Late Morning

I’ll head for the pool in a short while; my hips and legs are sore from this weekend’s trail run and longish walk.

Some stuff from the net:

Iraq Progress Report.

On 9-11 conspiracy theorists…

Barack Obama on some good financial reasons to end the Iraq quagmire.

Here: (from RichardDawkins.net), Hitchens responds to a critic:

[...]
However, it is his own supposedly kindly religion that prevents him from seeing how insulting is the latent suggestion of his position: the appalling insinuation that I would not know right from wrong if I was not supernaturally guided by a celestial dictatorship, which could read and condemn my thoughts and which could also consign me to eternal worshipful bliss (a somewhat hellish idea) or to an actual hell.

Implicit in this ancient chestnut of an argument is the further — and equally disagreeable — self-satisfaction that simply assumes, whether or not religion is metaphysically “true,” that at least it stands for morality. Those of us who disbelieve in the heavenly dictatorship also reject many of its immoral teachings, which have at different times included the slaughter of other “tribes,” the enslavement of the survivors, the mutilation of the genitalia of children, the burning of witches, the condemnation of sexual “deviants” and the eating of certain foods, the opposition to innovations in science and medicine, the mad doctrine of predestination, the deranged accusation against all Jews of the crime of “deicide,” the absurdity of “Limbo,” the horror of suicide-bombing and jihad, and the ethically dubious notion of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice.

Of course Gerson will — and must — cherry-pick this list (which is by no means exhaustive) and patter on about how one mustn’t be too literal. But in doing this, he makes a huge concession to the ethical humanism to which he so loftily condescends. The game is given away by his own use of G.K. Chesterton’s invocation of Thor. We laugh at this dead god, but were not Norse children told that without Valhalla there would be no courage and no moral example? Isn’t it true that Louis Farrakhan’s crackpot racist group gets young people off drugs? Doesn’t Hamas claim to provide social services to the downtrodden? If you credit any one religion with motivating good deeds, how (without declaring yourself to be sectarian) can you avoid crediting them all? And is not endless warfare between the faiths to be added to the list of horrors I just mentioned? Just look at how the “faith-based” are behaving in today’s Iraq.

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first — I have been asking it for some time — awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain. [...]

Another atheist view: NATALIE ANGIER

[...]
I don’t need pollsters like Daniel Yankelovich to tell me that I’m in the minority. I’m in the minority even among friends and family. Not long ago I was startled to learn that my older brother believes in God. (”You got a problem with that?” he practically snarled.) My older sister is rearing her two kids as semiobservant Jews, and my niece recently won raves for her bat mitzvah performance. When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don’t think about this stuff. It doesn’t matter to them. They can’t know, they won’t beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don’t care if their kids believe or not.

“My children’s religious beliefs are their own,” says Florence Haseltine, a scientist and advocate for women’s health. “And as long as those beliefs do not require you to kill your parents, they’re O.K. with me.”

Rare were the respondents who considered atheism to be a significant part of their self-identities. Most called themselves “passive” atheists and said they had stopped doing battle with the big questions of life and death, meaning and eternity, pretty much when they stopped using Clearasil.

“I don’t spend much time thinking about whether God exists,” said Wendy Kaminer, author of “Sleeping With Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety” and an affiliated scholar with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. “I don’t consider that a relevant question. It’s unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can’t worry about.”

To be an active atheist seems almost silly and beside the point. After all, the most famous group devoted to atheism, the American Atheists, was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an eccentric megalomaniac whose greatest claim to fame, at this point, is that she and her son were kidnapped several years ago and are presumed dead. Other atheistic groups, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation or the Council for Secular Humanism, are more concerned with maintaining an unshakable separation between church and state than they are with spreading any gospel of godlessness. Katha Pollitt, an unabashedly liberal columnist for The Nation who says she is listed in the “Who’s Who in Hell,” admits she used to feel more strongly about arguing against religion than she does today.

“I’m anticlerical, not antireligion,” she says. “If somebody believes there is God, I’m not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers.”

Or, as Tom Eisner, a neurobiologist at Cornell, put it, “I don’t ring doorbells saying I’m a Seventh-Day Atheist.”

And yet. there is something to be said for a revival of pagan peevishness and outspokenness. It’s not that I would presume to do something as foolish and insulting as try to convert a believer. Arguments over the question of whether God exists are ancient, recurring, sometimes stimulating but more often tedious. Arrogance and righteousness are nondenominational vices that entice the churched and unchurched alike.

Still, the current climate of religiosity can be stifling to nonbelievers, and it helps now and then to cry foul. For one thing, some of the numbers surrounding the deep religiousness of America, and the rarity of nonbelief, should be held to the fire of skepticism, as should sweeping statistics of any sort. Yes, Americans are comparatively more religious than Europeans, but while the vast majority of them may say generically that they believe in God, when asked what their religion is, a sizable fraction, 11 percent, report “no religion,” a figure that has more than doubled since the early 1970’s and that amounts to about 26 million people.

As Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.

“Survey data point to an overwhelming belief in God, but when you go down a couple of layers, it can be pretty vacuous,” says Cromartie. “It’s striking how many people say they’re Christian but don’t know who gave the Sermon on the Mount.” [...]

According to their time-diary analysis, only 26 percent of Americans in 1994 went to church weekly, although the Gallup poll for the same period reported the figure at 42 percent.

What’s more, in some quarters, atheism, far from being rare, is the norm — among scientists, for example, particularly high-level scientists who populate academia. Recently, Edward J. Larson, a science historian at the University of Georgia, and Larry Witham, a writer, polled scientists listed in American Men and Women of Science on their religious beliefs. Among this general group, a reasonably high proportion, 40 percent, claimed to believe in a “personal God” who would listen to their prayers. But when the researchers next targeted members of the National Academy of Sciences, an elite coterie if ever there was one, belief in a personal God was 7 percent, the flip of the American public at large. This is not to say that intelligence and atheism are in any way linked, but to suggest that immersion in the scientific method, and success in the profession, tend to influence its practitioners.

“It’s a consequence of the experience of science,” says Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Texas. “As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know don’t care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science — that it has made it possible for people not to be religious.” [...]

“Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities,” says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. “If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.”

Early in December, I visited the kind of person who should be as rare as an atheist in a foxhole: a freethinker in a fire station. Bruce Monson, an affable, boyish-faced 33-year-old firefighter and paramedic who works in the conservative city of Colorado Springs, where evangelical religious organizations are among the biggest boom businesses, had challenged some of the religious literature, quoting New Testament Scripture, that members of the Fellowship of Christian Firefighters posted on the taxpayer-financed station’s bulletin board. Fighting fire with fire, Monson posted literature of his own, this time quoting some of the less savory sections of the Old Testament, like when Lot sleeps with his daughters and impregnates them.

The Christian firefighters were outraged and demanded that Monson’s posts be removed. “I was told by my superiors to take my stuff down and leave the Christian material alone,” Monson said. Monson pursued his fight up the chain of command and finally won the right to his postings on the department’s Web page, but not without being described by any number of colorful terms and being told where he should, and would, go.

“I’m not antireligion,” he said. “I’m anti-shoving-it-down-your-throat. Is it too much to ask for tolerance?”

Oh, yes, tolerance. How sweet a policy of respectfulness and hands-off might be, were it mutually adhered to. But when The Atlantic Monthly asks, in the headline of a feature article by Glenn Tinder, “Can We Be Good Without God?” the answer is, of course, “Hell, no!” And when conspicuous true believers like Lieberman make the claim that religion and ethical behavior are inextricably linked, the corollary premise is that atheists are, if not immoral, then amoral, or nihilistic misanthropes, or, worst of all, moral relativists.

“There remains a sense among a lot of Americans that someone who actively doesn’t believe in God might not be morally reliable, or might not be fully trustworthy,” says James Turner, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame. Yet the canard that godliness and goodliness are linked in any way but typographically must be taken on faith, for no evidence supports it. In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the “Jesus people” movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found that atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests than were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled. Recent data compiled on the religious views among federal prisoners show that nonbelievers account for less than 1 percent of the total, significantly lower than for America as a whole. Admittedly, some of those true-believing inmates may have converted post-incarceration, but the data that exist in no way support the notion that atheism promotes criminal behavior.

In fact, the foundations of ethical behavior not only predate the world’s major religions; they also predate the rise of Homo sapiens. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, has written extensively about the existence of seemingly moral behavior in nonhuman species. “I’ve argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species,” he said. “In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that’s why we like them so much, even though they’re large carnivores.”

As humans have sought to move beyond simple reciprocity to consider abstract issues of fairness, or to grope toward something like a universal declaration of human rights, established religions have played a surprisingly small part.

“Over the centuries, we’ve moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy,” Dawkins says. “We’ve evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don’t approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.” [...]