The jobs don't pay a lot, and you take most of your pay in self-esteem, but somebody is always trying out for village idiot or village atheist. Often they're one and the same...

-- Wesley Pruden, Revival time with the village atheist, (Washington Times)

In a classic pot-and-kettle scenario, Wesley Pruden has done disservice to the readers of the Washington Times with an irrational screed mocking atheists for writing "irrational screeds mocking those who have the faith the authors clearly envy."  The saving grace for these unfortunate atheists is that the average Times reader is probably too smart to be taken in by such drivel.

Pruden has nothing constructive to offer in his screed.  He merely calls atheists names and cites examples of atheists saying bad things about people who deserve to have bad things said about them.  This is what his article boils down to:

• Did you know that there are atheists living among you?
• Atheists are idiots.
• Atheists hate people of faith because they don't have faith but desperately want it.
• Atheists say the darndest things.
• Atheists are getting more attention than I am and it pisses me off.

Mr. Pruden apparently doesn't concern himself with the facts regarding persons atheists have spoken ill of, or even facts about the atheists themselves.  I mean really, who among us who has actually read The God Delusion would use the word "irrational" to describe it?  I've been struggling with the book myself and have found it incredibly dense, repetitive, and belaboring of points, but irrational?  Rationality is the coin of the atheist realm.  The author has got it backwards... it is faith that is irrational.

The article is clearly calculated to incense the readership, as opposed to communicate any meaningful argument as to why atheists are idiots, or naughty, or whatever else he's trying to say.  He notes Christopher Hitchens' reference to Mother Theresa as "the ghoul of Calcutta", without bothering to say why.  He notes Pulitzer prize winner Paul Greenberg's mention of Reverend Falwell's one "decent" moment on record, without bothering to say why.  Apparently the "why" doesn't concern the unencumbered-by-a-Pulitzer-Prize-Pruden.

A rational person will find little of interest in this yawn-inspiring rant against atheism, except perhaps an appreciation of the irony by which the author reveals himself to be the shrill irrational caricature that he tries to paint atheists as.  Beyond that, there's nothing to see here.

"... A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded [...] We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law nor profess the God-given quality of human rights. [...] In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms [...] Too often, the courts have been biased against religious believers. This anti-religious bias must end ..."

-- Newt Gingrich, speaking at Liberty University
Gingrich: Challenge 'radical secularism' (AP via Pioneer Press)

How much of our history is merely perception colored by those seeking to attain power?  This nation was not founded on Christianity, why does that simple fact continue to elude these twits?  Shall we go back to Jefferson and check... AGAIN?

"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281

"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67
 

(Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government -- Freedom of Religion)

The great Virginian Thomas Jefferson understood that our country must espouse no religion, in order to protect them all.  Theists who hold their religions near and dear (especially Christians) should be very wary of those who want to infuse their religion into politics.  I discussed this last October in my article Looking Into the Abyss:

...If you are a religious person, and if you believe that politics is largely despicable, then it follows that you may believe that getting your religion into politics will improve the state of politics and make it less dirty.  But, like the mixing paints, doing so will also infuse the dirt of politics into your religion.  Priests will become politicians, and politicians will become priests, each less suited to their role than they were before.  Keeping your religion away from politics is the best way to keep politics away from your religion... if you don't eventually you'll find that the power-hungry have invaded your churches and turned them into something they were not intended to be.  Mixing the two leaves you with neither...

Southern Baptists, at least the ones who cheered Newt on at Liberty University, are pushing this nation toward theocracy.  It desperately concerns me that they haven't thought this through.  For his part, Newt is considering a run for president in 2008.  And so once again, the power hungry tell the religious what they want to hear in order to win votes.  Jefferson understood this too:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21
 

(Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government -- Freedom of Religion)

Fellow citizens, we have our work cut out for us.

Here's a news story from my childhood hometown, reported by the Boston Globe.  The First American Baptist Church of Whitman, MA has just ejected its pastor.  This pastor came from a different Baptist church based in Holbrook that closed down in 2005, bringing his old congregation with him.

The problem, apparently, is that the First American Baptist Church is of the "American Baptist" sect, and the new pastor is not.  He's an independent Baptist. The two groups don't appear to be mixing well, and there is mention of the pastor changing locks on the office doors and disallowing the former church clerk entry.  And so the former clerk began a movement to oust the pastor, which has gained much support and ultimately succeeded.

...While [Reverend] Fernandez claimed the two congregations merged, Judge Frances McIntyre, in her ruling, said the two congregations remained virtually separate for the next year and a half.

"The issue here appears to be two fundamentally different religious groups competing for control of property which has historically belonged to one of the groups," McIntyre wrote...

..."He's a wonderful preacher. He's just not a believer in American Baptists," [former church clerk Jean] Porter said of Fernandez. "It's in our church constitution that this is an American Baptist Church. That's our denomination, and has been for over 100 years. He's an independent Baptist. It's as simple as that."...

I don't pretend to understand the differences between the two sects, but I think it a little sad that they can't get along well enough to share the same church.  Then again at least one of the differences would have made me want to throw out the new pastor too:

...Eric Grey, associate executive minister for administration and finance for the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts, said there are certain differences in the tenets among the Baptist sects. "One is that we affirm women in the ministry," he said. Grey said the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts are "standing with the First Baptist Church of Whitman" in their court case against Fernandez...

(Emphasis mine.)  Yeah, I can see where a new guy coming in and saying, "no more female ministers" might annoy people.  (Then again, I don't think the Reverend did that.)  According to the article Rev. Fernandez negotiated a move to the Whitman church on the agreement that he would become certified as an American Baptist, which he did not do.  There is also mention of money being drained from a church account--all in all not a happy affair.

Perhaps the most annoying thing are the concluding remarks from the Reverend:

...Fernandez, meanwhile, said losing the Whitman building "doesn't matter" to him. "What is disappointing is the people who showed they were willing to sacrifice all these members of the congregation for a building."...

According to those who opposed him, it wasn't about "the building".  It was about him failing to meet his end of an agreement to become certified by the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts.  It makes him seem just a little bit... sly--thinking perhaps that he would promise the certification, but then win over the congregation during Sunday services and not bother.

I don't highlight this story out of any "atheist superiority complex"--there are definitely different schools of thought among atheists, and not all of us get along.  I mostly highlight the story because it is from my hometown, and because I'm sad these two groups couldn't work something out.

From Atheism to Catholicism:

My journey to atheism took about 25 years.  It was not a journey fraught with disaster (any more than any average person's life is) but it was not exactly easy.  In 1967 I was born, as all babies are, an atheist.  My parents were Roman Catholics, and fairly devout ones at that.

Over the next 17 years or so I was indoctrinated into the Roman Catholic religion.  I remember many, MANY, Sundays in church when I was younger.  As my parents became busier and busier with work and life in general, we went to church less and less.  Which was fine with me.  I was hyperactive and having to sit in an uncomfortable pew while an old guy babbled for an hour on a Sunday morning was very difficult for me.  Eventually our trips to the church were only occasional, Christmas, Easter, etc.--the big holidays.

My Dad had converted to Catholicism from Protestantism so that he could marry my Mom.  He made clear to me in a number of conversations that his belief was not strictly Catholic.  The most memorable conversation was one where he described a sort of "Gaea Hypothesis" where the Earth itself was what we think of as "God", a living organism with a desire to reproduce, which is why it had evolved humans, so that we could journey to other worlds and bring life there.

Dad loved Carl Sagan, and I have fond memories of watching Cosmos with him.  I understood some of it, but not all of it due to my youth.  When Carl gently explained with his "why not skip a step?" lecture about God and the origin of the universe, I didn't realize I was being exposed to atheistic cosmology.  (For those of you that missed it, you should check it out, Carl was a wonderful teacher.)

My Mom, a good Irish woman, worked hard to keep my Catholicism strong.  She sent me to CCD (Sunday school) until I flat out refused to go.  Even as a believer, Sunday school seemed to be a joke... what a waste of time.  And as previously stated, she got me to church for many years, right up to first communion and beyond.  By the time high school rolled around, my parents were less than impressed with the local public high school that my sister had attended 7 years prior (apparently there was a lot of drugs there and other unpleasantry), so they decided to send me to a parochial school.

Catholic school was very different from public school, but even as an atheist now, I am pleased to report that my education there was of high quality.  There was no shirking of evolution (it was a Catholic school, after all), and I remember only a couple teachers whom I felt really didn't belong there.  The indoctrination, at the time, didn't seem like indoctrination.  It is only in hindsight that I can see how Catholicism was drilled into me on a daily basis.  By this time my family were not regular churchgoers, and the school priest was concerned about the fact that I would not be confirmed.  So he encouraged me to seek confirmation on my own, which I did.  I was confirmed with the name "Peter" and from that point on actually went so far as to add Peter to my name as a second middle name.  Asked to sign anything I would write Charles Douglas Peter ...  I thought it was pretty cool to have a second middle name, and wearing that name was like wearing a badge of my Christianity--Peter, the rock, upon which Christ built his church.

For a time, I began going to church again by myself--I was highly motivated (by guilt) to do right by God.  But I had been motivated by guilt my entire life, and in experiencing the sorts of things every young boy experiences at one time or another, I was wracked with it. I agonized with guilt over the normal feelings a male experiences.  I spent many a quiet hour alone and near tears over the eternal damnation that awaited me as a sinner.  You see I was terrified of confession... I couldn't possibly sit in a little black room with a priest who knew me and pour out all my terrible sins, I just couldn't possibly do it.  I would never be able to look him in the eye again.  I tried to explain to one of my relatives once that I didn't like confession, and was informed "Well then, you're a heathen" much to my dismay.  Thus when I went to confession, I stuck to stuff that was pretty unremarkable, and left the booth each time knowing that not all my sins had been forgiven.  How draconian a system of forgiveness!  I can't just drop to my knees and ask for it?  An all-powerful being who already knows of each of my sins, and can read my mind and see how tormented I am, but who can't forgive me unless I go to the nearest service center and speak with a representative?

By my senior year in high school, with some of the early angst of puberty behind me, I was beginning to mature into an adult.  At that time, I came to a decision that brought me peace.  "When I go away to college," I thought to myself, "I'll take a weekend and drive really far, far, away from anyplace I've ever been, or will ever go again, and I'll finally confess these sins to a priest who I will never have to look in the eye afterward."  Knowing I wouldn't have to carry this weight forever, that there was a way out, made me feel much better about it.  The road to God's kingdom was clear, all I needed was a car and a tankful of gas.  This decision brought me great peace, and with the guilt in check, I suddenly became much happier.  I began to get along with the other kids better, and even became somewhat respected as an individual by my peers.  I also stopped going to church, figuring I could take care of all that when I went on my "religious retreat next year".

To Nondenominational Christianity:

And so I went off to college.  And there I became friends with people of all different creeds including agnostics and atheists.  It was an exciting time and I was finding many new schools of thought that fascinated me.  I was growing.  It was in college that I came to understand that the "sins" I had been beating myself up over for years were an extremely normal part of boyhood.  Before long I felt quite silly for agonizing over them, which in turn made me even happier.  I decided to put the religious retreat on hold until I figured out where my life was going.

Over the next couple years I concluded that the problem was organized religion itself.  I had become aware of the sordid history of my church, and of other churches and religions, and came to the conclusion that it was my personal relationship with God that mattered.  I changed from Catholic to simply "Christian".  I was very familiar with the bible, having spent years studying it, and felt I could try to live by some of the precepts set forth by Christ, seek forgiveness from God directly, and ignore all of the hateful crazy stuff that the bible was so rife with.

By the time college ended, my beliefs had changed again, mostly through discussions with my fiance, who was raised Lutheran.  I felt that the basic moral code of Christ was mostly a good one and had become aware of just how poorly people who were supposed to be exemplary Christians understood his teachings and how they were in many ways waving the banner of Christ while behaving in an exceedingly unchristlike fashion.  In that sense, his "church" didn't survive very long after his death, and transformed into something else.  I was aware that many had called themselves messiah and there was no more reason to believe in their divinity than in Christ's.  It amused me that if Christ lived today, he'd have been shouted down as a long-haired beatnick hippie liberal.  I was aware of just how much of the story of his life was now in doubt, much of it having been edited in order to fit with earlier prophecy.

To Deism:

I was no longer a Christian.  I thought that perhaps a God existed, but it seemed to me a being who had created the entire universe would have far, far, too much on his mind to worry over poor little me.  It was silly.  Apart from the love and support of my friends, family, and fiance, I was on my own.  There was no almighty being who was checking off an attendance sheet every Sunday, and counting every time I looked at the fanny of a lovely lady and felt desire.  All those years of agonizing guilt were years WASTED.  How differently my life might have turned out had I not been so weighted down with the assured eternal torment that came with thinking boobies were interesting.  But I was not angry at God, or the church, or Catholicism, or my parents.  I was only angry with myself, for not coming to the realization sooner.  At this point I was wavering between Christian and Deist.  I still believed there probably was a God, but he was nothing like any God humanity had ever imagined.  The very idea that a man or woman could "tell you about God" seemed ludicrous.  Our knowledge of the universe was absolutely paltry.  There were planetoids circling our own sun that we hadn't discovered yet, and we had not discovered a single extrasolar world for lack of equipment capable enough.   And yet our sun was one of billions, in a galaxy that was one of millions of billions of galaxies... the universe was, for any practical purpose, infinite.  And some dork with a 2000 year old book written by sheepherders is going to tell me he knows the mind of the God that created more than he could ever be aware of?  Puhlease.

The following year we got married.  We both felt, for our families' sakes, that we should marry in a religious ceremony.  It seemed easier to do that than to explain to our parents that we didn't share their religious convictions.  And, I had a certain attachment to my old church.  Even if I didn't believe anymore, I loved the old building, and remembering eying the architecture with wonder as a young boy.  So we jumped through all the hoops and did the pre-cana classes and finally got married after five years together.  Being married didn't change anything about our feelings for each other, we were already devoted to one another and for years had shared a single apartment and checking account.  Over the next few years I continued to grow (or shrink if you prefer) theistically.

To Agnosticism and finally Atheism:

Shortly after marriage I left deism behind and moved to agnosticism, and then finally to atheism.  This last leg of the journey was achieved simply through study and keeping an open mind.  I spent many nights pondering the existence of a God.  Many Christians feel that atheists are people who were molested by priests or who had something really bad happen to them that made them doubt God.  But my journey to enlightenment simply came through thought and reason.  Not once did I ever come to the conclusion that God didn't exist because of bad things that happened to myself or others.  My mind, and the minds of great thinkers, set me free from belief in a deity. And it was in freedom that I began to grow more than I ever had before.

That final transition from agnosticism to atheism did not come from arguments considering the likelihood of God, as put forth so eloquently by Dr. Richard Dawkins, but simply from an understanding of belief and science.  Nothing had ever sprung into existence from belief, and primitive humans, seeking to explain the world around them, had come up with beliefs based on their limited experience to explain their world.  There was a god of thunder, and a god of the river, and a god of this and of that, a final go-to place to explain that which was as yet unexplainable.  These gods were inventions, we know that now, and we assuredly believe that our particular god is nonetheless real.  Why?  The universe existed for billions of years before humans did.  Life existed for millions of years before human did.  There are almost certainly other worlds out there with life on them somewhere.  Why would we imagine that their God is our God?

It became clear that God is a product of man, and he still exists as a go-to for those questions that still are not answered and to comfort us.  Through a god and afterlife, we are eternal, our consciousness the manifestation of an immortal spirit that will rejoin its loved ones who have passed on before when we die.  The God hypothesis makes us live forever.  And further, it addresses the common lament that life is not fair, God will mete out justice.  If an awful, evil man becomes powerful and lives a long happy life hurting others, we can take solace that after death, he will be brought to account for his transgressions.  The God hypothesis makes life fair.  This is why the God hypothesis exists--to make us feel better.  It is a comforting idea, in my opinion.  But that doesn't make it true.

Which is where the science comes in.  Science and good old Occam's Razor.  A hypothesis only becomes a theory through testing, and the God hypothesis is untestable.  First of all, most religions make quite clear that their gods will not abide being tested.  Why?  Because testing yields no confirmation. Get 10,000 believers together and have them pray over a guy with no legs and he will not grow new ones.  Ever.  Believing doesn't make things happen.  Herbert Benson's recent study of believers praying for heart surgey patients found no positive effect on the outcome of the surgery and even had a slight negative effect for those patients who knew they were being prayed for.  Secondly there is no evidence.  Such evidence that has turned up (such as the Shroud of Turin) has failed under scrutiny.  You can't get from hypothesis to theory without observable and verifiable evidence.  Thirdly, the predictions of the God hypothesis are nonfalsifiable since there is no way to communicate with those "in the afterlife".  Instead such predictions are painfully ambiguous so as to be rationalized easily, and serve as raw materials from which charlatans can build a living preying on the gullible or the bereaved.  Which brings me back to Occam's Razor... the God hypothesis is an incredibly complex answer to the origin of humanity, whereas Darwin's elegant theory of natural selection and evolution is a very simple one--one that makes predictions which stand up to testing, and for which there are mountains of supporting evidence.  Occam's Razor cuts away the God hypothesis, leaving the simpler and scientifically sound evolutionary explanation.  There simply isn't any good reason to assume the existence of a supreme being until such time as evidence is discovered to support it. 

And so I dropped the (perhaps somewhat pretentious) "Peter" from my name, and went back to being just Charles Douglas.  So much the better, as Douglas is my father's name, and he was the saintliest person I ever knew.

Enlightenment:

Without a poorly fitting fairytale stretched over it, bursting at the seams, the world finally made sense.  Things snapped into place and became clear.  I could now ponder the origins of morality, religion, science, humanity, and the universe without the blinders of faith.  I could consider modern moral questions (such as gay marriage, abortion, and so forth) without the infernally nonsensical mandates of the Judeochristian deity.  I was happier than I ever remembered being, finding a remarkable peace that did away with guilt.  I was an atheist, happily married to another atheist, and together we could do much good for our fellow humans, and lead productive and joyful lives together.  It was only after becoming an atheist that I began studying some of the atheist literature that was available, becoming more familiar with Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, George H. Smith, Jonathan Miller, and the witty and caustic Christopher Hitchens.  (I confess that I have not read all these authors.)

Some years later our daughter was born, and we agreed to raise her in a world without superstition and supernatural nonsense.  She would be taught that she should be a good person all on her own, without a scary boojum that was going to "get her" if she didn't.  I think it was good for her, because she is like me, a creature of guilt, and I am so happy to see that she isn't crushed under it like I was.  Are we indoctrinating her?  Perhaps.  Young minds need instruction.  So we teach her how to be a good human being and leave it at that.  I've made quite clear to her that when she is older, if she decides to pursue a religion of one sort or another, I will love her every bit as much.  The only thing I ask is that she wait until she is older to make that decision, so that she makes it with an adult mind, instead of a childlike one.  Perhaps I needn't worry so much.  When her world had a Santa Claus and tooth fairy in it, she viewed the possibility of God as somewhat greater than zero.  When she was freed of those illusions her worldview became much more pragmatic and she seems happier with the knowledge that the world makes sense, even if life isn't fair and is sometimes very sad.

It was shortly after my kid was born that I made it clear to my parents that I was not a Christian.  Mostly because my Mom kept hinting at a "christening" for my daughter.  When was the baptism going to happen? And so forth.  My family has respected my choice to varying degrees of worry, my father being the clearest.  He summed it up quite succinctly: "your Mom doesn't like it but it doesn't matter to me."  My Dad was incredibly broadminded and thoughtful, deeply philosophical, and just all around great.  I really miss him.  My wife's family is similarly mostly respectful of her choice, except for one of them who is convinced that I "corrupted" her.  (This person would doubtless be surprised to know that Patty was an atheist long before I was.)

Living as an Atheist:

Living as we do, in liberal Massachusetts, where the basic humanist tenet of "live and let live" is alive and well, we are not persecuted for our lack of faith.  We get along well with our neighbors and friends, and pretty much don't talk about faith unless the subject comes up.  So far so good, but I read too much of the news not to see that atheists are persecuted in our nation.  It is perfectly acceptable to say "I hate atheists" and to express any number of ludicrous stereotypes about people like me.  George Bush senior once expressed his opinion that American atheists should not be considered citizens of the USA.  My daughter still has to profess a belief in God each morning during the pledge of allegiance, or feel like an outsider among her peers and risk intolerant treatment.  Every bit of currency in my pocket shrieks YOU ARE NOT AN AMERICAN at me with its boldfaced assertion that Americans "trust in God".  In a court of law, my testimony must be sworn truth before a nonexistant sky-fairy or it is immediately cast into doubt.  But that's fine.  Most Americans are Christian, and though all these things violate the separation of church and state, I'm prepared to overlook at least the latter two.  I know I am a good American, and that my testimony is just as accurate without fealty to some nebulous deity.  The pledge bothers me because it is a form of indoctrination, but there are far bigger fish to fry right now.  Just take a peek at George God-Told-Me-To-Invade-Iraq Bush for a minute to see how theistic thinking threatens us all when we fail to respect the wall of separation between church and State, erected by the esteemed Thomas Jefferson who was a Deist, not a Christian.

I know too many good people of faith to disparage faith itself, I can only disparage what some do in the name of it.  And thus I believe that as long as people aren't actively trying to convert me or persecute me, they are welcome to their faith.  I wish them nothing but joy of it.  But at the same time I feel a little sad.  Although it is a perhaps comforting thought when stepping out on a gorgeous sunny spring day to hear the birds singing that God made that day for me, and has a plan for us all, knowing that it all just happened according to basic laws of nature makes the day and my chance to enjoy it that much rarer and more special for me, and helps me appreciate it in a manner that a theist cannot.  What a precious, rare and wonderful world we all live on!

But that's okay.  What's important is that we each find our happiness while respecting each other.  Maybe I'm an optimist, but I ultimately believe that humanity will mature and either move beyond theism, or at least move to nonconfrontational theism that concerns itself only with the metaphysical, and leaves the physical realm to science.  It won't happen in my lifetime, but I'm doing my part to make it happen by being a good moral atheist and raising another good moral atheist.  As a good (atheist) friend of mine once taught me, it was Ghandi who said You must be the change you wish to see in the world, he was right.  So that's what I'm doing.

Peace.

---

Wow, I just stumbled across The Index to Creationist Claims by Mark Isaak.  What a great resource!

This is something I keep hearing from certain theists who feel the need to argue with atheists.  It came up during Christopher Hitchens' recent NPR interview (21 Mb .mp3 file).  I've heard it from the Kirk Cameron crowd.  I've heard it all over the place.  Let me summarize it:

There's so much in our world which is unexplainable by science, how can you not believe there is a God who created these things?

I hate this argument, mostly because it makes a number of logical errors.  Christopher Hitchens would go further to say that it is ridiculously arrogant.  During his NPR interview when a lady called in and put this to him, his response was (paraphasing):

She seems to imagine what isn't explained can be explained by her.  I wouldn't presume any such arrogance.  What have we been wasting our time for?  With all these inquiries into nature and the natural order--there's a lady in Virginia Beach who knows all about it, and she even knows who's responsible.  We should have asked her.  Isn't it amazing how religious people claim such humility and yet make the most fantastically arrogant claims?.

I wouldn't take Hitchens' stance that the caller was arrogant, only that she simply doesn't understand the logical problems with her argument.

First, why this peculiar jump from "unexplained" to "unexplainable"?  There are questions for which science has no answer other than "I don't know", but some people don't seem to realize that means "I don't know yet."  Surely there are some questions science cannot answer right now because nobody is investigating that particular question, or the answer requires evidence that hasn't been found yet.  But it doesn't follow that these mysteries are never going to be explained by science... therefore it's quite silly to refer to them as "unexplainable".  There is a big difference between unexplained and unexplainable.  A good analogy would be whether or not you have visited Easter Island.  If not, from your perspective, Easter Island is unvisited.  Is it therefore true that it is unvisitable by you?

Secondly, why the immediate leap to God?  So there is a question we don't know the answer to, why must the answer to that question be God then?  You do realize at some point the question will be answered and in all likelihood God will not be the answer.  What then?  If God is not the answer then, why should he be the answer now?  Consider that 1000 years ago, we didn't know what caused lightning bolts to rain from the sky, and many people therefore said it was the work of one god or another.  Now we know exactly why lightning happens, and God doesn't appear in the recipe.  Why should today's questions unfold any differently than the questions of 1000 years ago?

Finally, and this kind of bugs me the most, when will we know everything there is to be  known?  When will we have visited every single planet in the entire universe and categorized everything on them?  In all likelihood?  Never.  Every new scientific discovery always brings new questions.  Always.  If the universe is infinite, then so is knowledge.  Because of this there will always be unanswered questions.  Which makes the existance of such questions rather mundane.  It's simply a natural side effect of learning new stuff that new questions crop up.  It's not an amazing, and compelling, and mysterious thing that there are unanswered questions.  If you are looking for the empty spaces on the shelves of knowledge for a place to put God, you are going to be moving him around forever.  Those spaces are reserved for books that haven't been written yet.  If you want to stop having to reinvent God every time science fills a gap, then maybe you should put him where he belongs... in the mythology section.

It's approaching midnight and the patter of rain is filtering into my house, along with the drawn out, low, gut-vibrating rumble of thunder.  An approaching storm is on the one hand exciting, but on the other hand serves as a reminder of just how powerless we all are.  It's not hard to understand why primitive man would look at the angry sky and imagine a rampaging god.

Reverend Jerry Falwell is no longer with us, having died suddenly today as reported by the Houston Chronicle:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority and built the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said. He was 73.

Falwell was hospitalized in "gravely serious" condition after being found unconscious Tuesday in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said earlier...

I've never made any secret that I don't think highly of Jerry Falwell.  But that said, he was still a human being, and doubtless had friends and family who loved him and who are suffering now.  I know what that feels like and they have my sympathy and my condolences.

In another example of fundie Christian love and acceptance, a 13 year old girl in Hardesty, Oklahoma is now being homeschooled after having been basically run out of school by the local knuckledraggers.  Please watch this video. 

You're a brave girl Nicole.  Sorry for what you went through.  You should come live in Massachusetts.  We have plenty of religious nuts here too, but the area is pretty liberal, and therefore most of the Christians I know actually behave like Christians.

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about.  None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway.  I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least.  So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing.  Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth.  Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it.  Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed.  I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset.  But I'll get through.  (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player.  I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep.  But eventually I get tired of the same stuff.  The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts.  (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.)  You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.)  NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations.  Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

• NPR Science Friday with Ira Flatow
• On Point with Tom Ashbrook
• Car Talk
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, The NPR News Quiz

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception".  Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic.  You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos.  You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos.  Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out.  He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive."  I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if  he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl.  I'm going to remember this challenge.  It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately.  I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away.  It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it.  Things haven't changed much.  Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat.  So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive.  I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap.  Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon.  Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum.  So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book.  It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins.  Check it out, if you dare.  This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself.  Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns.  They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth.  (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them.  You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music.  I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.