Breaking News: Cardinals Disband Catholic Church; Green Smoke rises from Basilica

[Please note: this is a guest post, written by a friend, and posted here by permission because I think it is great.] Vatican spokesman Father Guido Sarducci announced today that effective immediately, the Catholic Church is disbanding its hierarchy, and will henceforth devote its brand name to supporting grassroots humanity in all its richness. According to Sarducci, "we were just sitting around talking about the Inquisition, the 80 million indigenous people wiped out by religious orders and Spanish troops in Latin America, the current hierarchy's war against women and gays, and the on-going conspiracy to protect a vast breeding ground for child abuse, and we decided, man, it's time to break with all that." Reliable sources said the Cardinals' decision was based in part on increasing concern about rumors that an international court is considering indicting the church as the largest and longest lasting criminal conspiracy in world history, a development Sarducci characterized as "a bummer." According to reliable sources, the Vatican will become a multi-use area, and will include a treatment and rejuvenation community for victims of child abuse and torture, a stunning museum with proceeds going to support indigenous populations wiped out under church leadership, a women's center, and the creation of a Fallibility Institute, dedicated to fostering democratic institutions, free thinking, spirituality and humanism, and social justice for all. Oh, and maybe a small church. Meanwhile, local Catholic churches around the world will be turned over to the control of their parishioners, who will be free to decide their own organizational structure, leadership, affiliations, and beliefs. According to Sarducci, "we decided to send out some green smoke, man, to signal our resolve to save the world from what's actually threatening it: environmental disaster, economic inequality, and hatred based on nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. Then people can build a society based on democracy, peace on earth, and good will towards all." It is reported that some of the Cardinals were asking for further clarification regarding the meaning of the term "all."

"Analytical Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief"

I realize that I haven't posted for awhile. This is because my favorite target, the hypocritical Catholic church hierarchy, that permitted pederastic vampire priests to feed on young innocents, has recently managed to hoist itself by its own petard. The Catholic laeity around the world is now realizing that just about the only segment of the Catholic church that is not completely rotten to the core is represented by the nuns, who work selflessly and tirelessly to help the disadvantaged and the poor of the world. And this formerly quiet group is to be congratulated for recently beginning to organize itself to oppose the cruel censorship imposed upon it from above. The title of today's post is the title of a recent article in Science magazine (Science Vol. 336, April 27, 2012, pp 493-496). The abstract states in part: "...these studies indicate that analytical processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief." The conclusion of this scientific study, reported in a highly regarded journal, thus implies that intelligence can contribute to overcoming superstitious religious beliefs. So here's to the day when many or all individuals' native intelligence permits them to see the light of truth through the mud of religion. And I certainly don't mean the light that "God" is rumored to have said "let there be"!

Ireland

The Irish Prime Minister has bravely turned over the stones. And the clerical slugs- right up to the top- who condoned and protected pederasts to save the church from embarrassment, are now trying desperately to scurry for cover.

Irrelevance of the US to Democratic Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

We suddenly find ourselves living in wonderful, amazing, and interesting times, definitely not only in the sense of the Chinese curse ("May you live in interesting times").

One very significant aspect of the successful (so far) Egyptian revolution is that the US was essentially irrelevant to the whole process. Not a nice thing to think about our previously all-powerful country, but this was a grass roots movement and, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the best thing the mighty USA could do was stand back, stay out of the way, and let people power lead the way.

As Bob Dylan put it so well in "Times They Are A-Changing":

Don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

It is becoming abundantly clear that, for the spread of democracy in the world, we in the US are the old folks. The people in the streets who ousted Mubarak represent the force behind the democratic future of the world, while the US represents the respectable status quo. So let's stay out of the way of this wonderful grass roots movement that is sweeping the Arab world.

But oh why couldn't wishy-washy Obama have supported the young Egyptian revolutionaries before their success was a fait accompli? He would have gained significant credit for himself (especially among his former avid supporters here in the US) and, far more importantly, helped to persuade the people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries in which change is brewing, to view America as a steadfast (albeit pretty insignificant) supporter of revolutionary democracy. It seems clear that the US government and its leader is instead correctly viewed by the young Arab revolutionaries in the streets as a feather that blows in the wind, finally taking sides only when the outcome is clear.

Statutory Rape by a Catholic Priest

Today’s New York Times (2/12/2011, page A12 top, “Los Angeles Archdiocese…) describes a Catholic priest who confessed to having sex in Los Angeles in 1967, with a 16 year-old girl.

The response of the Catholic Church was, predictably, to first appoint the priest, Martin P. O’Loughlin, to serve on a Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Advisory Board (well, I suppose O’Loughlin is indeed an expert on carrying out sexual abuse!), and then appoint him as pastor to another church. Now, thank “God”, the priest is finally being dismissed from the Los Angeles Diocese.

But what a shame that the statute of limitations for statutory rape in California is 10 years or less. I don’t care what this rapacious creep does for a living. He deserves to be tried, convicted, and sent up the river for a long time for the evil crime he committed, surely causing permanent and severe injury to the life of that young girl.

Today’s revelation of how the Catholic Church dealt with this issue, first by concealing it, then placing the priest on the Sexual Abuse Advisory Board, and then exposing additional children to this predator, deals yet another blow to the crumbling sanctity and authority so long professed and projected by church officials.

Spiritual Appreciation Is an Emergent Property

This post arose from a conversation I had with my wife after we had just seen the terrific new play in New York City, "Freud's Last Session". This two-man play is about a possible encounter between an aging and ill Sigmund Freud, a lifetime hard-core atheist, and C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a former atheist who as a young adult underwent a religious conversion, found Christ, and went on to write books with concealed Christian messages. The most famous of these is the children's book, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe", in which The Lion is a symbol of Jesus Christ. In the play, Freud and Lewis have a wonderful, spirited exchange about whether God exists, and how we can know the answer.

My wife asked me how I, as an atheist, view the wonderful aspects of life not readily explained by science: the majesty and mystery of our universe, the beauty and force of nature, our aesthetic appreciation of this natural beauty, and of music and art, and our ability as humans to be moral creatures, and to experience love and, yes, even Grace. As I thought about this question, I was reminded of the mind-brain problem addressed by scientists and philosophers who study consciousness: how does the squishy, gray, three-pound human brain, containing c. 100 billion multiply-connected neurons, give rise to the apparently incorporeal qualities of consciousness and ability for intellectual thought and language that are unique to human beings? This is of course one of the two great mysteries of our time (to me, the other great mystery is what the extremely weird but clearly correct physical theory, termed quantum mechanics, really tells us about the structure and function of the universe).

But investigators of consciousness have a very useful concept to describe, in a general way, how mind arises from the brain. In their view, mind/consciousness is an emergent property of the brain; i.e., ethereal mind somehow emerges from the very complex biochemical and physical properties of the brain. So it seems to me that the counter to those who insist that some sort of Higher Power up there has given us all this great stuff, is that development of the Earth with all its beauty, along with biological evolution on the Earth, all proceeded according to strictly scientific principles. And then all that we treasure about human beings, including consciousness, language, morality, the ability to appreciate beauty and to love one another, somehow arise as emergent properties of the qualities and experience of human beings who live individually and collectively upon the Earth.

We Can't Get Our Paws out of the Sugar Bowl in Afghanistan

My father spent some of his young formative years in the 1930's in India, as a Protestant evangelist. In one his stories to me about that time in his life, my father told me about the simple method Indians used to capture a monkey. They would set out a bowl attached to a chain, containing sugar that is much loved by monkeys. The opening in the top of the bowl was small enough for a monkey to put its hand in, and grab a fistful of sugar. But the hole was too small for the monkey to pull a sugar-filled fist out of the bowl. The monkeys virtually always refused to release the sugar, even though they could easily have removed an empty hand from the sugar bowl, and thus escape.

It seems to me that the US now faces a similar situation in Afghanistan. Our fists are filled with so much history that is hard to release: the very sad deaths and maimings of the many American soldiers who have served so bravely in that country; the long history of our attempts to defeat the Taliban there, most recently through attempts to "win the hearts and minds" of the Afghanistanis; and our national pride that would cause us to lose face in the world if we lost this war as we did the one in Vietnam.

Many Americans seem to be in favor of our ending the war in Afghanistan by adhering to a firm date for removal of our troops. But Obama's deadline for doing this in July 2011 seems to become less firm the closer it comes. Isn't there some way that we could release our fistfuls of unfortunate history in that country, thus opening our hands and allowing us to leave the quagmire that Afghanistan has become ?

The King Has No Clothes!

Sure, the Pope does wear clothes- plenty of them, including a sweeping robe, scepter, etc. - to proclaim and advertise the dignity and power of his position as the one infallible man (not a woman of course!) on Earth. Particularly impressive and intimidating is his big hat, with its high top pointing the way to the God on high.

But the ever-growing worldwide sex scandals that are unearthing the gangrene growing in the Catholic church have finally revealed one of the main goals of this organization: to perpetuate itself at all costs. It is now clear that long-accepted practices supporting this goal include hiding the moral turpitude of some of the church’s leaders, who either practiced or concealed pedophilia. The leaders implicated in these scandalous practices now include priests, bishops, and even the earthly CEO himself. And at what a terribly sad ancillary cost: sexually sick “shepherds” permitted to continue to prey wolfishly on fresh young innocents.

Perhaps the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church hierarchy, now revealed for all the world to see, will someday lead to a realization that the king has no clothes in a different sense: that all of the power and glory of organized religion is based ultimately upon the illusory concept of a god up there who rules our lives.

Revelations in Ireland Disclose Yet Again the Rotten Structure of the Catholic Church

This news is of course no longer current, since the revelations, in Ireland of all countries, of the sexual abuse by Catholic priests of young boys in orphanages and schools, occurred a month ago. On the other hand, I have not posted to this blog for an even longer period, so I suppose there is a certain symmetry here.

I am not particularly attracted to any of the major or minor superstitions- oops, religions- that have ever existed. But I particularly despise the Catholic Church. Not the millions of devout Catholics in the world, who of course have, under our wonderful First Amendment, the right to worship the deity(s) of their choice. The putrid odor instead emanates from the sanctimonious hypocrites currently in charge of the decaying Catholic organization, who have chronically condoned and concealed the sexual abuse of innocent children (mostly boys) by Catholic priests.

It is bad enough that the malignant leadership of the Catholic church has failed to punish and/or expel priests known to be guilty of the terrible sin of having sex with trusting children. But far worse, these spiritual “leaders” have instead transferred the guilty priests to other flocks of innocent doves, permitting these fiends to continue feasting on new young victims.

The current Catholic church hierarchy clearly qualifies as one of the foulest pestilences that God (if there were a God) has wrought upon the Earth. One wonders what sin Humanity has committed, great enough to justify the visitation upon us of such a putrescent plague. Only God in his infinite wisdom knows!

Here endeth today’s lesson.

The Large Hadron Collider: A Big Broom in the Sweep-up of Religion

It has been about a week since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on at CERN, and managed to circulate its first beam of protons in a complete circle. When the very powerful LHC is in full operation, accelerating opposite beams of protons to shattering collisions, it should yield tremendously exciting findings. These are expected to include answers to a number of outstanding questions in physics, including: 1. why matter has mass (if the LHC proves sufficiently powerful to detect the Higgs boson, believed to be responsible for providing sub-atomic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons with their observed masses); 2. the nature of dark matter (the majority of the matter in the universe, which mysteriously interacts only via gravity with the universe we detect via both light and gravity); 3. why our universe contains so much more matter than anti-matter. It also seems quite likely that investigations with the LHC will yield completely unexpected results, which will further increase our understanding of the nature of the universe.

During most of human history, much about the world and its workings were virtually incomprehensible, and religion provided answers and thus held sway. Even long after the development of the modern scientific method, hypotheses perforce incorporated the concept of God, and asked how and why God created the universe in its specific form. But recently, science has managed to operate independently of religion. In this atmosphere of free inquiry, scientific findings have forced religion to change its beliefs to accord with what science has discovered. One can easily think of numerous examples, including Christianity’s abandonment of the belief that the universe revolved around the Earth, and more recently the acceptance by John Paul II in 1996 that all life on earth, including humans, are a product of evolution.

I envisage supernatural belief as akin to a thick layer of dust in a room, composed of the dictates of organized religion, covering the truth about the nature of the universe. And in that metaphor, science consists of brooms, that over many years have swept the dust of these supernatural beliefs into an ever-constricted corner of the room, thence to be discarded in the dustbin of history. Removal of the dust through scientific inquiry is gradually yielding the bright, hard, polished floor of knowledge about the world and its creatures. It is to be hoped that the confounding dust of organized religion will eventually all be swept up and discarded. The LHC may prove a powerful broom indeed in this eventual conquest of scientific knowledge over out-moded supernatural beliefs.

A Possible Church Split That Matters in the Real World

For us atheists, there is not much to choose among superstitions, whether they involve a belief in the power of salt thrown over a shoulder, or of sending “up” prayers to a mystical being who died for our sins. These subtle and irrelevant distinctions are dwarfed by the enormous gap between their magical beliefs and the real world.

But, as recently reported in the New York Times (June 30, International Report, page A6), the Anglican Communion (which includes the American Episocopal church) has 77 million members, and is the third largest grouping of churches in the world. This organization, headed by the archbishop of Canterbury, can thus exert a significant influence here on Earth. In 2003, the Episcopal Church consecrated a gay man, Rev. Gene Robinson, as bishop of the New Hampshire Diocese. This bold action has led to extensive discord among the Episcopalian churches in the U.S. And now, as reported in the above NY Times article, a large splinter group, led by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, has threatened to form a new Anglican province that will reject the “false gospel” of the present Anglican church. It seems quite clear that the central issue here is homophobia, with the reactionary splinter group rejecting the concept that gays should be permitted to lead Anglican churches.

God knows (just kidding!) that organized religion has held back acceptance in this country both of scientific concepts like evolution, and of constitutional issues such as separation of church and state. But when it comes to acceptance of gays by the Anglican Communion, one religious group (the present Anglican church and liberal Episcopal churches in the U.S.) is on the right side, while the splinter group led by Peter Akinola and colleagues are attempting to roll back hard-won progress on tolerance of diversity in sexual orientation. This issue has significant real-world implications, and the religious liberals should be applauded for their efforts to further the full acceptance of gays in our world society.

Marx (and now Obama): "Religion is the Opiate of the Masses"

Marx penned this elegant aphorism in l843. And Barack Obama essentially rephrased Marx when he stated on April 6 that [working class people] “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion…as a way to explain their frustrations.” The similarity of the statements by Marx and Obama provided an opportunity for the neo-con William Kristol (who I read only with distaste) to mount a strong attack on Obama in his Op-Ed column in yesterday’s New York Times.

What Kristol doesn’t mention in his column is that Marx got it right (at least on this score). Organized religions do spin fairy tales that help the oppressed, including working-class Americans, deal with the vicissitudes of life. This seems especially true at times like the present when the cracks in capitalism become visible, and cause economic pain to all but the super-rich.

However, I have to agree with Kristol that in Obama’s April 6 speech, this usually eloquent and considerate speaker stumbled badly when he paraphrased Marx’s succinct summary of religion. I am, and continue to be, a strong supporter of Obama. And Obama was of course correct in his Marxist analysis of the economic pain that leads people to “cling” to religion (together with guns and antipathy). But Obama exhibited highly questionable judgment in making such a statement. It is both insensitive and impolitic to throw this kind of sentiment in the faces of true believers. Their natural responses will be at best indifference, and far more likely anger at the disparagement of the source of their deeply held religious beliefs. This kind of statement stands in violation of our American principle of tolerance of the beliefs of others. And events subsequent to Obama’s April 6 statement demonstrate its ability to precipitate ongoing attacks from many quarters, including his rival for the Democratic nomination.

I hope that Obama manages to proceed with his impressive campaign for the presidency without any further errors in judgment as serious and potentially far-reaching as the one he has just committed.

Darwin, Cosmology, Creationism, and Extinction

We have just celebrated the 199^th anniversary of Darwin’s birth on February 12, 1809. But both the grandeur of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and its ability to provoke controversy, are undimmed by the passage of time.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory shares a property with some other great paradigm-shifting concepts: in retrospect it seems almost obvious. The theory consists of two exceedingly simple ideas: 1. organisms possess mechanisms (now known to act on DNA) that permit gradual changes in a population; and 2. in a given environment, only the fittest organisms will survive and thus propagate. But the originality and enormous significance of Darwin’s theory imply that he was the greatest and most important theoretical biologist the world has ever seen. Evolution is the key concept underlying everything we presently understand about the biology of organisms, including us humans. This theory is also the guiding principle undergirding all of modern-day biological and biomedical research.

And of course the “theory” of evolution has now been extensively proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be correct. Yes, there are aspects of evolution that are still in contention, partly because they don’t appear to strictly follow one or the other principles of Darwin’s theory. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, wrote extensively about some of these outstanding issues. For example, he described what he termed “spandrels”, features in an organism that do not arise directly from evolutionary selection. One example is the human chin, which results from different rates of growth of bones in our jaws during development. Another concept, also championed by Gould, is “punctuated equilibrium”, in which evolution proceeds abruptly rather than smoothly. But these outstanding questions about aspects of evolution clearly don’t invalidate the theory, but instead provide interesting ongoing challenges for evolutionary biologists.

Yet polls show that at least half of Americans do not “believe” in the theory of evolution, but instead believe in alternative pseudo-scientific theories: first “creationism”, followed more recently by its shabbily disguised offspring, “intelligent design”. Why such widespread disbelief in evolution? Well, it’s partly explained by the 18^th century scientist Georg Lichtenberg: “When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, does the hollow sound always emanate from the book?”

But here’s a different way of looking at this question: why don’t the opponents of evolution also oppose progress in physics and cosmology? The answer seems simple: recent advances by physicists and cosmologists in our understanding of the universe generally make no direct statements about the origin of human life. However, there are some very recent, interesting, and pretty far-out cosmological theories, involving multiple universes in infinitely expanding space, that do make statements about all life, including of course human beings. These theories imply that the existence of life in our particular universe could be simply the outcome of a completely random process of universe production. I think it is probably fortunate for the cosmologists that these more recent theories are completely unknown to the general public.

By contrast, it is widely known that the theory of evolution states that we humans were not created in our “perfect” form by a Grand Creator, but that we instead evolved from lower, “baser” organisms. Even worse for the chances of this theory being accepted, it is quite clear that the process of evolution proceeds with no intervention whatsoever from a supernatural force.

This refusal by much of the public to accept evolution could be at least partially corrected by enlightened educational policies. However, schools in many parts of the country- one thinks especially of Kansas, of course, where history has recently tried to repeat itself- have done a poor job both in dispelling mystical beliefs in creationism, and in emphasizing the importance of science to our society. As recently as this past week, Florida rang in on this subject: state officials there decided that evolution can be taught, but only as a theory that has not been conclusively demonstrated. These officials, in their infinite wisdom, decided that Einstein’s relativity theory is also only a theory, but that Newton’s gravitational law can be taught as fact!

The federal government has also failed us, by permitting individual states like Kansas and Florida to develop their own policies on science education. This has left an intellectual gap in our society, with little to counter-act the teaching by members of some organized religions of a non-scientific, supernatural approach to our understanding of the origin and development of life on earth.

The rejection of evolution by at least half of all Americans is extremely frustrating to biologists and other scientifically literate individuals. Societal disbelief in the established theory of evolution is, to biologists, as ridiculous and insulting as rejection by the public of basic, proven concepts in physics, such as the laws of gravity and relativity, would be to physicists.

I very much hope that societal evolution will ultimately render the pseudo-theories of creationism and intelligent design, like the dinosaurs, extinct.

Infinite God or Infinite Universe?

Many people believe that God created the Universe. But who created God? The standard religious response seems to be: “Oh, no, that question is neither valid nor necessary. God is both eternal and has supernatural powers [i.e., powers that transcend natural law]. And anyway, our universe (containing us humans) is so wonderful that God must have have created it”.

In the field of cosmology, models are being considered in which the whole world (i.e., everything) has existed forever. In one such model, our little Universe is but one of many (maybe an infinite number) of similar entities. These universes are created all the time as little bubbles, produced by a “Big Bang” and then expanding rapidly, just like our universe. Like all scientific theories, these models are governed by natural laws [although in many cases these laws are still poorly understood.]

So, which should I choose: a God of infinite duration and supernatural powers; or a whole world (including our universe as maybe just a tiny part) that has existed forever? Well, each model is pretty dramatic, since one of them may ultimately account for everything we know about our universe, plus a whole lot that we will probably never know about other possible universes. The existence of multiple (perhaps an infinite number of) universes explains why our universe contains living beings- we live in one of the very small fraction of universes with physical laws consistent with life. So we wonderful human beings could well be the outcome of a completely random process of universe production!

Is it any more “amazing” to think that the clock of the entire world may have been been ticking for all eternity, than to believe in a God who has been around for the same duration, and employed his supernatural powers to created our universe? To my mind, neither model wins the “amazing” contest. But what greatly decreases the “amazing” quotient of either model is that, to our present knowledge, our universe(s) is a singular event. So I would ask: “amazing compared to what?”

Being a scientific rationalist (and also by Occam’s Razor), I would choose the universe of infinite existence over a creator of infinite duration and power. Of course, the whole shebang may be not be infinite, and may be composed only of our universe, starting with the Big Bang, and preceded by “nothing”. Then how did the Big Bang happen? Again, I believe that physical laws govern that singular occurrence, although sadly, we may never know these laws.

So, as I discussed in a previous post (“The God Assumption…”), there seems to be no need whatsoever to hypothesize the existence of a god(s).

An Irrational Love of Hymns

I have been an atheist for a long time. And for just about as long, I have had an irrational love of Christian hymns (my favorite is “Amazing Grace”). This started when I first learned the hymns at a summer camp, as we sang them on Sunday mornings in a clearing in the woods, surrounded by beautiful trees, sky, and mountains. I was inspired by the intensity of the words, but even more so by the beauty of the melodies as we all joined our voices in song. And to this day, I still enjoy singing hymns, and amaze the small fraction of my friends who are Christians by singing from memory multiple verses of many favorites. I of course believe virtually none of the concepts in these religious songs, but I still enjoy not only the melodies, but also the spiritual intensity of their sentiments. The same can of course be said for the beautiful, religiously inspired works of Bach, Haydn, etc.

But this points up the danger of hymns: their very intensity, pleasing and catchy melodies, and rhythmic qualities can sway people’s minds and direct their beliefs and their actions. This is true of course of any kind of polemical songs. One example of this power, far removed from hymns, are the “uplifting” Hitler Youth songs and Nazi anthems that were sung endlessly during Nazi propaganda marches.

A song by the country-singing Carter Family, “Diamonds in the Rough”, points up the power of hymns to convince, and even convert. The song begins:

While walking out one evening
Not knowing where to go
Just to pass the time away
Before we gave the show

I met a little salvation band
Singing with all its might
I gave my heart to Jesus
And left the show that night.

These two brief verses present a perfect parable of conversion by hymn: the wastrel, frittering away his time either in some kind of a secular show, or just walking around, hears a salvation group singing songs of devotion to Jesus. He immediately leaves the show, and presumably dedicates his life to the Saviour.

So I can't help retaining a sentimental love for hymns. But clearly, in the wrong hands- or minds- they can be insidious.

Dreaded Thoughts of an Atheist

Let's Put the P Back in Xmas

For two millennia, Christianity has had a lock on December 25, denoting this day as “Christmas”, the celebration of Christ’s birthday. And of course many of us non-Christians, atheists included, do partake of the Christmas traditions. But celebrations of December 25 has pagan origins dating from ancient times. For untold centuries, the winter solstice was marked by celebrations of the time when the Sun finally turned the tide in its battle with night, offering the promise of a return to the long, warm days of Spring and Summer. The Romans called the winter solstice “Sol Invictus”- the Undefeated Sun.

The Romans celebrated the anticipation of the return of Spring -and the birthday of the sun god Mithra- with a festival ending on December 25 (then believed to be the year’s shortest day) called Saturnalia, after the god of agriculture. Saturnalia was a joyous occasion filled with lusty pursuits such as feasting, drinking, and fornication. Certainly a somewhat different event than our present-day fairly sedate, religious, and family-oriented Christmas!

So how did this pagan celebration of the winter solstice get translated into a celebration of Christ’s birth? Christ’s birthdate is not mentioned in the Bible, and is thus unknown. So the early Christian church arbitrarily decided to denote December 25 as Christ’s birthday.

This was a very smart, pre-Madison Avenue PR move by the church. Paganism was a major rival of early Christianity, and the winter solstice was a widespread and beloved occasion for celebration. So the church’s choice of December 25 permitted an entrenched old Pagan tradition to continue, but transformed into a new Christian tradition. And it probably seemed quite natural to transform the universal human joy at the return of the life-giving Sun, into joy at the birth of a Son who was the Saviour of humanity. Thus the Christian church managed to turn bawdy Saturnalia into the pious Christ’s mass, Christmas.

But many of the most beloved trappings of our present-day Christmas celebrations come directly from these age-old pagan winter solstice traditions- the spirit of kindness towards friends and strangers, the wassail punch (very similar to the Roman drink calda), kissing under the mistletoe (from ancient Scandinavia), the Advent Wreath (from the pagan fire wheel symbolizing life), and the age-old Celtic Yule log. And of course our traditional Christmas tree is simply a continuation of an ancient pagan tradition of bringing bits of greenery into the house to celebrate the winter solstice.

So let’s take December 25 back from the Christians, and restore it to its wonderful Pagan traditions. For starters, I offer the modest proposal that we remove the X from Xmas, and rename this day Pmas.

An Atheist's Prayer

I think that to many of us, atheism represents a profound belief rather than a certainty. For me at least, both as a thinking person and a scientist, any such rigid conviction would be almost as abhorrent as religious dogmatism. We have to consider the possibility that any particular theory of the universe- ours included- is flawed, or even just plain false (string theory is a good candidate for the latter). As the astronomer Carl Sagan said, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." So we can’t be completely certain that the universe was neither created nor is ruled over by some kind of supernatural being. This means, unfortunately, that deists might, in spite of themselves, possibly be right about the existence of a god(s).

But if we atheists did get this wrong, there is surely no reason to conclude that any organized religion got it right. What are the odds that any particular superstitious club, in our very ordinary little dot of space, happened upon the correct description of this all-powerful ruler of the universe? Probably about equal to the infinitesimal odds given in Matthew 19:24 of a rich man getting into heaven. It seems far more likely that any such “god(s)” would bear little or no resemblance whatsoever to any gods envisioned by any religions past or present.

The prayer below, addressed “to whom it may concern”, explores the possibility that atheism/humanism might have gotten this one wrong:

An Atheist’s Prayer

Bless my family and me,

Whatever organizing force there may be in the World;

Whatever abiding spirit may have escaped the crushing randomness of the Universe;

Whatever God-like being, capable of ascribing meaning to life and the world,

I might have over-looked in the arrogant certainty of my atheism.

Matthew's Jesus

When I heard about Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ”, I decided to read the Book of Matthew as background info. I obtained (okay, actually bought) the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, to be sure I got the most accurate translation of Matthew (although the authenticity of any current version of the Bible is at best questionable). Yes, Matthew does quote some beautiful sayings of Jesus. But I found the overall description of Jesus in Matthew pretty distasteful.

In Matthew, particularly in the early part, Jesus comes across as a sort of Wizard of Oz, using magic healing to convince the many doubters that he truly is the Messiah. By my count, Jesus heals or brings back to life 13 individuals. Then, to really drive home his miraculous abilities, Jesus performs at least five large-scale healings (e.g., 4:23, “He went all about Galilee…. healing every disease and every infirmity among the people.”). But Jesus’ “healing” was conditional on belief- he wouldn’t heal the Cananite woman’s daughter till she had professed her great faith (15:21ff). Under those terms, you better believe! And of course Jesus also performs other kinds of magic tricks, including amplifying the loaves and fishes (14:16ff), and walking on water (14:22).

Matthew’s Jesus reminds me of an old-style Atlantic City Boardwalk auctioneer, saying to the crowd: “Still not convinced? Tell you what I’m gonna do,” and then producing other baubles and gewgaws to amaze and confuse them. How could anyone resist the word of someone apparently possessing such broad miraculous powers? But if the multitudes had believed, as we atheists do, that Jesus’ “miracles” were at best magic tricks, it seems highly doubtful that they would have believed his claim to be the Son of God.

Another aspect of Jesus beside the miracles described in this Book rankles me. Early on, Jesus tells his future disciples to just drop everything and follow him (4:18ff). So off the guys go discipling with Jesus, leaving nobody to support their wives and children. In fact, Jesus cruelly forces his followers to choose between him and their families, saying things like “I have come to set a man against his father…” (10:35), and “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…” (10:37). So much for Christian family values!

Well, it was worth reading Matthew to get this information directly from the source. But after reading reviews describing Mel Gibson's movie as a homoerotically violent piece of work, I never did go see the damned thing.

It's Kind of Sad Being an Atheist

Declaring oneself an atheist is, by itself, a purely negative statement. Being atheists means that, in the absence of some proof that a god(s) rules the universe, we don’t believe in any such god(s). We of course feel forced to define ourselves this way in a country where roughly 85% of the population believes literally in heaven and miracles.

But “atheist” is still an uncomfortable designation, since we don’t want to define ourselves solely on the basis of a negative belief. So what are we to do? The answer is not at all obvious. Many of us (including me) consider ourselves to be secular humanists. This means to me that we hold the same beliefs as any right-thinking liberal person: love, appreciation of the beauty of the earth and of cultural human endeavors, and the rights of all people to have access to a happy and fulfilling life. In the atheist Thomas Jefferson’s ringing phrase in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,…” (Yes, the rest of that sentence unfortunately mentions “their Creator”, but the impact of the “self-evident” phrase is not lessened thereby).

A movement called The Brights (www.the-brights.net) has proposed a solution to this quandary. I feel sympathetic to their statement of principles, but personally find it still too undifferentiated. Perhaps we atheists should extend our self-designation slightly to something like: Atheists Who Also Seek to Live Full, Loving, and Generous Lives. Too long a name, of course, but maybe a start.