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.

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.