US Youth—Atheistic Thinking is Just Fine!

American high schools have atheist clubs, warns the head of US Catholic bishops. Kids confirmed in the eighth grade, are atheists by the time they’re sophomores in high school. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, notes that atheism is getting popular among teenagers and students in the USA. Atheism is growing rapidly in the 18-25 age group, and Catholic and Protestant professionals alike are getting worried about it. Young Americans are beginning to get the courage to go against the pressure of their parents and peers and proudly declare their atheism, flooding YouTube with atheistic videos. The US is getting like Europe. People who have long believed that religion is part of the American psyche are beginning to doubt!

It is hard for the scientific skeptic to imagine that human beings differ greatly in the way they think, but the religious believe they do think differently from nonbelievers. How then can devout Christian youth be persuaded by godless atheism? Indeed why should the Christian confident that they think differently from the atheist even worry that they can be deconverted by mere arguments? There could be no reason, if it were true, but it is not. UCLA researchers have found that Christians and nonbelievers use the same parts of the brain in categorizing the truth of articles of religious faith. Sam Harris, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA, is one of the researchers. 15 Christian believers and 15 nonbelievers judged the truth of religious tenets while their brains were being monitored in a scanner. For both groups:

1. judging religious assertions activated parts of the brain related with emotional judgment, uncertainty, rewards and self
2. thinking about facts used parts of the brain that are strongly associated with memory retrieval
3. asked to declare as true or false matters of faith took longer to respond than when asked to categorize matters of fact.

If anything, it shows that humans generally find matters of faith more puzzling and emotional than matters of fact, so even the faithful must have their doubts. The Cardinal sees it the other way round. Atheists are evangelical in their proselytizing, so they are thinking like believers!

It’s the mirror image of a kind of fundamentalism, because it’s very restrictive in its use of reason. It’s also very triumphalistic and self-righteous.

Either way, the mode of thinking of the pious and the profane are the same, and atheism can be taught to the next generation just as belief is, so any rise in atheism at the expense of religion is likely to continue to grow. Christian professionals are praying that the fear of death will change the minds of the newly atheistical youth, as they grow older.

The cardinal says that unbelief among young people is not just rejection of going to church, it is new atheism and every bit as intolerant as Christian fundamentalism. That is just old fashioned scaremongering, itself a form of intolerance. The intolerance of patriarchal religion is not surprising. It is the foremost teaching of the Old Testament God, in deed if not always in word. American youth are right to reject it.

How Sincere Belief Decays into Dollars

Doctrines fitted to make the deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, never stimulating imagination, feelings, or the understanding.

An example is the way in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity—the maxims and precepts in the New Testament—considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians. Yet not one Christian in a thousand guides their personal conduct by reference to those laws. Their standard is that of their nation, their class, or their preferred newspaper. They have a collection of ethical maxims, which they believe to have been uttered by their God incarnate in His infallible wisdom as rules for Christian living, and a set of everyday practices, which meet some of Christ’s maxims, deny some, and otherwise may go some way to meet them or to deny them. They are a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests of worldly life. Christians pay homage to Christ’s standards, but owe their real allegiance to worldly standards.

All Christians profess to believe that…

• the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world
• it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
• they should judge not, lest they be judged
• they should swear not at all
• they should love their neighbor as themselves
• if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also
• if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor.

When they say they believe these things, they do believe them. They are not insincere but believe them in the sense that they believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed, but they do not believe them in the sense of a living belief which regulates conduct. They believe Christian doctrines until they get to the point where they are meant to act upon them. They believe them as worthy doctrines useful to pelt adversaries with, and like to cite them as the reasons for anything people do that they approve of. Then they are Christian things to do. But anyone who reminded them that the maxims require them to do things they never think of doing is considered as expecting Christians to be saints, though they themselves are not. They forget that these are the requirements of God Himself!

Christ’s doctrines have no hold on ordinary believers. They have negligible practical influence on their minds, or on their actions. Christians have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but feel no obligation to God to apply the words to the things signified—nothing that forces their mind to take note of them, and make them personally conform to what are meant to be God’s own teaching, directly from his own incarnated mouth. Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for for a pastor to assure them they do not have to go far in obeying Christ. A few regular dollars for the church and its minister is enough.

John Stuart Mill wrote most of this 150 years ago in On Liberty. It is even more true in America today.

The Nones are Multiplying! Is the US Going Secular?

Nones in USA

Maybe the US is belatedly leaving behind the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of belief in Luther and Calvin, and joining the modern world of science, in short, beginning to reject superstitions like religion. A survey analysed by Barry A Kosmin, Ariela Keysar, Ryan Cragun and Juhem Navarro Rivera called American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population, published by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, suggests it. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008 is a survey of a nationally representative sample of 54,461 adults. 7,407 are Nones, people who responded to the question: “What is your religion, if any?” with none, atheist, agnostic, secular, or humanist.

The Nones are growing. They increased from 8.1% of the US adult population in 1990 to 15% in 2008, an increase in numbers from 14 million to 34 million adults. Nones are mainly younger than the US population: 30% are under age 30 and only 5% are 70 years or older. 60% of Nones are male, though males are a slight minority of the the general US population, 49%.

Blacks, who are the most religious racial/ethnic group in the US, make up 8% of the None population. Hispanics, in 1990, comprised 6% of US adults and 4% of adult Nones. In 2008 Hispanics had doubled their percentage of the US adult population to 13% and tripled their proportion among adult Nones to 12%. A large percentage of Asians are Nones, 29%.

32% of Nones were Nones by the age of 12, whereas only 9% of people in the US generally were. But the majority of Nones (73%) came from religious homes. 24% of them are former Catholics, though Catholics make up about a quarter of the US population anyway. Since they were 12 years of age, 4% of Americans switched from None to religious, but 11% of Americans switched from religious to None, a 7% imbalance favoring Nones.

Men are more likely to remain Nones than women: 66% of men Nones at age 12 were Nones at the time of their participation in ARIS 2008, but only 47% of women Nones at age 12 remained Nones. American women are more religious than men, men more secular than women.

Nones are less likely to believe in a personal God, only 27% of Nones compared to 70% of all adults, but not many Nones are atheists, just 7%, but Nones are more happy to call themselves atheist or agnostic than all US adults. Most Nones are theists, but hard and soft agnostics together account for 35% of them, compared with 10% of the US population. A notable proportion of both populations believe in a higher power but not a personal God (Deists). Nones do not seem interested in religious rites of passage, like baptisms, religious marriage, or religious funerals.

Nones Table

Nones differ from most Americans in accepting human evolution. 36% of the US population say humans definitely did not evolve but only 17% of Nones, whereas 17% of the population of the US definitely accept human evolution, compared with 33% of Nones.

The percentage of Democratic Nones is similar to their percentage among the US population, but Nones are over represented among independents—over one in five in 2008—and under represented among Republicans—less than one sixteenth. 42% of Nones consider themselves independents. In the US population, 29% consider themselves independents.

Nones are growing in every geographic region in the US, unlike most religious groups. 36% of the US population was in the Southern states in 2008, but only 29% of Nones. The West has 30% of Nones but has 23% of the US population. In 2001, the states with the highest percentage of Nones were the Pacific Northwestern states (Oregon, Washington, Idaho). They are still among the top 10, but states in New England are now at the top, including Vermont (34% Nones) and New Hampshire (29%). There are now three geographic divisions in the US which are particularly none religious: the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the Mountain States.

American Nones embrace philosophical and theological beliefs that reflect skepticism rather than overt antagonism toward religion. Only 15% of Nones with a college degree are theists while 11% are atheists. Nones over 25 with a college degree are the most secular. Young people who are Nones have doubled since 1990 to 22%. In their commitment to reason and science they also continue the tradition of the late 18th Century American Enlightenment. Such views and opinions echo those held by many of the founding fathers and leaders of the American Revolution such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine.

Nones are the invisible minority in the US today. In the future we can expect more American Nones given that 22% of the youngest adults self identify as Nones and will become tomorrow’s parents. In two decades the Nones could account for around one quarter of the American population.

Proportion of Nones

Proving God: A Christian’s Arguments

A Mr Dale writes online:

1. Any declaration of truth, like: my hair is brown or God exists or there is no God requires evidence.

   Not so. These are apples and pears. “God exists” requires evidence, as does a statement about the colour of something, but “there is no God” neither requires evidence nor can there be any other than the absence of evidence that there is a God. When something is imaginary, it does not exist in the material world and so there can be no material evidence of it. When there is no material evidence of something, then the skeptical attitude at the base of science declares that it does not exist. If material evidence arises, then science is corrigible. It can change its previous conclusion. Meanwhile God does not exist because there is no evidence He does. If Christians demur then they must produce the evidence for God.

2. What evidence does anyone have for atheism? What evidence could be provided to support it? How do you measure spirit? It’s impossible to measure fully the states of an atom, which is a material construct. How then can you disprove something which is immaterial?

   Something immaterial, like spirit, can have no effect on the material world. So far as we material things are concerned, spirit does not exist because there is no material evidence for it, nor can there be unless spirit is in some sense material, in which case we can detect it. No one has, and the skeptical view is that it does not exist. See 1.

3. As pointed out, time and again. There are many arguments for God’s existence. There is physical evidence to support the general historicity of the Bible, esp. the New Testament. And there is God’s promise of self-revelation to the earnest seeker.

   None of the “many arguments” are given. The historicity of a book is no proof of God, and God’s self-revelation is not a self revelation at all but merely a statement of certain authors and preachers, all men.

4. But even if you could dis-prove the theist’s arguments that’d still only lead you to agnosticism.

   Not so. Agnosticism is sitting on the fence. The skeptical conclusion from a lack of evidence for God is that there is no God.

5. Consequently one has to ask; how can anyone hold the strong belief: there is no God, in the absence of any suporting evidence. Surely the best any rational person can do is say. I don’t know if God exists.

   Not so. See 1 and 4.

6. On the other hand the Christian can look at the argumentation. Can balance the evidence and can receive God’s self-revelation and consequently, rationally state: God exists.

   Not so. Mr Dale proves that the Christian does not look at the evidence, or the arguments, and does not balance the evidence but counts as evidence that which is not evidence and that which is irrelevant. In short, they are indoctrinated and deluded.

7. Considering human beings are pre-programmed to believe, something long, argued for by Christians and the rationality of Christian belief as opposed to the no-God hypothesis, would it not be rational to actually look for answers to some of these questions?

   Rationality is something Christians like Mr Dale should try.

Americans reject GOP religiosity as well as politics

For a generation in the United States, conservative Christians politicized themselves, and so the GOP adopted their religious politics, opposing stem cell research, gay marriage and abortions, championing public money for religious schools and social program, and appointing evangelized judges. Three days after 11 September, 2001, President Bush gave a dramatic address sounding like a sermon in the National Cathedral. Supported by prominent Jewish, Moslem and Christian figures, it seemed a model of multiculturalism. Religious moderates of every hue provide cover for fundamentalists by refusing to contest the extremists’ premises. How can they? They share them.

Yet no one stood for the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. They were ignored as if they did not exist. Everyone in America believes in God. In the face of it all, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been timid and voiceless, ignored and derided, but described as devils. Now atheistic books have become bestsellers. Are Americans getting fed up with Republican religiosity as well as politics?

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don’t believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll recently said, 91 percent do. It is not true. According to Ronald Aronson, a teacher at Wayne State University and author of Living Without God, published by Counterpoint, writing in The Nation, the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed 50,000 people, found 29 million adults to be without religion—one American in seven, 14 percent.

But a Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism found 18 percent of 2,000 Americans chose one or the other, with 73 percent believing in God or a supreme being. The poll also allowed for people to respond “Would prefer not to say” and six percent of Americans chose this to answer the question whether they believed in God or a supreme being, because they were scared to deny God publicly for fear of their religious friends and neighbours. So, the sum of unbelievers (18 percent + 6 percent) is not far off one in four Americans!

This large segment of Americans is fed up with being marginalized and insulted. They are mainly well educated people. A Harris American poll found 31 percent with postgraduate education do not believe in God, compared with 14 percent with a high school education or less. The better the education, the higher the percentage of disbelievers, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
Ronald Aronson,The Nation

Christian Belief is Just Talk

Jamie Whyte, author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking and a former philosophy academic, wrote in The Times of 16 September 2008 that atheists are amazed at the persistence of religion in a country as sophisticated as the USA. How can clever, mature adults believe Christianity in the absence of any secure evidence of its central tenets, and a vast amount of contrary evidence?

That the world was created by an invisible deity, that He later impregnated a virgin who then bore a son who was His own father, that we have immortal souls and will live for ever in Heaven if we are good and love Jesus—how can anyone who has even attended high school believe such things? And how can agreement with this nonsense be a prerequisite for winning the support of the American electorate? It defies belief.

“If something defies belief”, Whyte says, “a good starting position is not to believe it”, and that is the very position that science takes as a prerequisite. It is called skepticism, and has led us from the darkness of a Christian dominated west a thousand years ago to the present period of knowledge, gadgets, easy living, and long life as long as you make sure you do not serve in the military.

Whyte has a theory about it. He does not believe that Christians really believe in their “gobbledegook”, as he calls it. What American Christians are doing is expressing hopes not beliefs. They are not saying “I believe” but “I wish”, hoping to convince themselves. Whyte correctly points out that people who really believe in eternal damnation, and that God has commanded human beings not to kill, and, in fact, to turn the other cheek, could hardly be voting Christian gun crazed madmen—or women—into the White House to unleash “shock and awe” on to innocent Arab families.

Christianity means doing something, God’s will, not whatever suits you, as US Christians think. The Christian God, they all like to claim to be best friends of, Jesus, told them they have to love other human beings, not just their relatives and best friends, but even their enemies! What US Christian does that? They fail the tests that Christ set for them, and they fail them without a flinch because they just do not believe the bible at all.

What is more, the Christians who are most fanatical are the least concerned about their post mortem situation. They have convinced themselves that they are all saved anyway, so what they do does not matter. It shows that they do not read their bibles in the round, but only the bits they like, the bits that support their wishful thinking.

The bible belt of America is all together less moral on a range of measures than less fanatically Christian districts. Pre-marital sex and abortions are higher than more secular parts of the USA considered by believers to be immoral zones, like New York and California. Sarah Palin is the darling of the Christian Right Wing, but her daughter was not convinced of the danger of an eternal roasting enough not to put her off a bit of illicit nooky, and so she got pregnant.

What do the Christians care about that? Suddenly, it is only human to do such things. The truth is they don’t really believe what Christianity has to say about eternal life or eternal torture. Or rather, they like the idea of eternal life, and conclude that, whatever they do, they are good enough to be saved, and the eternal torture does not apply to them, so need not be considered.

As Whyte says, if these Christians believed what the bible says, then they could not fail to act on it. In other words, their belief must be evident through their behaviour, yet mostly it is not. God’s commandments ought to dominate the lives of believers utterly, yet you cannot distinguish a Christian from any one else:

People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not… Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.

The heavenly reward does not come into it because all US Christians are deluded enough to think they are different from the rest, yet when they are shown not to be, it is because we are all human. It is a double standard, that can be expected from people who lack the analytical skills, and particularly the self-analytical skills, to realize what they are doing.

US politicians are no different, except perhaps that they realize what they are doing, and cynically stick to what suits the empty headedness of the typical Christian voter. Otherwise their basic policies are completely free of any inferences from the possibility of facing God’s wrath.

When they are occasionally asked to justify some awful atrocity—like the war in Iraq, a punishment on the Arab families for the crimes of a few Moslem extremists as fanatically religious in their own way as the US Christian caucus—they claim they are happy to meet their maker, proving their faith in nothing other than wishful thinking. Did they not read that Christ came to bring peace not a sword, and Christ is God, Christians tell us? They already know their God’s will, and they have been found wanting. They did not bring merely a sword but 15,000 pound bombs, and the support of 60 million Christian believers eager to bring Christian love to their enemies.

By the light of their avowed Christianity, this is perverse.

Any politician who talked in truly Christian terms would be “an unelectable lunatic”. Despite that, they have to run it close for the sake of the pretence of Christianity that the 60 million profess.

All of it shows that American Christians are Christians only in name. They do not read their bibles but think they are saved because they are Americans, and Americans are the new Israel. Their authority is Paul the apostle, a mere man, while God incarnate just talked a load of bull to be ignored by true believers! The central message of Christ is commendable, to love one another. It is a shame that Christians almost universally ignore it. They think Christ said, love yourselves. In reality, US Christian belief is just talk.

The “Work of the Devil”

A devout friend of mine, among the more gullible of believers, is in a blue funk. He read in the UK Daily Mail (1 June) that the Vatican has denounced the six Marian visionaries of Medjugorje in Bosnia who have seen the Virgin Mary 40,000 times. Since 1981, every year they have attracted five million Catholics as pilgrims—hundreds of thousands from Britain alone, my gullible friend among them.

The Medjugorje phenomenon began on June 25, 1981, when six children told a priest they had seen the Virgin on a hillside near their town. A church investigation dismissed the vision, and the Vatican banned pilgrimages to the site in 1985, but many Catholics, like my friend, took no notice. Businesses in the town and the visionaries themselves have benefitted immensely. Today, those who saw the Virgin own smart houses with security gates and tennis courts, and expensive cars. One is married to a former US beauty queen.

The story is that a respected Roman Catholic Bishop in the Vatican, Bishop Andrea Gemma, once the Vatican’s top exorcist, has declared that the visionaries had perpetuated a “diabolical deceit”:

In Medjugorje everything happens in function of money—Pilgrimages, lodging houses, sale of trinkets. This whole sham is the work of the Devil. It is a scandal.

He added that the Vatican would soon crack down on the scam. The visionaries tour the world preaching, accompanied by their buddy, the Blessed Virgin Mary, but Catholic officials in the US have already banned them from speaking on church property in future world tours. They have not said whether the Virgin Mary is banned as well.

I have argued with my Catholic friend for decades that these miracles are scams or at best delusions, but few believers are convinced by reason. Even if true, this denouncement by the Vatican will not stop myriads of believers from continuing to support this scam and others, just as Protestants continued to support corrupt tele-evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart even when they have been exposed.

Meanwhile, John Humphrys, the excellent BBC broadcaster and agnostic, tells us in his new book, In God We Doubt, that atheists should “respect” the beliefs of the faithful! How can it be done? As Humphreys says, some believers might be deeply sincere. But belief is itself loopy. The sincerity of someone’s loopiness might moderate the atheistic reaction to them personally, but cannot ameliorate criticism of their loopy beliefs. They just do not merit respect!

Einstein and His God

Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some, aware of his statements such as that God does not play dice, to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic.

Thus I came—despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude… which has never left me.

Albert Einstein

Boston’s Cardinal O’Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism” and “befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation.” On April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask:

Do you believe in God?

Einstein’s return message is the famous statement:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist… I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.

The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein’s God:

However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to… clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism… This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.

A Cynic Parody: Ecclesiasticus Gadget—Sample

When the sactimonious redeemer pontificates usually, then some deceit beyond incomprehension negotiates an agreement with another greened resurrection. Another biblical scholar earns justified criticism, and Pontius Pilate ponders deceitfully; but, it is that the infrequent emotion upholds the force of mental exertion. God the deceit prophesied Garden of Eden, and Isaiah prophesied eschatology; yet, always the infernal presence prays. Saith Yehouah: Because the daughters of lie are complicated and walk with ponderous necks and consuming eyes, therefore Yehouah will smite with the just enigma or paradox or member of the humblest flock, and the Lord will lay bare a feverish diagnosis. And, not that Peter is immoral exploiting Satan by failing to give full value for the miserly end of evil. Yet, often a gentile, the abject punishment for the wicked, and the ontological shekinah of the Lord are what made the avowal of faith next to the prognosis and the mark of the seven avenging angels!

Herod annoyingly vanishes. When some fatness is ontological, the commitment or purpose caricatures a sealed book inside the false prophetic vision. Saith I: Woe is me for I am underhanded because I am a man of a cup of wine, for mine eyes have seen Mary Magdalene, the Lord of hosts. God’s retribution on Mary Magdalene killing Daniel was morally wrong and incompatible with Jesus. The accidental gesture in the marketplace is transcendental. Pontius Pilate and metaphor shall be the overwhelming clergyman because they are sordid. Never put a pollution or the money lender related to Isaiah over a pustule or ontological angelic favour. Where an unstable allegory gratifyingly has a change of heart about the tattered sad disjuncture, then Mary the Virgin always dies. But, then again, the truth procrastinates often. Judas suffering from the true insanity yet god they called Yehouah should have the choice of being put painlessly to death.

Rise up, the Lord said to Isaiah: Go forth inexorably to meet Mary Jashub at the profound feeling of inferiority in God, and say: Let us go up and steal kudos from it against Lord Jesus to have a bit of evidence and epiphany. Only by going back to the hefty day can we hope to teach the final age. Smugness enslaves: Christians have hardly ever been foreign, and poorly consume and imbibe with the twisted sinner. The people conquer the ostensible master or they hurl vituperation on the avowal of faith. Unless a righteous one cries in shame again, why should anyone imagine Lord Jesus absconds?

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Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

The Christian and Jewish liars just never cease their lying. A film has been made with the title, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, by a man called Ben Stein, who seems to be famous for something in the USA, presumably lying! Look him up on the internet and you’ll find he is famous for precisely nothing, unless it is being a chum of Richard Nixon. He has written books, made films and appeared on TV, all of which is utterly forgettable, and indeed, has been forgotten. The man is a nonentity.

His film tries to make out there is an atheist conspiracy in the US, if not the whole world, against Christians. Jews and Christians have always been great at making victims into the victimizers, and vice versa. Almost everyone in the USA, faced with an overbearing Christian smugness amounting to intolerance, feels obliged to say they are practising Christians, though being Jewish naturally is acceptable too, and only a small percentage have the courage to say they are atheists. Yet this tiny minority of atheists is victimizing the 90-odd percent Judaeo-Christian majority! In the USA, it is Christians who are the oppressors, and this film is an example of it.

The film inverts almost every truth there is in America, hardly surprising, one might imagine, for a buddy of the worst president the USA had in recent history before Bush, and one who was rightly impeached, as Bush ought to be. The fact is that these supposed religious defenders cannot tell truth from lies, and could not distinguish God from Satan if they met him sitting next to them on a bench in Central Park.

Sociopathetic Stein claims that science has always included “the ability to inquire whether a higher power, a being greater than man, is involved with how the universe operates. This has always been basic to science. always.” If it is so, then the failure of science ever to find an iota of evidence for God is a conclusion he could not like, but science has always been concerned with the natural world, not that supernatural world occupied by God and his hosts of spirits for which no evidence has yet been found because supernatural is synonymous with imaginary.

Standing by the adage that the old ones are the best, Stein makes the usual Christian claims that the best scientists are religious:

Some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, operated under the hypothesis that their work was to understand the principles and phenomena as designed by a creator.

The opposite is the truth. Galileo lived 400 years ago, under the threat of the inquisition and being burned alive if he denied God or the Church. Newton lived 300 years ago when the baneful influence of Christianity was still strong, and the threat of the inquisition was just fading, but Christianity was still compulsory in British academia because tenure depended on it. The only modern great Stein can cite is Einstein who repeatedly explained that he was a pantheist not a theist, and did not believe in Jewish and Christian fantasies. Nature was Einstein’s God, and it is typically Christian chicanery to claim Einstein as a believer.

Stein likes to list scientific achievements, in addition to the three scientists he knows the name of, to make it seem as if they depended on what he is defending, belief in God:

There would be no modern medicine, no antibiotics, no brain surgery, no Internet, no air conditioning, no modern travel, no highways, no knowledge of the human body without freedom of inquiry.

Science discovered all these wonders with no help from God. Freedom of enquiry is, of course, what the Church did not want, and still does not want. Science follows its own clues and has found out what it has by so doing, not by listening to the prescriptions of preachers, pastors and rabbis. That is what narks these fundamentalist Republican Christian obfuscators. This film is really a defence of idiotic Christian fundamentalist claims that an ignorant book, which necessarily runs counter to the discoveries of science, was written by God. These people make God into an ignoramus and an idiot because they are appealing to the most ignorant and idiotic elements in society as part of their scheme to keep their power and riches.

Their philosophy, the philosophy of neoconservatism, openly admits that religion is to be used to control the mass of people who believe it. The controlling elite, needless to say, do not believe a word of it. They pretend to, simply to get voting fodder among the dimmest elements of the electorate, because it saves them jerrymandering by resorting to bent chads and judges.

Their claim is that science is threatening freedom of enquiry—even though it is founded on it and utterly depends on it—because it rejects religious claims like Intelligent Design, an alternative to Creationism—literal belief in the bible—that are not scientific and cannot be accepted into science if science is to remain what it is, and not become an aspect of theology. What is scientific is what is demonstrably true, not what a lot of religious crooks and shysters pretend is true to win sympathy from people unable to escape Dark Age mindlessness and superstition. They themselves are too stupid to realize that, if they succeed, they will bring back the Dark Ages, and the scientific knowledge that has given them world domination will be lost, and the countries that are not ruled by donkeys will take over.

Anyone who values our modern achievements has to oppose this counter-productive fancy for medieval Christianity in the USA. The leading Christians have rarely been good, as any unbiased inspection of Christian history will show, and for much of its 1700 years it has deliberately and cynically kept people in abject poverty and misery so that an elite could benefit. Support Christianity to get into heaven, if that is what you believe, but you had better be sure your pastor is a saint and not a devil. Mostly they have been the latter.

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