Magi Mike’s Blog

Christianity took 300 years before it was accepted by the Roman emperor, Constantine, as his administration’s preferred religion, a few decades before it officially became the Roman state religion in 381 AD, when Theodosius’s edict banned paganism and enforced belief in the Christian Trinity. The Christian church was triumphant. The task now was to convert the world, a task that suited Roman imperialism. As Christianity was the religion of Rome, Christians were Roman citizens. Christian faith was now identical to loyalty to Rome. Faith was no longer the practical morality of loving kindness taught by Christ but was patriotic loyalty, like the worship of the emperor. Devotion to God had become a political principle uniting the people of the empire by equating the Church and the state, as many Americans do today.

By the thirteenth century, the Fourth Christian imperialist Crusade (1198-1204 AD) had resulted only in the sacking of Constantinople, a rich Christian city, the rival to Rome in the eastern empire, and increasingly Christians were turning from Catholic Christianity to the heresies of Catharism and Bogomilism, Christianities untainted by imperialism, and therefore much closer to the Christianity of the apostles.

Then came the early modern rush to colonize the world with the pope’s blessing! The Spaniard, Juan Gires de Sepulveda, claimed its justification was how grave people’s sins were, and the rudeness of their nature—reasons why the Indians’ position was to be servants of sophisticated people like the Spanish. He wondered how we could doubt that these people—so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated by impieties and obscenities—had been justly conquered by such an excellent, pious and most just king as Ferdinand the Catholic and by such a most humane nation, excellent in every kind of virtue!

Of course, the most humane nation, excellent in every kind of virtue, with such excellent, pious and most just Christian kings, called Presidents, is today the USA. Yet, the United States itself grew out of a colony of Europeans exploiting native Americans and imposing European Christianity upon them. They freed themselves of their European masters but sought and now, with no moral hesitation, still seek to impose their own will on others. Latin American theologian Ismael Amaya writes on American missionary Christianity:

Much of the motivation behind the colossal effort to support the gigantic missionary enterprise around the world, is the conviction that God has raised America—especially Anglo-Saxon America—as the vessel of redemption of the world.

American Christian missions are both products and purveyors of American culture. Now the US invades other countries willy nilly and steals their resources in the name of the God, whom they always invite to bless them whatever sins they commit, and a democracy commonly cited as imperial justification for war—though they themselves are not at all democratic but ruled by a rich oligarchy. They set up a constitution democratic and secular in form and practice only to surrender it to the verbal gymnastics of professional clergymen and politicians.

Curiously, in early Christian thought based on the bible (as the Christian commentator, Lactantius, observed), the west was considered as evil, and the east good. Now in the eyes of most of the world—all those whom the US cannot buy or intimidate—that is not merely metaphorically but is demonstrably true, though western propaganda attempts to portray the western world as good and the rest wicked.

Christians revived duallism, with Satan the wicked half and Christ the good half of it, but the west no longer takes its moral stance from the good God. Christians have been tricked into adoring the wicked God, and now do it with chilling enthusiasm. Traditionally, the good God is the metaphorical God of light, the God of Dawn and the coming day, who since time immemorial, has therefore been considered able to see everything in the forthcoming day. He has foresight. The wicked God is the God of dusk and darkness, who cannot see ahead for he is the advancing darkness. The god of darkness and night only knows what has already happened.

Good differs from evil in the use of foresight. Good people who adopt the morals of the good God differ from the wicked ones in having foresight, and personally using it. Good people can see the consequences of their actions and do no ill. If wicked people can do the same, they justify their wickedness, or they assume they can do no wrong. An imperial religion demands justification of this kind, and is incompatible with kindness and consideration. The practical morality of Christ is incompatible with imperialism and conquest. More…

When those who deny the existence of God at the same time reveal that they ardently want Him not to exist, are we justified in feeling skeptical? It seems a parallel case of the one presented a couple of posts back, in which we decided we were justified in being skeptical when an ardent believer asserted that God exists.

The trouble is that the case of the atheist is not truly symmetrical with the previous one. The argument which held before now fails. The two cases are not symmetrical because God is not now the base case. That is the natural world we experience. We do not experience a supernatural God. Believers may say they do, in one way or another, but while they may experience something, it is their assumption or hypothesis that it is God. After all, the same experiences can be simulated by means that can only be natural ones—drugs, fatigue, starvation, electrical stimuli to the brain.

God is formulated as the explanation of experiences we cannot otherwise explain, but we are no better off, no nearer an explanation to say that a figment of our imagination explains these things. With nothing more than wishful thinking to support the hypothesis of God we have to eliminate it on the basis both of skepticism and Ockham’s Razor.

The base case is the skeptical case, not the credulous one—we reject what we cannot demonstrate as true. By Ockham’s Razor, we have no need of the entity, God. So far, like Laplace, we have been able to explain our experiences without that hypothesis.

J C Flugel, an eminent psychologist of the mid twentieth century, pointed out (Man, Morals and Society):

When those who assert the existence of God, at the same time reveal that they ardently desire Him to exist, we are justified in feeling a little skeptical.

The skepticism arises because one has to suspect “wishful thinking” is the basis of their assertion. The desire that God exists burns so furiously in the believer’s busom that they convince themselves it must be so. It is a self deception.

There is another, a better reason for skepticism, that of the scientist. The scientist is skeptical on principle about any claim that is not tested until such time as it is adequately tested and shown to be so. It is a principle that excludes all self deception and gullibility, which otherwise would lead us to accept whatever we choose or prefer out of the many available explanations whether possible or impossible.

Added to the skeptical principle in science is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, introduced in the later middle ages by a cleric in an attempt to eliminate what might be called Sufism—the multiplication of “explanatory” entities—from Christian theology. It found its most valuable place in science in successfully keeping scientific hypotheses to a minimum of complexity.

So, for example, the believer will say the postulation of God explains inexplicable things like the existence of the universe, why we are here, what we do after death, and so on. It does no such thing, and violates both the skeptical principle and Ockham’s Razor.

Take the case of the creation of the universe. We can certainly observe the world in which we live, but we cannot observe a God. The believer invents an entity, God, for which there is no direct evidence, to explain a very large and evident entity that we know does exist, then says that the nonentity created the large and evident entity, QED. On the skeptical principle, we have to reject the argument because there is still no evidence for the imaginary entity, God, other than our new conjecture that He created the universe. That is circular. God is a fudge! His imagined supernatural nature is another fudge, one which explains why God cannot be detected!

And we now have two entities to consider, the universe which we confirm in our daily lives, and God, which is a fudge to explain the universe, but otherwise leaves no traces anywhere. We are actually no better off, because, even if we are convinced by the fudgy explanation, we still have something to explain—God. Contrary to the clerical Razor of Ockham, we have mutiplied entities from one to two, and are left as badly off as before with an explanation for one of them still needed.

That, of course, is no problem to the Christian, devoid of any need for principle, but overflowing with Sufi answers. The existence of God needs no explanation because He is eternal, He lives forever and is the Prime Mover of everything else. Yet God is explained by introducing a new principle, that of an eternal life for God. But, if God, the imaginary entity, can be eternal, we are left with the question of why the universe itself could not be eternal, again using Ockham’s razor to cut out the superfluous entity with the astonishing properties it has to have for it to perform all these miracles.

The universe is before us. If it were eternal, then that would suffice to remove the need for the postulate of God. The believer will jump forward full of agitation, telling us that science has shown the universe has a beginning in the Big Bang. It is not eternal, so we must go for the believer’s hypothesis of God. Well, if believers could formulate God mathematically, we might begin to be convinced, but so far they cannot. Science however has found and tested a large number of mathematical theorems that can still offer us naturalistic explanations, even if they are getting more and more wonderful, beginning to look like Sufi science, perhaps, with the difference that these mathematics work!

The discovery of complex numbers allows physicists to postulate virtual events, events that take place in complex time. Maybe complex time is God, for the Big Bang has been explained as no bang with the use of complex time. We think of time as being linear, starting from the Big Bang, but complex time yields a multidimensional time, not just the linear one, and that means time need not begin at all. The linear time that we experience is an illusion, and what seems like a bursting forth of vast amounts of energy in linear time is more of a continous pulsation in virtual time.

Then again, there is the theory of quantum mechanics which has led to truly wonderful things, not least of which is the notion of the multiverse. It seems that all events possible can happen somewhere in this multiverse which therefore is indeed conceptually infinite, though there may be a limit set by the graininess of space and time themselves, but even so there could be so many universes withing the multiverse, that even God would need assistance. Unless of course we postulate a multitude of Gods serving each possible universe, and perhaps a multi-God in change of the lot!

Science is apparently confirming that something transcends the universe we can observe directly, just as believers have believed. It is the multiverse. Perhaps that is God, but it is not a personal God at all. If anything, it is like the God of the Stoics and the Deists, a set of transcendent laws that even the believer’s local God must be subject to.

Jewish and Christian Fundamentalists think God wrote their bibles, and as God is perfection, the bible cannot be wrong—it is inerrant. Even less extreme Jews and Christians think the Torah or Pentateuch, the five books of Moses were written by Moses. Others think the various books were written by the authors cited—Daniel wrote Daniel, David wrote the Psalms, John wrote John, and so on.

Modern biblical scholarship suggests biblical text was written by different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles, and such idiosyncracies as the different names they used for God. Some of the books were written by priests after the temple had been well established, and they were keen on maximizing their revenue and influence. Other parts reflected a period before the temple was properly established, and before the state of Judah had been set up as a temple state. The Christian part of their bible was obviously written with a view to establishing Christianity.

A computer program for analyzing text—a subset of artificial intelligence known as authorship attribution—developed by Israeli scholars led by Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, shows the joints in the bible where the different authors texts joined together. It picks out differences in style and word choice to show which parts of a single text were written by different authors.

The program confirmed that the Pentateuch could be split into two parts internally related but different from each other, that 90 percent matched the scholars’ division into priestly and non-priestly authorship. Thus it confirmed in minutes what had taken the scholars one to two centuries of meticulous study, effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes. The program indicated differences with scholarship in about ten percent of the text, a notable example being Genesis 1. Scholars had called this priestly but the program did not agree. Similarly, scholars had long believed that Isaiah consisted of three texts concatenated, with the join between the first two being at Isaiah 39. The program points to the join being at Isaiah 33. Of course, it might be the program that is wrong!

The program recognizes Hebrew equivalents, and synonyms. It will notice the use of the word “makel” for “staff” as distinct from “mateh” with the same meaning. As a test, the developers of the program randomly jumbled Ezekiel and Jeremiah into one text. The program sorted out the two components “almost perfectly”, undoubtedly an excellent performance, though the styles and language of the two books are very different.

What the algorithm won’t answer, say the authors, is whether the bible is human or divine. Three of the four authors, religious Jews, belief that the Torah was dictated to Moses in its entirety by God. He just chose to write in a mixture of different styles! For academic scholars, arbitrary changes of style—changes for no good reason such as to suggest a change of mood—indicate cutting and pasting human authorship. Koppel insists:

No amount of research is going to resolve that issue.

He serves to show that belief in God destroys all reason, even in otherwise intelligent people.

Francis Hutcheson introduced the notion of “moral sense” or “moral sentiment” (Hume), the feeling one has of approval or disapproval of a human act. The moral sense is not arrived at by reason as the rationalists would have, it is noted empirically, by observation and experiment. It is a feeling, a passion or an emotion, the feeling we have as part of our human nature that a deed is right or wrong. It implies that:

1. Human beings can act out of reasons other than self interest, for the good of others. In particular, we can act out of benevolence—kindness, compassion, altruism, generosity, magnanimity—the lovingkindness of the Jews or the love of the Christians.
2. Humans consequently can approve of deeds that they feel are right, they are kind, and disapprove of those that they feel are wrong, they are spiteful or simply thoughtless.

It is tempting to see malevolence as the opposite of benevolence, and sometimes it is, but Hutcheson did not think it was usually the case. Our instinct is to help bond with others for our mutual benefit by being kind to each other. The idea of an evolutionary bonding mechanism makes sense for social animals like humans. A disruptive mechanism makes no sense. Our inclination to be kind has been selected over hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, because we stand better in the face of our rivals for food by working together. Any antisocial mechanism cannot benefit us. It tends to put us back in the state of individual, solitary hunter gatherers, with naught but antagonism between us, and no chance therefore of the co-operation that has allowed us to thrive. It follows that we disapprove of apparent acts of malice for this reason, but that any such acts are unlikely to be persistent now, having been selected out, one hopes, long ago.

Hutcheson concluded that the failing was not one of active malice but one of the absence of sufficient inclination to be kind, and the main reason for that was “self love” taking the place of love of others. Disapproval of selfishness and greed—acts based on putting regard for oneself before that of deserving others—was aroused in spectators because of their sympathy for the “victim”, the member of the group who was deprived through another member’s greed. Sympathy or compassion is at the core of our group bonding instinct, and its arousal when we see an unfortunate colleague stiffed.

Those of whom we approve we consider virtuous, while those with a reputation for unkindness we disapprove of as vicious. Virtue is the approval of others earned by having a reputation for generosity and kindness, and vice is disapproval of others earned by having a reputation for miserliness and unkindness, stemming from self love. Those who love themselves are attracted to vice because self indulgence is harmful to others in some respect, and all such acts are gathered under the label of vice. The humanity of such people is not fully developed in some way, either because they lack the moral instinct, or it is weak, or, perhaps more commonly, having had no cause to use it through being able to indulge themselves throughout their lives without disapproval, they have got used to neglecting it. They become mean by a form of auto conditioning. They reward themselves through self gratification and thereby weaken the instinct to do right. Such people, persistently failing to act morally in the formative stages of the group, would eventually have aroused intense hostility among group members, who would have taken stern measures, evicting the freeloader or even eliminating them all together.

Utilitarianism

Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense as the social approval of kindness became an important pillar of Utilitarianism—mutual benevolence makes the members of the group feel secure and happy. Once everyone was happy, by definition they lived in a happy community. The Utilitarians therefore sought to do those acts which yielded the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in society. The flaw in it is that it seems to be ready to condone unhappiness in a substantial portion of society as long as the majority is happy. That portion of society could be notionally up to a half and yet be a minority, even if hardly. Any such society could not be stable. The minority would have to be kept suppressed, and in fact any small minority could be habitually oppressed by a majority, yet that society would meet the Utilitarian criterion. So, on the face of it Utilitarianism can justify the oppression of minorities, and that cannot be right.

Moreover, it removes the motivation for being benevolent, the direct approval of one’s peers, in favor of assessing the consequences for the majority, something that might not be known until way down the line. It is the spontaneity of kindness and its social approval that makes it work so effectively. Spontaneity needs no thought. It is done instinctively, and is instinctively approved. One does not need a philosophy of happiness for this number or that, lovingkindness will lead to social happiness—spontaneously! The benefits of greater happiness and a stronger society are consequences of it all right, but indirectly. The whole point about love and kindness is that you do not have to think of the consequences, you just get them.

Empirical

Hutcheson was an empiricist, and a moral instinct is a phenomenon of the real world, which can be observed and tested. A sense is thought of as a physical means of being able to know what is happening outside our bodies, but senses tell us what is happening inside our bodies too. We feel a headache and a stomachache. We also “feel” emotions. We see a sharp slap in a drama and say, “Wow! I felt that”. When we have that sort of feeling, it is sympathy, and it can be much more subtle—the sadness of a mother who has found her child dead. If we are human we want to cry too. We have all experienced such emotions unless we are psychologically defective in some way.

David Hume did not think the human moral sense was a mystery, because sympathy with the feelings of others explained it adequately. A spectator of a benevolent act sees happiness produced as a result of it, and by sympathy the spectator also feels pleasure, and that brings moral approval. The one who does the benevolent deed will feel the approval of their peers as honor or pride, while those who act selfishly will feel disapproval as shame and guilt. All presuming they are not psychologically defective or damaged.

The source of all this in the primitive human group is scarcity—the scarcity of food. Security, caring and sharing are the motives for prehumans to band together. Food was not always abundant, and, when it was scarce, sharing it was a vital reason for sociality, and a necessary act of bonding. The band were foraging socially, that is to say, different groups of them would go foraging separately but when someone made a desirable discovery, they neither kept it for themselves, nor tried to get an advantage by selling it to someone in the group for the highest bid. Whatever they gleaned, they shared. It is natural for a normal human being to want to share. They knew they were expected to share it, as they expected anyone else who made such a find to share it with them. It was the done thing, because by so doing, they were held in esteem by the rest of the group, and could feel proud of the admiration. It is the origin of benevolence.

Had they tried to keep the find to themselves, or even tried to keep an unfair portion of it, they would not have been approved but would have been frowned upon and treated with disdain, inducing guilt and shame. A persistent offender would have been expelled from the group. Of course, there would be cases of dispute, and then the community, under the guidance of the leader, would have to decide the outcome. Whence the issue of fair shares led to the need for justice.

A Criticism

Adam Smith, being more focused on the individual than the group, thought it impossible that everyone had the same sense of sympathy, and that was sufficient to discount any moral sense universal among human beings. In arguing his case, however, Smith begs the question by referring to the sense of propriety of a “normal” man, from which his ideas of virtue, merit and duty derive. If Smith allows that a “normal” man can have a “normal” sense of propriety, there is no reason why he should not allow him a “normal” sense of morality. Normal does not have to mean identical, any more than saying a normal US woman lives 86 years means they all live to the same age. Humans have an evolutionary experience stretching back 200,000 years, a period that covers the time when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups, and evolved our common moral instinct. We no more have the identical same moral instinct than we all live to the same age, or all have the same height, but qualitatively, it is the same in all of us, differing only in degree. Smith’s argument is therefore merely nit picking.

It is because human beings, all of us or at least the vast majority, have inherited the moral instinct with their genes, that something which is entirely a subjective personal experience can be treated as a universal human emotion, and therefore as something true for us all. God did not have to imbue us all with a moral sense because we developed it through our evolutionary experience, notably the experience of coming together to live in groups rather than remaining solitary and fending only for ourselves. Human morality was not handed down as a universal truth, it became universally true because it was necessary for us to evolve the way we did—communally.

As our sociality is essential to our being human, and our moral instinct keeps us social, to lose or ignore our moral instinct will destroy our communities and then our humanity will be destroyed too. That is the importance of morality and sociality. Why are we ignoring them?

Ancient

For most of the dark ages, so called because of the absence of learning brought about by the victory of Christianity, people lived in misery largely because of their poverty, not because they had ideas beyond their station. Peasants knew their place in the social system, and even in the nineteenth century, the wife of the Bishop of Armagh was going to make sure the little scallywags at Sunday school knew it:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

All things bright and beautiful, Mrs C F Alexander

Most people were effectively slaves throughout the time of the Feudal system. They had a notional freedom, but in practice were tied to their lord and master and the bit of his land he allotted to the peasant to pay him for his otherwise corvée service to the manor. As Mrs Alexander wrote, God had “ordered their estate”, and few villeins entertained any idea of getting on in the world.

Some however, did, and especially after the millennium year (1000 AD) when the parousia did not happen and Christ failed to appear as the bishops had been promising for centuries. Thereafter, some people objected to their propaganda (Catholic lies—the original meaning of the word), many of them in the south of France, in Languedoc. They were Cathars and Vaudois, and preached spontaneously against Catholicism as being a Satanic plot. The Church organized a crusade against them, massacring and scattering them, then set up the Inquisition to pursue the scattered remains throughout Europe, calling them witches, and projecting on to them the accusation of being Satanic that the witches had originally pinned on the Catholic clergy. As the Church won, it is witches who are now remembered as Satanic.

The Cathars and Waldenses were the first Protestants and the first capitalists, for many had to travel around earning what living they could as craftsmen and tinkers. Their preaching against Catholicism inspired people like Wycliffe and Tyndall, and the Lollards. They also motivated the peasantry to think strange thoughts, thoughts that God had not ordered everyone’s place, and that human beings need not be tied to the land. In England in 1381, the peasants revolted. A Lollard preacher, John Ball, taught quite a different message from that which the serfs held habitually and unquestioningly until then:

When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.

These dissenting Christians were reading the bible for themselves, and Ball plainly meant that God had not made any such prescription in Genesis, so the presumed order of society had been arranged by the nobility and the clergy hand in hand for their own benefit, and contrary to God’s intention.

Primeval Human Groups

Adam and Eve in the bible had willingly chosen to disobey God, but the notion of God had sociologically come from the interpretation of their societies that early humans, just awakening into consciousness, found themselves living in. These small human groups were essentially classless. Leaders were treated with somewhat greater respect than ordinary members of the group, because they had to take decisions on the group’s behalf, but otherwise they barely differed from the others, living, sharing and caring equally with them.

A child was born into the group, and knew nothing else. When they were ill or hungry, it was the group that looked after them. The purpose of the leader was to keep them united when they were attacked by a predator or a rival group, so every member looked to others for defense and security too. And that was just how they saw it as they died. The group always provided for them and protected them from birth until death. It was, to them, as much part of Nature as the rising of the sun. It seemed eternal because it was in existence when they were born, it still was when they were dying, and so it had always been. The group was led by one member, the most competent of them to do it, and particularly good leaders were remembered, and became identified with the group first as a totem, then an ancestor or a father. In time the benefits of the tribe transferred to a mythical founding leader, who thereby became a god.

So the imagined benefits of the supernatural god or God were inherited from the benefits of the primitive tribe. God is a supernaturalized society, but the society he represents was the egalitarian society of early human beings, a society that made everyone feel secure and safe, and was ever present.

Freedom in Paradise

We can see now, that there was no way that this early simple society could have sustained a division into “haves” and “have nots”. Had it done so, the “have nots” would have upped and left—there could have been nothing in it for them, and the “haves” would have had to become “have nots” to survive. They would have had to do their own delving and spinning. This is the stage when the original hypothetical social contract that founded the original group could have been abandoned, had the social contract been violated.

Were the people in this early human group free? They were and they were not! They benefitted from the help offered by others in the group, and they in turn had to help the others. So they were not free to do as they liked. They had a social duty to perform in return for the social benefits they received. But all of them could rely on the others, for any rogue or antisocial member would have been disciplined by the rest, perhaps even being killed in extreme cases, as chimpanzees do, but also being driven out where they were likely to die unless a nearby group took them in. Members of the groups felt secure, and could participate in evicting a poor or old leader who was no longer effective, thereby participating in a rough and ready democracy—but they were obligated to the group by duty.

Here is the natural source of the ideas of positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom meant that none of the group members felt enslaved or confined. None could be made to do more than their fair share for the group, and could withdraw from the group if they felt some caucus in it was asking too much of them. But they were able to make their own contribution to the group, just the same as the others did, and also could help in replacing an ineffective leader. So, they had positive freedom. True freedom is the right balance of the two of them, and that is what the primitive human group had.

Modern

Overdoing negative freedom breaks down the cohesiveness of the group. People may be able to do a lot of things they could not do while they felt more obligated to the group, but they also feel that the help of others was waning, leading to their growing anxiety and insecurity.

For long periods in the dark and middle ages, though their lords could be oppressive, people could not imagine what freedom was. Equally, though poor, and liable to have hard times in bad seasons through cold, drought or flood, the normal working year was short, and people had a lot of free time waiting for crops to grow, and saints days for merriment. They also had the same strong feeling of community that the primitive group had. In short, the anxiety they felt was real, through poverty and providence, but was not generally social. Social anguish has grown steadily in the twentieth century along with the collapse of caring society into greed and exploitation.

People are feeling the absence of the kindness that close groups always had as a compensation for the random hardships of living—positive freedom. Instead they want more negative freedom—with its attendant failing cohesion of society.

Michael Nugent on 8 June, 2011 writes at Atheist Ireland that the “World Atheist Convention in Dublin” (WACD), which met on Sunday 5 June 2011, discussed and adopted the following declaration on secularism and the place of religion in public life. He asked that everyone should discuss and promote the WACD declaration with friends and colleagues, and to discuss and promote it among atheist, humanist or secular groups, and with the media and politicians.

Dublin Declaration on Secularism and the Place of Religion in Public Life

1. Personal Freedoms

   1. Freedom of conscience, religion and belief are private and unlimited. Freedom to practice religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others.
   2. All people should be free to participate equally in the democratic process.
   3. Freedom of expression should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others. There should be no right ‘not to be offended’ in law. All blasphemy laws, whether explicit or implicit, should be repealed and should not be enacted.

2. Secular Democracy

   1. The sovereignty of the State is derived from the people and not from any god or gods.
   2. The only reference in the constitution to religion should be an assertion that the State is secular.
   3. The State should be based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Public policy should be formed by applying reason, and not religious faith, to evidence.
   4. Government should be secular. The state should be strictly neutral in matters of religion and its absence, favouring none and discriminating against none.
   5. Religions should have no special financial consideration in public life, such as tax-free status for religious activities, or grants to promote religion or run faith schools.
   6. Membership of a religion should not be a basis for appointing a person to any State position.
   7. The law should neither grant nor refuse any right, privilege, power or immunity, on the basis of faith or religion or the absence of either.

3. Secular Education

   1. State education should be secular. Religious education, if it happens, should be limited to education about religion and its absence.
   2. Children should be taught about the diversity of religious and nonreligious philosophical beliefs in an objective manner, with no faith formation in school hours.
   3. Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Science should be taught free from religious interference.

4. One Law For All

   1. There should be one secular law for all, democratically decided and evenly enforced, with no jurisdiction for religious courts to settle civil matters or family disputes.
   2. The law should not criminalise private conduct because the doctrine of any religion deems such conduct to be immoral, if that private conduct respects the rights and freedoms of others.
   3. Employers or social service providers with religious beliefs should not be allowed to discriminate on any grounds not essential to the job in question.

David Bahati, a Ugandan MP, influenced by three American evangelicals seeking favor with God by spreading their bent version of Christianity, introduced a parliamentary bill to deal with the around half a million gay people in Uganda. The bill would ban all forms of homosexuality, jail homosexuals, and hang the most persistent. The Archbishop of Canterbury along with many people from around the world objected, and the bill was suspended. It has reappeared and again disappeared, but plainly the movers of the bill are working hard to get it accepted as a motion, and passed by the Uganda Parliament.

Alan Wilson, an Anglican bishop, writes about this bill in the UK Guardian. In the face of the attempted evangelical take-over of the Anglican Church, bishop Wilson stands squarely as a Christian, on the ground that the Ugandan bill contravenes basic Christian teaching, and those Christians who are supporting and indeed pushing forward the bill, are not one iota Christian.

The bill treats homosexuality as monolithic—it is one wilful Christian error, and, moreover, it is a western import to the formerly distinct sexuality of east Africa, ignoring the martyrdom of 25 young men by Kabaka Mwanga in 1886. Worse, the bill violates basic principles of justice, including the human rights of its victims defined by the UN. Apparently accepting this, some promoters seem ready to reject the UN declaration to clear the way for it, rather than surrender “their queer-bashing law”. The bill will turn Anglican vicars into agents of the state, and forbid them from listening to gay Christians, as the 1998 Lambeth conference committed the whole Anglican communion.

It is not a question of liking homosexuality or otherwise. Bishop Wilson notes that Jesus had friends, like Nicodemus, who were Pharisees. Nevertheless, Jesus frequently criticized Pharisees, though he had similar ideas to those of the Pharisees in significant matters. After all, they were all Jews. Jesus generally did not object to what Pharisses wrote, but did object to their own way of interpreting it in practice, their lifestyle. Regarding them, he taught:

Do what they say, not what they do.

Their basic teaching of the Mosaic law was valid, but they had the idea that they could help prevent pious Jews from inadvertantly breaking the law by building around it “a wall” of lesser specific laws that were easier to comprehend and remember. As Wilson puts it, “Pharisees saw themselves as God’s minders”.

It was counterproductive. The Essenes thought it a theological error to hide the law behind a wall. What God had intended, they thought, was that Jews should understand the law itself, its meaning and importance and obey it as it is, not that God’s law should disappear behind a wall to make it, in some sense easier not to break. It meant their lesser precepts became paramount, yet there were far more of them, and ultimately their intention was far from clear to ordinary Jews. The basic law of God was compromised, Wilson says, because seemingly pettifogging subsidiary laws became regarded as inviolable, and apparently pointless, when their original purpose was not adequately explained.

For example, Jews were supposed to bathe in sufficient water to cover a man, but the Pharisees specified a minimum measured amount that would suffice, hoping to ensure that every Jew could not inadvertantly break the law. But before long pious Jews began to think the precise measure, meant to protect the actual law, which was vaguer, was what was important to God, and so had to take tedious care to measure out the right quantity of water! Jesus, who was most likely an Essene himself, called this “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel”.

Cherry picking the few Bible texts that could be interpreted as saying anything about homosexuality, the Ugandan bill strips them of their context and imposes them harshly in a way that would be disproportionate for serious crimes.

Straining at a tiny but contentious gnat, it swallows a sociopathic, genocidal camel.

The Ugandan bill is unchristian and uncivilised. It criminalises a few people and threatens their lives. The civilised world must urge that Uganda’s honorable members of Parliament will be decent enough to see it is wicked. If it were to become an act of the Ugandan parliament, it will violate not only the golden rule, “as you would that people should do unto you, do likewise to them” but also Jesus’s summary of the whole law, “love God and love your neighbor”. The secular Christian regards God as a personification of society, He stands for all your neighbors, so loving God implies loving your neighbor, but Christ made it clear in his sermon regarding the Judgement on the Mount of Olives (Matthew 25:31-46) that is what his Father meant by it.

A series of short comments by various professional religionizers at ReligionBlog at Dallas News, attempts to explain why so many Christians are losing their faith. Only two of them mention the loss of core Christian values by the various denominations. Maybe there would be a lot more Christians if the ones there are actually followed Christian morals. Christianity has strayed from Christ’s moral code… if, indeed, it ever had it—for Christ was certainly not a Christian!

The excuse is that Christianity has had to adapt to social change, an argument that assumes morality to be purely arbitrary—in short, relativism, something Christians are supposed to abhore. Yet human morality has evolved with the evolution of social animals. For a solitary animal, notably those that just lay eggs and leave them to their own devices, only sexual attraction distinguishes animals of the same species from any other. Any other animal is a potential rival, prey or predator. Animals that live socially must have morals! They have to have sufficient “regard” for the others in their group to allow the social group to cohere, and that “regard”, however it manifests, is morality—it is absent in relationships between solitary animals.

Religion began as that aspect of human culture that strengthened group living, and therefore morality. The human animal has the need for morality above all other animals because its societies are all the more complex, and because we are aware of morality, and have codified it to an extent. The codification of aspects of morality can change with time and place, but the core of human morality is an instinct bred into us to preserve the societies upon which we now depend for our very humanity. Regretably, religion introduced spurious additional functions and purposes, confusing its core aims.

Now it has has been made an excuse for capitalism, and, particularly in the USA, the protector and defender of it and its antisocial ideology of right wing libertarianism, promoted by neoconservative “pastors”, who know nothing of Christianity or history and sociology, like David Barton. Christ didn’t have a dime. He had to ask to borrow one to show the crowd Caesar’s head on it. Ministers today do not ask for pennies, they own TV stations and ask on them for thousand dollar donations to make them richer than they already are. And people send them the money, thinking it is Christian charity! Then the unscrupulous ministers claim God has made them rich as proof of His blessing, though God blessed His own Son with poverty.

It is hardly surprising that many want no part of this corrupt pseudo capitalist apology of a Christianity. Real Christians are leaving, or not joining in the first place, leaving the ones still within the ranks of Christianity as fools or fakes. Only they think greed is good, that God rewards liars, and that it is Christian to murder our fellow innocent human beings, thousands of miles away, in God’s name as acts of arbitrary vengeance.

Supposed Christian confidence tricksters betray themselves by rarely citing the words of God uttered from his own lips when he incarnated on earth because they stand for a morality that they abhore—the morality of helping others, not tricking them out of their own possessions and killing them. Instead they go back to the Old Testament for justification in the earlier and more barbaric image of God of more primitive times and peoples.

Christ taught an altogether different God from the vengeful ogre of the Jewish scriptures. The Christian God is a God of love. Christians are therefore meant to love others. Only a remnant does. Now the whole Jewish saga—for the large number of Christians who have not read it—was one of the mass straying from God’s law of the Chosen People—the Jews—and their suffering exile and destruction as a punishment. All but the remnant who remained righteous. They were preserved.

All those right wing authoritarian “Christians” baying for blood and revenge, while thinking they are saved just for their so-called faith, should really make sure they understand their bible first, and not just what their money grubbing pastors—priests of the Antichrist—tell them. The Antichristian pastors feed the lambs what they want to hear, not what Christ taught—salvation is easy, just have faith, greed is ok and riches are God given, and murderous revenge is only human. Christ taught salvation was hard, it was not only a matter of faith but required effort and will, the poor not the rich are blessed by God, and judgement is God’s prerogative only.

Scientifically, or any other way, we cannot prove anything that is imaginary or simply a thought. Centaurs, vampires, werewolves, philosophers’ stones, elixirs of life, fairies, demons, angels, gods, God—such things can be imagined, but cannot be proved because they are purely imaginary, figments, and so do not exist in reality to leave behind any evidence for them. The absence of evidence for them is evidence! It is evidence against them.

A basis of science, a feature without which it could not work, is skepticism, one does not postulate anything for which there is no evidence. Its opposite is credulity, the inclination to believe anything on the least of evidence or none! Related to skepticism is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, or Parsimony, which says that one postulates only what is necessary and feasible—one does not glibly invent things. Using these principles science has no need to hypothesize God. Nor does it have to disprove God, an entity for which it has no need, any more than it has to disprove centaurs or elixirs of life, etc, or needs them.

An agnostic is deliberately wavering, wavering out of choice and not reason. To claim there is no evidence either way, is simply to say there is no evidence, and so to be scientific and skeptical the postulate of God has to be rejected until convincing evidence forces a reassessment. It is impossible to be simultaneously a scientist and a believer in God, so long as science cannot accommodate credulity. Credulous science becomes religion!

Moreover, if God existed and has the effect on the material world that believers think He has, He is necessarily leaving evidence behind. Science ought to be able to detect it. As Victor Stenger shows, nothing so far suggests anywhere in the universe that we have checked out that requires a God to explain it. Science is highly successful at explaining things without the hypothesis of God. So, if God exists, He is not manifestly changing the world in any discernible way. Worship and prayer are having no effect.

Of course, a purely mental God, a purely imaginary or psychological phenomenon, can effect one. It is a form of autosuggestion. That is probably why people are able to convince themselves that God does answer prayers. It is the Placebo God.