apply scholarship to public affairs. Einstein and Dr Partho Sarothi Ray were/are exceptionally activist scientists (EAS). Carl Sagan was an EAS. Galileo was an EAS, succumbing to house arrest for years to support his heretical thesis, though he loved the church. Good company these folks.

Shawn Otto in Scientific American’s, “Good Science Always Has Political Ramifications” notes

“Why? Because a scientifically testable claim can be shown to be either most probably true or false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a Pope, a Congressperson, or a common citizen.”

The term activist scientist is used pejoratively by conservative groups to beat up climate scientists, who insist they must speak publically because their research is not being accepted.

Sloan asserts the need for a “new” field of study called Evolutionary Religious Studies.

“Evolutionary Religious Studies (ERS) is the scholarly study of religion from an evolutionary perspective.”

Sloan mentions Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and himself as the new kids on the block. Yet, he dismisses Dan Dennett (DD or D squared) who famously said in his book that religion should be studied like any other phenomenon and the fact that it isn’t is the problem. Dan famously insists that religion should be taught in public schools.

“It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster calling on the best minds of the planet.”

Indeed, all of the so called activist atheist scientists (AAS or is that EAS?) have asked, demanded, begged, and cajoled for more research, not less. What they contest are current conclusions based on dogma and an incredible lack of credible evidence. What they contest is some obvious stupidity to which people hold dear for what might be politics, ideology, economics, tradition, or some other cognitive biases. But it’s a democracy, go for the Templeton prize, but expect ridicule.

Sloan lists three steps for justifying his “new” field. The first is to accept a personal god as legitimate to research–as if it hadn’t been already, to death. But hey, find the money, get a grant, and have at it. Go for a Templeton prize. But hey try to stay honest.

“They are alike in their rejection of the “actively intervening god” hypothesis. I am choosing my words carefully here. The concept of supernatural agents that actively intervene in the laws of nature and affairs of people is a perfectly good scientific hypothesis that occupied center stage for centuries.”

A PGH (perfectly good hypothesis) is not the issue. Any assertion worded properly is a PGH, I guess. The “world is flat hypothesis”  (WFH) is a PGH but is long proven false. No one is saying to absolutely stop studying miracles, parapsychology, personal agency, or faith healing. What we are all tired of is having to prove the world is not flat over and over and over again, or that god cured, talked, appeared to them, because religion so imbues our culture they refuse to accept any material evidence. We’re tired of people insisting that we believe their nonsense when we need to solve bigger issues than a fetus is a person, to support antiabortion. Victor Stenger has long shown that miracles are physically impossible. Having a baby is not a miracle, nor the feeling that god is talking to you. Both are parsimoniously explained by biology and neuroscience.

James Randi, Joe Nickell, and Tom Flynn have long investigated these claims and continue to do so—in spite of the extraordinary amount of evidence showing it to be false. Tarsky and Kahneman solidified the field of Behavioral Economics and showed how heuristic biases are prevalent. Leon Festinger, back in 1956, detailed how cognitive dissonance affects critical thinking negatively.

Sloan negates methodological naturalism (material reality). But the choice then is to endorse a kind of subjective idealism (material things do not exist), which though championed by George Berkley and FH Bradley a long time ago doesn’t work. Pyrrhonis and skeptical empiricism (no truth and it’s only experiential) are as dead as the idea of ether being space. Can’t we better spend our money elsewhere? We have populations issues, wars, resource shortages and we’re busy proving if there is a personal god or not and whether it had evolutionary utility or is collateral? Right now, here and now, belief in a personal god is killing us because we can’t agree on an epistemology that produces evidence we can all follow to success.

The reason we need to decide on these issues is because bad science, pseudo-science, and nonscience are causing us to make egregious decisions concerning personal liberty, group governance, and resolutions to real-world problems. If I had a shred of evidence that praying to god would solve a worldly problem I’d be on my knees every damned day all day long. Insisting that prayer works, is valid, prevents people from doing what does work. If it were harmless, left as personal, and made private we wouldn’t care so much. When a president prays to god he or she might as well cut up a chicken and rorschach its guts.

Sloan then asserts:

“As a scholarly discipline, ERS is agnostic about what gets done with the knowledge that is created. The New Atheism is oriented toward action.

All scholarly research and all science tries to be objective in spite of the fact that all people have biases, positions, and ideologies. All science leads to action. Every publication is an action. Every hypothesis is an assertion to action. That is the entire point. To find the truth no matter where it be and then use it to make our lives better. The more activist you are in this the better.

Sloan says in step 3.

“Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS.

The New Atheists are the source of your “new” field. They are the ones that said let’s study evolution (LSE). Let’s see why or what makes people believe in a god, think the world is flat, or use god and church to help in impulse control. Hell, there are some still trying to get why there is a current Flat Earth Society (FES). It’s a trite truism noted by damn near everyone the obvious motivational benefit of thinking an all-powerful god is on your side—until you are crushed for your incorrect assumption, your delusional optimism, and your poor lack of planning, because your depression, fear of defeat, caused you to choose a quick but less effective remedy.

Hell, exceptionally activist atheists (EAA) noted the horrors of postmodernists pouring water on EO Wilson’s head and claiming there is no DNA while the idiot SJ Gould pugnaciously accommodated the pernicious dual magisteria theory (PDMT) to gain traction in his accolades and prestige. His punctuated evolution was easy fodder for the religious to assert a nonsensical godly intervention. It makes more sense that aliens embedded bacteria to start life than god did it.

You, and your “new” ERS, stand on the shoulders of your predecessors and then shit.

Dan Dennett has repeatedly recommended that people read Pascal Boyer “Religion Explained”.

“religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources.”

And Boyer has supported DD. DD is on your side and you don’t get it.

Even the “scholar” so loved by apologists, like Jonathan Haidt, Emil Durkheim, noted the benefits conveyed by religion would be better done by secular institutions and had explanations not requiring the supernatural. From wiki

In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God.^[68] Durkheim argued that the concept of supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and separation of supernatural—that which cannot be rationally explained—from natural, that which can.^[69] Thus, according to Durkheim, for early humans, everything was supernatural.^[69] Similarly, he points out that religions which give little importance to the concept of god exist, such as Buddhism, where the Four Noble Truths is much more important than any individual deity.^[69] With that, Durkheim argues, we are left with the following three concepts: the sacred (the ideas that cannot be properly explained, inspire awe and are considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion), the beliefs and practices (which create highly emotional state—collective effervescence—and invest symbols with sacred importance), and the moral community (a group of people sharing a common moral philosophy).^{[38][69][70][71]} Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion.^[69] He defined sacred things as:

…simply collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects… they are only collective forces hypostasized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world.

Boyer writes:

 As I have pointed out repeatedly the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people play music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental capacities are recruited by these activities. The same goes for religion. Because the concepts require all sorts of specific human capacities (an intuitive psychology, a tendency to attend to some counterintuitive concepts, as well as various social mind adaptations), we can explain religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how they contribute to the features of religion that we find in so many different cultures. We do not need to assume that there is a special way of functioning that occurs only when processing religious thoughts.

Sloan effaces himself and says he hasn’t nor is he inclined to review all of the New Atheist literature but looks forward to someone doing it. Perhaps he should do more basic reading then. He spends the next few hundred words claiming that New Atheists aren’t doing legitimate science. This is like claiming Einstein wasn’t a legitimate scientist because he had a hard time accepting Quantum theory as the complete picture (imagine Einstein saying god doesn’t play dice), and that he shouldn’t have pleaded not to use the A bomb because that was too activist.

I had some respect for Sloan and his alliance with EO Wilson and particularly some research into group theory but now I wouldn’t trust him if he told me what time it is. Show me the data. I want to see your watch.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com and www.frontiersofreason.com

Post By Phil Ferguson.

——————————-

via CNN.

A Catholic college in Ohio has apparently become the nation’s first to drop its health care plan because it opposes parts of the federal health care law signed by President Barack Obama.

The Franciscan University of Steubenville posted on its website last week that it is discontinuing its health care plan.

“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover ‘women’s health services’ including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” the university says.

Hey ladies!  No contraception for you.  Your place is in the home – pregnant!   We would go 200 years if these people ran the country.

“We will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life,” the statement says.

Now you know where they stand.  If you like your freedom – don’t support this gang of thugs.  Why would anyone go to this college.  They do not teach you how to learn – they teach you want to think.  This is the exact opposite of education.

Hey,  if all catholics followed the no contraception view then the church would not have make laws to prevent them from using them.  Listen to this maroon…..