american athesit magazine feb 2008

www.atheists.org

American Atheists Essential Reading ListBooks on this list have been selected to provide introductory information on topics of interest to Atheists. They address a wide range of important subjects such as: the history of Atheist thought, the origins of modern religion, the role religion plays in modern culture and politics, Atheist parenting, and the ongoing battle for the separation between church and state. While these titles represent only a fraction of the books available from American Atheist Press, collectively they provide a broad overview of Atheist thought.

Natural Atheism by David Eller stock# 5902 $18.00 352 pp. paperbackOur best-selling book. A great overview of Atheist philosophy from the perspective of a “natural” Atheist.

Christianity before Christ by John G. Jackson stock# 5200 $14.00 237 pp. paperbackChristian doctrines are traced to their origins in older religions.

The Case Against Religion by Albert Ellis stock# 5096 $6.00 57 pp. stapledA psychotherapist’s view of the harmful aspects of religious belief.

Living in the Light by Anne R. Stone stock# 5588 $12.00 157 pp. paperbackSubtitled “Freeing Your Child from the Dark Ages,” this book serves as a manual for Atheist parents.

Our Constitution: The Way It Was by Madalyn O’Hair stock# 5400 $6.00 70 pp. stapledAmerican Atheist Radio Series episodes about the myth that our founding fathers created a Christian nation.

What on Earth Is an Atheist! by Madalyn O’Hair stock# 5412 $18.00 288 pp. paperbackAmerican Atheist Radio Series episodes on various topics of Atheist philosophy and history.

The Bible Handbook by G. W. Foote, W. P. Ball, et al. stock# 5008 $17.00 372 pp. paperbackA compilation of biblical absurdities, contradictions, atrocities, immoralities and obscenities.

An Atheist Epic by Madalyn O’Hair stock# 5376 $18.00 302 pp. paperbackThe personal story of the battle to end mandatory prayer and bible recitation in schools in the United States.

65 Press Interviews by Robert G. Ingersoll stock# 5589 $15.00 262 pp. paperbackIngersoll’s 19th-century newspaper interviews as a Freethinker and opponent of superstition.

An Atheist Primer by Madalyn O’Hair stock# 5372 $6.00 30 pp. stapledA humorous look at god concepts will help children (and adults) have a clear view of religion.

An Atheist Looks at Women & Religion by Madalyn O’Hair stock# 5419 $10.00 42 pp. paperbackWhy attempts to reconcile religion with civil rights for women are self-defeating.

The Jesus the Jews Never Knew by Frank R. Zindler stock# 7026 $20.00 544 pp. paperbackA search of ancient Jewish literature yields no evidence for the existence of any historical Jesus.

The Great Infi dels by Robert G. Ingersoll stock# 5197 $7.00 80 pp. paperbackHow nonbelievers and Atheists have contributed to civilization and enriched our lives.

Our Pagan Christmas by R.J. Condon stock# 5064 $3.00 20 pp. stapledThe non-Christian origins of common Christmas customs are explored.

Sex Mythology by Sha Rocco stock# 5440 $8.00 55 pp. stapledA scholarly study explores the sexual origins of religious symbols including the Christian cross.

Morality without Religion stock# 8310 $1.00 24 pp. pamphletAtheist leaders and philosophers give their views on godless ethics.

Please see the order form located in the center of the magazine for member discounts and shipping & handling.

Abraham Lincoln: Freethinker, Soldier and Martyrby Joseph Lewis

12

FEBRUARY 2008

Vol 46, No.2

ISSN 0516-9623 (Print) ISSN 1935-8369 (Online)

Editor, American Atheist Press Frank Zindler

Editor, American Atheist Magazine Ellen Johnson

Designer Elias Scultori

Cover Design Tim Mize

Editorial Assistants Gil and Jeanne Gaudia

Published monthly (except June & December) by American Atheists Inc.

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American Atheist Magazine

CONTENTS

From The PresidentA Tribute to Darwin, Lincoln and Washington - All Non-Christiansby Ellen Johnson

4

War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In ReligionThe Onion

6

Charles Darwin And His Never-Ending Controversyby Conrad F. Goeringer

8

Beyond Belief: The Joy Of A Camp For Non-Beliversby Samantha Stein

16

Representing You5

Letter to the Editor6

ObituaryHans Kasten

15

Christian Rewriting of History18

Britain’s National Secular Society Prominent at Windsor Castle Seminar

26

Atheists & Co.Bill Treloar

27

Dawn Of Animal Vision Discovered28

Book ReviewGod Is Not Greatby Gil Gaudia, Ph.D.

29

Atheist Singles30

State Director Listing35

Trading Faith for Spirituality: The Mystifications of Sam Harrisby Meera Nanda

20

4 American Atheist — february 2008

In this issue of American Atheist Magazine we pay tribute to three remarkable people, Presidents Washington, Lincoln and British naturalist Charles Darwin.

President’s Day is celebrated every year on the third Monday in February because both Washington and Lincoln were born in that month. They were born on February 22 and 12 respec-tively. This year President’s Day falls on the 19th.

Another great man Charles Darwin, like Abraham Lincoln, was born on February 12 and many Atheists celebrate his birthday in February as well.

Of course Christians want to claim Washington and Lincoln as their own. To have these American heroes portrayed as Chris-tians bolsters their revisionist history of America as being an official “Christian” nation. Bogus quotes, which have these men promoting prayer and calling on a god to protect our nation, have been attrib-uted to both presidents and the religious establishment in America makes sure that their followers are well versed in them. Here are two questionable quotes attributed to them.

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.—George Washington

The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foun-dation in morality and religion.—Abe Lincoln

This is why the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library & Archives is so important. It was established to preserve our history so that Christian revisionists could not erase us from that history. One wonderful book we have in the library is titled, ABRAHAM LINCOLN Was He A Christian. It was written in 1893 by John B. Remsburg and published by The Truth Seeker Company. In the preface to the book, Mr. Remsburg wrote:

Almost immediately after the remains of America’s most illustrious son were laid to rest at Springfield, one of his biographers put forward the claim that he was a devout believer in Christianity. The claim was promptly denied by the dead statesman’s friends, but only to be renewed again, and again denied. And thus for a quarter of a century the question of Abraham Lincoln’s religious belief has been tossed like a battledoor from side to side.

The author states that Abraham Lincoln was not a Christian and cites newspaper articles, previously written books about Lincoln

from the president

A Tribute to Darwin, Lincoln and Washington - All Non-Christians Ellen Johnson

february 2008 — American Atheist 5

and interviews with personal friends of whom he noted, “and when we realize how rapidly those who lived and moved with him are pass-ing away- that erelong none of them will remain to testify-the im-portance of this evidence can hardly be overestimated. The book is a marvelous refutation of Lincoln being a Christian.

And what about George Washington? He, like Thomas Jef-ferson, was a Deist. He thought that the universe was brought into existence by a god and that was the end of it. He did not accept that there was a personal god which was involved in the day-to-day existence of humans.

There are many extant quotes from George Washington on the subject of religion which sound very similar to those made by another Deist, Thomas Jefferson. I wrote my masters thesis on the religious philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and I am well versed on his statements on the subject and from what I have read, George Wash-ington was as much a Deist as was Thomas Jefferson.

And last but not least we honor Charles Darwin with an ar-ticle by Conrad Goeringer. Next to me on my desk is a book from the CESAALA titled, “Autobiography of Charles Darwin.” It is from The Thinker’s Library, No. 7.

(With Two Appendices, Comprising A Chapter Of Reminis-cences And A Statement Of Charles Darwin’s Religious Views, By His Son, Sir Francis Darwin (Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge). It was published in London by Watts & Co. in 1929.

From this wonderful treasure I quote Mr. Darwin on the subject of religion, in a letter to a Dutch student written on April 2, 1873:

“It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arouse through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is be-yond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.”

At the CESAALA in the American Atheist Center we have many similar books and materials dating back to the 1700’s. Mada-lyn O’Hair began to collect and preserve our written history thirty years ago, so that the truth about Atheists, Humanists, Rationalists, Freethinkers and other non-believers would never be forgotten. We have 21,000 books alone. I have applied for a grant so that we could catalogue this collection, but we were turned down. So we need your help to purchase computer software and hire a full time employee to do this necessary and important work. Once it is catalogued we will know what all is on the shelves and where to locate it. This will make it easy to find the right materials to do research. And knowing what we have will make it easier to add new titles to the collection. So please give generously to American Atheists so that we may continue to collect, preserve and share our history. ❋

To see commentary by Ellen Johnson on video please visit www.atheists.org and click on the video screen on the home page.

11/05/07 — Ellen Johnson gave an interview to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper on the decision by New Line Cinema to edit out anti-Christian portions of the movie, “The Golden Compass.”

11/07/07 — AA Legal Director Edwin Kagin was a guest on the “The Al Rantel Radio Program on KABC.

11/09/07 — AA President Ellen Johnson was a guest on the FOX Network’s FOX & Friends program to talk about the controversy over the movie “The Golden Compass.”

11/09/07 — AA President Ellen Johnson was a guest on CNN’s Headline News to talk about “The Golden Compass” movie.

11/13/07 — Ellen Johnson appeared on CNN to discuss Georgia’s governors prayers for rain.

11/13/07 — Ellen Johnson gave an interview to the Family News In Focus on American Atheists Utah Highway Cross lawsuit.

11/14/07 — Ellen Johnson gave an interview to Religion News Service on the Golden Compass movie controversy.

11/14/07 — Ellen Johnson gave a phone interview with a World Religions class at Nikiski High School in Nikiski, Alaska.

11/16/07 — Ellen Johnson appeared on the Glen Beck program on Headline News to discuss our Utah cross lawsuit.

11/16/07 — Utah State Director Richard Andrews appeared on the FOX Network’s Hannity & Combs program to talk about our Utah cross lawsuit.

11/16/07 — AA Communications Director David Silverman gave an interview to FoxNews.com about our Utah cross case.

11/16/07 — Our attorney in the Utah cross case Brian Barnard, was a guest on the Alan Combs radio program to talk about the case.

11/15/07 — Virginia State Director, Rick Wingrove, gave a talk on Atheism to the Washington DC Freemasons Lodge No. 4

11/15/07 — The Salt Lake Tribune had an article about our Utah Highway Cross case decision.

11/16/07 — FoxNews.com had an article about our Utah Highway Cross case. AA Spokesman David Silverman and our attorney in the lawsuit Brian Barnard were quoted in the article.

11/20/07 — The Deseret Morning News reported on our Utah Highway Cross lawsuit.

11/22/07 — Ellen Johnson appeared on the FOX Network’s “America’s Pulse” program to talk about our Utah cross lawsuit.

11/23/07 — Ellen Johnson appeared on the CNN Headline News Program to talk about the movie - The Golden Compass with Bill Donohoe from the Catholic League.

11/22/07 — The Utah Daily Herald printed an article about our Utah Cross case decision.

11/17/07 — Newsweek.com ran a story on out Utah cross case decision.

representing YOU


JERUSALEM—As an uneasy truce between Israel and Hezbollah continues, millions of average men and women in the Holy Land are turning to the one simple comfort that has always seen them through the darkest days of their troubled history: the steadfast guidance of their religious faith.

“I take solace in knowing that my faith is a sanctuary, an escape from the bloodshed and turmoil,” said Haifa resident Yigal Taheri, who last week lost his wife and newborn daughter when a Fajr-3 long-range rocket launched by Lebanese militants struck the synagogue where his family was attending services. “YHWH, Elohim, whatever you wish to not call Him—His love comforts all those who are willing to open their hearts to Him. Praise be to G–d.”

“Religion is the one thing that has never let us down,” Taheri added over the low rumble of AK-47 fire emanating from the nearby home of a radical Israeli rabbi.

Taheri is not alone. In a time of seemingly unending conflict be-tween Israelis and Arabs, a growing number of Middle Easterners are fervently embracing the unshakeable wisdom of Judaism and Islam.

Palestinian Omar Abdel-Malik, a resident of the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, credits his Islamic beliefs for preserving his sanity.

“The Israelis have fired missile upon missile on my neighborhood, but it has only made my trust in Allah that much stronger,” Abdel-Ma-lik said. “I cringe to think where the people of the Middle East would be right now if it weren’t for our steadfast belief in one true, merciful, and loving Supreme Being.”

Palestinian widow and mother of three Dareen Idriss agreed, citing the healing power of prayer as a way to cope with the relentless slaughter she and her family witness every day. “When the children cannot stop crying because of the bombs, we all gather our families in the rubble of the mosque to pray for justice,” Idriss said. “During this calm meditation, we also pray for the annihilation of the Hebrew race.”

West Bank settler Ari Chayat, whose neighborhood has also been

ravaged by violence, echoed this profound reliance on faith. “The world is so brutal and unfair,” Chayat said. “Many days, my uncompro-mising belief in a vengeful creator is all that gets me out of bed in the morning.”

“If it wasn’t for my faith that the God of Abraham has given these lands to Jews and Jews alone by divine decree, I probably wouldn’t even be here today,” Chayat added.

Lebanese militant Jawad Hamid, who recently lost his best friend to an Israeli helicopter attack while the two men were on their way to pick up a Katyusha rocket, said his faith in Allah was the only way he could cope with the tragedy.

“Every time I want to give up hope, I just open the Quran to my favorite passage, Surah 2:194: ‘Whoever acts aggressively against you, inflict injury on him,’” Hamid said. “Whenever I read those words, I am immediately filled with inspiration and a renewed sense of purpose.”

Even political leaders have tapped into the public’s reliance on religion and used it as a way to encourage them to never give up.

“In this time of strife, the only way to endure the unending suffer-ing is through an unwavering, uncompromising faith in one’s religious beliefs,” Israeli hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah went so far as to quote from the Quran in a speech delivered to followers the same afternoon.

“It’s always frightening to be reminded of your own mortality, as we all were this past Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sun-day,” Hezbollah commander Mahdi al-Zaidi said. “But rather than react irrationally, I looked deep within my faith, consulted the Quran, and by the mercy of Allah, I gained the resolve to oversee a massive airstrike against the enemy.”

“We will get through this, so long as we have God on our side,” he added. ❋

Reprinted with permission of THE ONION. © copyright by ONION, INC.

War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion by the onion—www.theonion.com(Humor)

Identical Mistakes by Lloyd Foster

You have probably never seen issues of religion or race in this light before. Never looked at politics, corporate life or the threat of terrorism from such a unique angle either. And just in case you are thinking that this is a collection of boring es-says by a disturbed academic… This is a novel! A mystery novel, no less. A bona fide mystery that will keep you guessing to the very last page.

Go out and grab a copy.You will see.

Available on amazon.com(Not available from American Atheists.)

Letter to the EditorEditor:I respectfully request of the American Atheist journal that

unimportant words such as christianity or god or catholic not be capitalized, against your better judgment, because these words are certainly not deserving of any such reverence, nor will they ever truly be. I thank the American Atheist organization for standing up for me and who I truly am and just simply being level headed, my search is finally over.

Cliff HillingtonPalm Springs, California.

Our editorial policy is to capitalize the names of religions and specific gods but not the generic word “god.” We capitalize Theist and Atheist as well as Humanist, Freethinker, Agnostic, Skeptic and Rationalist because they are as much proper nouns as are Christian, Protestant and Catholic. (Editor)


The 34th Annual National Convention of AMERICAN ATHEISTS

March 21-23, 2008 — Minneapolis, MN

Get ready now to join us for

AMERICAN ATHEISTS returns to historic Minneapolis, MN. for our 34th National Convention!Join us for a weekend of workshops, panels, talks by noted speakers and other activities.

Minneapolis is also one of the premier tourism destinations in this part of the nation, so you’ll want to consider making your Convention visit an extended weekend.

The venue is the new, luxurious Minneapolis Marriott City Center Hotel in the heart of downtown. It offers everything from stunning views to magnificent accommodations, and you’re within walking distance of many regional attractions. There are also convenient mass-transit and other connections to spectacular destinations including THE MALL OF AMERICA, the world-class Minneapolis Institute of Art and so much more! The special convention room rate for the American Atheist convention is only $99 per night (single, double, triple or quad).

Reserve your room now. Be sure to say you are with American Atheists 2008 to qualify for the special room rate… and don’t forget to ask about “shoulder dates” if you want to extend your stay before or

after the convention weekend! You can visit the YAHOO! Travel web site for the Marriott City Center at http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-345643-marriott_city_center_minneapolis-i to learn more about the hotel and the local tourism sites and amenities. The hotel web site is at http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/mspcc-minneapolis-marriott-city-center/ . Remember, you must make your reservations directly with the hotel at:

Minneapolis Marriott® City Center 30 South 7th Street Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402 USA 1-612-349-4000 (phone)1-612-332-7165 (fax)

GETTING THERE…Major airlines service the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport. Once there, you can take a cab or private shuttle, or for only $2.50 hop the light rail which takes you downtown to the Marriott! Visit http://www.mspairport.com/msp/Airlines/passenger.aspx for information on flying to the convention.

SPEAKERS, EVENTS AND MORE…Check forthcoming issues of the American Atheist Magazine, and the American Atheists Convention web site at http://www.atheists.org/convention for updates on Convention events! We promise you a blockbuster line-up of speakers, fun social events and so much more – what you’ve come to expect from this annual Convention bash. Make reservations now!

We’ll see you in Minneapolis!


Nearly two centuries after the birth of naturalist Charles Darwin, his discoveries about the origin of life on our planet remain at the center of a heated culture war debate touching on the status of science and religion…

This February, 2008 will mark the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin, the Brit-ish naturalist whose scientific career

crystallized evolution and natural selection as the unifying explanation for the development—and di-versity—of life. In a remarkable series of books, Darwin established this complex process as the driving force behind the spectacular abundance of different, but related, natural forms.

Despite his considerable corpus of evidence, though, and the even weightier body of findings that scientists have uncovered since his 1895 book On the Origin of Species, Darwin and “Darwinism”—evolution through natural selection –remain centerpieces in centu-ries-old debate over the intersection of religion and science. As this issue of The American Atheist Magazine heads to press, for instance, the PBS is airing its critically-acclaimed NOVA segment, “JUDGE-MENT DAY—Intelligent Design on Trial” which probes the legal, cultural and scientific aspects of teaching so-called “alternatives” to evolution in the public schools. In a recent debate among candi-dates for the U.S. presidency, White House hopefuls were grilled as to whether they “believed” in evolution. Equally disturbing are polls which show that a near-majority of Americans “believe creationism,” the religious doctrine that God created human beings and other life in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire England. His heritage was laced with religious nonconformists in-cluding Unitarians and Freethinkers like his father, financier Robert Darwin. Charles studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, but abandoned the prospect of a medical career and ended up studying taxidermy from a freed black slave who regaled him with tales of the South African rainforest. In 1827, he enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge where his interest in natural history continued to thrive. It was here that he met botanist John Stevens Henslow

and expanded his interest in geology. Thanks to Henslow, Darwin was recommended as resident naturalist for the voyage of the HMS Beagle which was to spend two years charting the coastline and sur-rounding waters of South America.

Despite the vicissitudes of a prolonged sea voyage (Darwin frequently suffered from seasickness and fever), the young naturalist managed to amass a considerable body of fossils and newly-discovered living organisms many of which he shipped back to Cambridge along with his observations. He had also gathered evidence to support his thesis that creatures could evolve into different species when isolated, a process of transmutation which he detailed in his “Red Notebook.” Upon his return to England, Darwin was hailed for his revolutionary findings. His name also became associated with the expansive debate over what role, if any, “god” played in the fashioning of life on Earth. He also set to work putting his theory on the transmutation of living creatures to paper, first in a 230-page paper, and later in a series of books which would ignite a controversy that even the famous natu-ralist could not have anticipated.

God, religion and Darwin

Many viewed the publication and growing acceptance of Charles Darwin’s ideas on the development of life as a threat to re-ligious orthodoxy, and the account of human origins found in the Old Testament. Evolution postulated “deep time” whereby a gradual

Charles Darwin And His Never- Ending Controversyby Conrad F. Goeringer


process unfolded over millions and even tens of millions of years—a far cry from the brief creation cycle described in Genesis. It also raised questions about divine agency. Darwin stopped short of philo-sophical speculation, or declaring that a “First Cause” did or did not create the universe. Indeed, he remained a Theist throughout his life despite his explicit critiques of Christianity and other religious orthodoxy.

Following publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” in 1859, Darwin was propelled to the center of re-ligious controversy. Fueling this was the development of “higher criti-cism” within the established churches, where theologians and clerics were undertaking a critical examination of Biblical texts and claims. In 1860, for instance, a small coterie of Anglican thinkers published “Es-says and Reviews” where they attacked biblical literalism, and expressed support for Darwin’s insights on the evolution of living forms.

Perhaps more significant than Origins was Darwin’s 1871 opus, “The Descent of Man.” Here, among other topics including the evolution of the human species, he argued his case for the origin of religion and ethical sensibilities as useful, socially beneficial traits. But he also argued against the suggestion that, somehow, belief in a deity was an innate part of the human character.

“There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary, there is ample evidence derived not from hasty travelers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their language to express such an idea…”

His skepticism in a deity which guided the development of life and presided over the most superficial events in a vast universe continued to grow. Charles Darwin remained an Agnostic, though never abandoning his fall-back belief in a “first cause.”

“Formerly, I was led to the firm conviction of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the high feelings of wonder, admiration, and devo-tion, which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind.” [1]

Darwin’s most eloquent musings on religion, though, were saved for a posthumous memoir he began in May of 1876 and ti-tled “Recollections of the Development of my mind and character.” This work—published after his death as “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin”—was heavily redacted by his wife, Emma, who held strong religious convictions. The complete, unexpurgated text was not pub-lished until 1958 when Darwin’s granddaughter Nora Barnes pub-lished a complete edition of the great naturalist’s musings. A full section is devoted to Darwin’s opinions in respect to theology and his gradual disillusionment with traditional Christianity.

“At the present day the most usual argument for the exis-tence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most per-sons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos (sic), Maho-

madans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favor of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God… This argument would be valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. There-fore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists…” [2]

Darwinism and the roots of the American culture wars

Darwin’s writings on the evolution of species along with oth-er findings about “deep time” and the age of the universe won the day in the scientific community. Liberal religionists made efforts to reconcile their Biblical narrative with the growing body of evidence that clearly pointed to different origins for life and universe. Atheists and other Freethinkers could point to the corpus of Charles Darwin’s writings as evidence of a naturalistic view of how life began. Lib-eral Christians chose to accept Darwinism as well, though, suggest-ing that the biblical accounts of the Old and New Testaments were symbolic, allegorical and products of their time while still conveying a “deeper message.”

In America, the strongest expressions of anti-Darwinism be-gan with a set of four volumes published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1917 titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.

The project was the brainchild of two wealthy Protestant oil tycoons, Lyman and Milton Stewert. The Fundamentals reaffirmed a literal interpretation of the Bible as the immutable word of a god and, it was hoped, would be an efficacious bulwark against the encroach-ment of modernism. The volumes were to give “fundamentalists” a defense against everything from Roman Catholicism to Atheism, contemporary philosophy, political liberalism and, of course, evolu-tionary accounts of human origins. Chapters were authored by the leading voices of Protestant revanchism, and featured titles such as “The Fallacies of Higher Criticism,” “The Testimony of the Monu-

Is the Bible a “dirty” book? Is it a source of corruption filled with shocking and obscene tales?This popular book is an analysis of sexual behavior and practices reported in the basic “scriptures” which are “held sacred” by three of the world’s major religions. It is thoroughly documented with (King James) Bible passages and with references from secular and religious sources. It is an astonishing, informative book.

Christianity claims that the Bible should be a guide for morals; that in it are some tales of love, forgiveness, kindness and care. Atheists, however, find passages that are NOT lessons in morality and decency; they are simply part and parcel of a disgusting religious book that should have been abandoned a millennium ago! Index. Paperback. 428 pp.

$14.00 – stock # 5000 (Please see order form for member discount and S&H charges)

The X-Rated Bible by Ben Edward Akerley


ments to the Truth of the Scriptures,” and “Science and Christian Faith.” With its emphasis on biblical literalism and infallibility, The Fundamentals set America’s Protestant stalwarts against the growing cultural and scientific consensus that accepted science—and Darwin’s important explanation—as the pre-eminent way of comprehending how the universe, and life, operated.

Biblical literalism, though, remained a popular and entrenched belief throughout much of the American South and Midwest, and in a wider Protestant fundamentalist subculture. Numerous states had laws that attempted to circumvent the teaching of evolution, includ-ing Tennessee which enacted its statute in 1925. It declared:

“… that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals .” [3]

In the public imagination, the trial of high school biology in-structor John Scopes remains the symbol of the conflict between gov-ernment-sponsored religious fundamentalism and modern science. Scopes was charged on May 5, 1925 with violating the Tennessee statute by teaching from a textbook citing contemporary evolution-ary findings. The American Civil Liberties Union had sought an opportunity to challenge the law. The subsequent trial pitted William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow against each other rendering it one of the most spectacular, if not significant legal confrontations of modern times. There was little Darrow could do to challenge the basic facts of the indictment, that Scopes had indeed violated the Tennessee anti-evolution law.[4] Instead, he put the Book of Genesis and biblical literalism on trial. Historian Edward J. Larson noted, “Like so many archetypal American events, the trial itself began as a publicity stunt.”[5]

John Scopes was convicted, but to many—particularly in the academic and scientific communities—the tide had turned, and bib-

lical literalism was rendered a quaint but irrelevant belief that was vanishing from America’s classrooms. The nation’s natural history museums openly displayed exhibits that illustrated the fact of evolu-tion and the transmutation of species. For most, Darwin and Dar-winism had carried the day.

Laws against evolution, though, lingered on the books for decades. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision (ED-WARDS, GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA, ET AL. v. AGUILLARD ET AL.) struck down a Louisiana statue that required creationism taught in science classes along with Darwinian evolution. Neverthe-less the rise of the contemporary religious right saw a flurry of new efforts throughout the country to promote an anti-evolution agenda. “Creationism” morphed into “Intelligent Design” or ID, which used the vernacular of the scientific enterprise but proposed a “designer” who created entire species and presumably guided their development. Creationists and ID advocates promoted their cause as a legitimate “alternative” to evolution. Several state education departments and numerous local school boards passed regulations proposing “dis-claimer” stickers on textbooks, while others called for “revised” stan-dards for teaching science and even the use of “ID” approved texts.

Charles Darwin and his findings have remained topics of wide misunderstanding ever since the brilliant naturalist first began publicizing his research. His “Theory of Evolution” is not a “theory” as much as es-tablished fact which is constantly confirmed by a growing body of empirical evidence. Polls find that a near-majority of Americans, though, reject the proposition that modern humans and other creatures evolved from earlier ancestors, and that a combination of natural selection and mutation steers the de-velopment of all life on Earth.

The controversy also retains its sharp religious edge. The leading proponent of “Intelligent Design,” the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, has close ties to the country’s fundamentalist movement. Other groups like the Center for Science and The-ology vigorously attack evolution and in-stead promote a “comprehensive Christian worldview.”

Science, faith and boundaries

The legal battle over how and what to teach in respect to hu-man origins has also fueled the debate about the chasm separating faith and science. Does evolution eliminate the need for divine cre-ation and guidance? The religious and the scientific community re-main divided. For most Atheists, Darwin’s work and the rest of the scientific enterprise steadily vanquish the need for any supernatural entities or processes to explain how nature works.[6] Others at the opposite end of this epistemological spectrum argue that science and religion need not be in “conflict.” The late Stephen Jay Gould ar-gued for what he described as “nonoverlapping Magisteria,” but crit-ics have attacked his views for failing to resolve basic theoretical and factual dilemmas.[7]

Strangely, biblical literalism has not led fundamentalists—at least in large numbers—to attack other areas of the scientific enter-prise. There is no robust movement, for instance, to doubt Coperni-


can or Keplerian descriptions of the solar system. The Roman Catho-lic Church has apologized for its persecution of Galileo, and one does not hear complaints at school board meetings that a heliocentric solar system diminishes the “dignity” of human beings. The Bible remains a fertile and literal source for critiques of modern culture over is-sues like gay rights or the status of women. The country’s thriving Christian evangelical and fundamentalist subculture remains silent on much of modern science. Why then the continued acrimony over Charles Darwin?

Perhaps it is because Darwin and the course of biological sci-ences since his time deal with us. It locates humans in a vast, inter-connected web of life made possible through an almost infinitely-complex matrix of chemical interactions. This process, in turn, is now understood in an even wider and grander set of events touching on the very existence and evolution of stars. We are, as Carl Sagan often declared, “star stuff.” The metals and other complex constitu-ent components of our bodies—and the rest of the universe—were “cooked” in fantastic stellar furnaces which exploded and threw these building blocks of life out into space. From there, gravity took over. Clumps of matter accumulated, accretion disks formed, matter compressed, planets took shape and—with a myriad of other processes—the first constituent elements capable of self-replication came to be.

It is a process we only partly understand. Nearly two hundred years after his birth, though, the discoveries and insights of Charles Darwin remain a foundation stone in giving human beings insight into how we came to be. Even without the need for a god, designer or first cause, life and the universe remain fascinating and wondrous objects of inquiry. ❋

Notes

[1] Darwin was frequently asked if the different variants of Theism were com-patible with his findings in evolution. In 1879, for instance, he replied to one correspondent that “a man can be an ardent Theist and evolutionist,” but that he himself had “never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God,” and that “an Agnostic would be a more correct description of my state of mind…”

[2] See Darwin, Charles (1958), N. Barlow, editor, The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. With the original omissions restored; edited and with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow, London, England: Collins.

[3] The Tennessee law passed both houses of the state legislature by impres-sive margins, but was less than enthusiastically supported by Gov. Austin Peay. He nevertheless signed the legislation on March 21, 1925 declaring, “Probably the law will never be applied.”

[4] Scopes willingly incriminated himself and encouraged students to testify that they had studied evolution from the class textbook and in classroom discussions.

[5] See Larson, Edward J., “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and Ameri-ca’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” (1997) Basic Books.

[6] Interestingly, most fundamentalists would conditionally agree with this assertion, declaring that Darwinism supports a “materialist” or non-theis-tic conception of the universe.

[7] See http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html . Gould’s essay, dedicated to Carl Sagan, first appeared in the journal Natural His-tory, March 1997.

Conrad Goeringer is a staff writer for American Atheist magazine. He is also Editor of AANEWS, our electronic newsletter. Mr. Goeringer is a former antiquarian book dealer, reporter and freelance writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

So many of you help American Atheists with donations and other financial support—and we want to find a way to say “Thank You!” We are pleased to announce the re-establishment of an American Atheist tradition—The Founders’ Friends, begun by the Murray O’Hair family.

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The

Friends...Founders


Radio address delivered Feb. 24th 1957 over Radio Station WMIE, Miami Florida. (Reprinted from Classic Radio Addresses and other works by Joseph Lewis, Late President of the Freethinkers of America MEMORIAL EDITION) courtesy of the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library and Archives.

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen: No one will deny the courage of the uniformed

soldier who goes forth to battle. Neither will any one withhold from him the credit and respect to which he is

entitled. But not all soldiers wear uniforms. Neither do all soldiers die upon the battle-fields ‘mid shot and shell.

There are soldiers, who do not know how to operate a gun; who do not go forth to battle amid the beating of drums, the waving of flags or the cheering of people.

There are soldiers who fight, not upon the battle-fields, but upon the field of thought. Upon the battle-field there is somewhat of an equal contest. Man power can be met with man power and de-structive explosives with devastating projectiles. But infinitely more courage and superior ammunition are required to do battle in the larger arena of human action.

The progress of mankind has been one bitter struggle against the forces of reaction; a battle of Herculean effort against invisible and deadly enemies.

On the battlefield; the roaring of guns and the bursting of shells are a signal that the enemy is approaching and preparation is made by the defending army to withstand the attack; but in the battle for human progress, the enemy gives no such signs of approach.

Ignorance, Hatred, Bigotry and Superstition are the malig-nant enemies of the human race, These vicious enemies do not fight in open fields. They do not fight fairly. With them equal combat is unknown. Their victories are won in the dark. Stealth and hypocrisy are their weapons.

Thousands have died, millions have died in mortal combat upon the battlefields in defense of their country, in defense of their homes, on behalf of liberty.

And thousands, yes millions, have died in that grand army of human progress-soldiers in the army of Science, of Art of Medi-

cine of Invention and Discovery and in the army of Justice and Freedom.

The world is ever ready to do homage to the soldier upon the battlefield. But in the realm of human progress it is lamentably true that only too often does the gallant soldier receive rebuke and calumny for his reward.

Seldom, in his own day, does the soldier who fights for liberty taste the fruits of his victory.

Abraham Lincoln, the Soul of America, was a soldier in both of these armies. He donned a uniform, shouldered a gun, and marched to battle in defense of his country. He suffered the hardships and en-dured the trials of a soldier’s life. As captain of a regiment in the Black Hawk War in 1832, Lincoln acquitted himself with honor. And upon his return from battle he received the plaudits of his countrymen.

War brutalizes our natures and hardens our hearts; it warps our thoughts and makes us callous to the sufferings of human life.

But Lincoln never permitted war to harden his heart nor stunt his feelings. He was possessed of a rare love for humanity. His kindli-ness knew no bounds and his honesty was so widespread that he was affectionately known as “Honest Abe.” There were many who chided him for his “soft heartedness,” but Lincoln was Lincoln and was not to be swayed from his convictions.

Lincoln’s soul was touched with the kinship of ‘life by the magic wand of a mother’s love, To Lincoln his mother was his Star of Hope, his Rainbow of Life, the myriad-colored arch that ever beck-oned him to “carry on.” Lucky indeed is the child whose mother in-spires him ‘with humanitarian ideas and thoughts and with the urge that he may so live that when he passes on the world will be better for his having lived.

We have only pity for Lincoln’s mother-Nancy Hanks-because Lincoln never knew his real father. He got his name from his stepfa-ther. Lincoln was one of .the great “Love Children” of the world.

When became fully aware of the situation, it left a scar deep upon his sensitive mentality, which became more poignant with the years, and undoubtedly accounts for the deep channels of sorrow that lined his face.

He was often heard to sigh, “My poor mother, my poor moth-er.”

Abraham Lincoln

Freethinker, Soldier and Martyr by Joseph Lewis


Lincoln never forgot the lowliness from which he came and it was the memory of his hardships which caused him never to abuse his power except on the side of mercy.

You remember the case of William Scott? While Scott was on sentry duty, after a strenuous day of fighting, and exhausted from the wear and tear of battle, his strength failed him and he fell prostrate upon the ground. When discovered by another soldier and awak-ened, it was revealed that he was dreaming of his mother, and that she had awakened him to remind him of his duty as a soldier!

But in time of war, excuses for being asleep while on sentry duty are not acceptable or valid, and Scott was taken to his superior officer, tried by court-martial, convicted and condemned to be shot!

The case was brought to Lincoln’s attention. His heart was touched. He could not make himself believe that the boy was a trai-tor, and ordered his release. You know what followed: Scott died fighting valiantly for the union cause!

On another occasion, a woman went to the White House and begged an audience with the President. Her husband had been cap-tured, tried, convicted and was to be shot. Lincoln consented to see her. She told her story and pleaded with the President to suspend judg-ment. Lincoln asked her whether her husband was a good man and whether he treated her children kindly. She replied that he was a good husband and a good father and that the family could not live without him. She said he was a fool about politics and if she ever got him home he would do no more fighting for the South. “Well,” said Lincoln, “I will pardon your husband and turn him over to you for safe keep-ing.” The poor woman, overcome with joy, sobbed as though her heart would break. “My dear woman,” said Lincoln, “if I had known how badly it was going to make you feel, I never would have pardoned him.” “You don’t understand,” cried the woman between her sobs. “You don’t understand, Mr. Lincoln.” “Yes, yes, I do,” answered the President, “and if you do not go away at once I shall be crying with you.”

In our thoughts of Lincoln, let us not forget that he was a hu-man being, born just as you and I were born, only that his hardships were immeasurably greater than ours, his difficulties far more numer-ous. He had to struggle for everything he possessed. He had no teach-ers. He was self-taught. Tramping through the woods for six miles to borrow a grammar book is an indication of his thirst for knowledge and the obstacles he overcame to acquire it.

He had an unquenchable desire to learn. A burning urge to accomplish. This urge prompted him to read every book he could get. He was once asked what he was reading, and he replied: “I’m not reading-I’m studying.” He was particularly fond of controversies. He loved an argument. He was never satisfied unless the sparks flew in the discussions. “Hew to the block, let the chips fly where they will,” was his motto. And fortunately this trait of Lincoln’s broke down all barriers and prejudice in seeking knowledge. He was carried’ on the wave of Rationalism which swept this country in the Forties. This brought him in contact with the writings of Voltaire, Volney and Thomas Paine. They were his intimates.

As a result of Lincoln’s reading of the books of these great Rationalists, he became a Freethinker.

He even wrote a book against the inspiration of the Bible, and questioned the legitimacy of the birth of Jesus Christ.

He never became a member of any church, and his wife testi-fied that he was not a Christian believer. Abraham Lincoln belonged to no sect; he professed no creed.

When he ran for Congress against the Rev. Peter Cartright he was charged with being an “infidel.” Lincoln said he would not deny the charge, because it could be easily proved.

It is an established fact, verified by indisputable evidence that Lincoln wrote the original draft of his famous Gettysburg address, with the words, “under God” left out.

These words were later inserted, at the suggestion of a reli-gionist, who wanted a copy, to be sold for the benefit of a church. Lincoln accommodated him.

A similar incident accounts for the reference to a Deity in the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is an historical fact, and noteworthy to us, that the ‘Emancipa-tion Proclamation, was written, and printed, by Lincoln BEFORE he consulted the members of his cabinet. When he called them into con-ference, he handed each member a copy, and asked for suggestions.

One member, the overly pious Salmon P. Chase-Secretary of the Treasury-noticing that there was no reference to God in the proclamation, suggested that some mention be made of it. Lincoln replied, “Won’t you make a draft of what YOU think ought to be inserted.”

And this accounts for the reference’ to God in this great docu-ment.

However, they are not Lincoln’s words, nor his convictions. They are the pious and useless sentiments of a fanatical reli-

gionist. In every great crisis there are always religious fanatics, who

have spoken directly to God, and who are directed by God to de-liver certain messages. The Civil War was no exception, and Lincoln was not free from these religious cranks. It is said that Lincoln, more than any other President, was constantly pestered by clergymen with advice “directly from God.” He controlled his temper only because of his sympathy for the mentally deranged. To indicate, his attitude toward such people, I will quote his words of contempt for them:

“I am approached with the most opposite opinions and ad-vice, and by religious men who are certain they represent the Divine Will. I hope, it will not be irreverent in me to say, that if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to ‘me.”

We must not lose sight of the fact that Lincoln was the most misunderstood and hated man of his day. There were conspirators in every branch of the Government, and, it has been intimated, even in his own cabinet. We must not judge him for what he permitted oth-ers to do in order to accomplish his glorious undertaking, and if the churches of his day were ready to strike him down on the slightest

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provocation, the over sentimental references to “God” in his messages can be readily understood as of little importance.

When chided about his Thanksgiving Day messages as being contrary to his known convictions on the subject, Lincoln said to Judge James N. Nelson: “Oh! this is some of Seward’s nonsense and it pleases the fools!” Lincoln knew the power of the church’s hostil-ity, and was a compromiser in the sense that he believed in “doing a little harm for a great good,” particularly so when the end meant the liberation of thousands of human beings from the bondage of slavery. To the church, it is more important to crush the infidel than to add a step of progress to civilization and for that reason, while president, Lincoln was reticent in public upon the question of religion. By this act of discretion he carried the nation safely through the most trying period of its history.

It is very curious, indeed, that if Lincoln were a Christian, as some say, nowhere in any of his writings does there appear a single mention of the name of the founder of Christianity.

With the cares of the Civil War hanging heavily upon his shoulders, with the poignancy of the death of his son Tad, still sear-ing his heart and mind, and with the thought that death might not be too far distant, Lincoln wrote to his life long friend, Judge J. A. Wakefield, this “testament” of his beliefs:

“My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the Scriptures, have become clearer, and stronger, with advancing year, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them,”

It was utterly impossible for Lincoln to be a believer in the Bible-with its sanction of slavery-and the author of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Voltaire had shot his bolts at the caste system of Europe, and the chains began to fall from the minds and bodies of men.

Thomas Paine was the first man on the American continent to raise his voice in behalf of the Negro slaves.

Fired by these men with the love of Liberty and human rights Abraham Lincoln entered the Army of Progress.

In retrospect, we see him on a flat boat navigating down the Mississippi River. We see him arrive at New Orleans. We see him in company with two friends come upon the market place. We see him watch the sale of a Negro slave gir1. We see him rebel at the revolting scene. As the girl is examined by her bidders, her flesh pinched, her form displayed, her nudity exposed, we see his sad face become more sorrowful, we see him clench his fist, and with a quiver in his voice, and an oath upon his lips, utter this statement: “If I ever get a chance to hit that thing (meaning slavery), I’ll hit it hard.” On his return to Springfield we see him enter the political arena with a short but crude declaration only to be concluded by that everlasting monument to his name, the Emancipation Proclamation. We now see him competing for public office. We see him defeated, halted in his march. But defeat and discouragement were words not to be found in Lincoln’s vocabu-lary. When questioned concerning his defeat he said he felt like the boy who was too big to cry and too hurt to laugh. Determination was the quality of Lincoln’s character and he knew that “the harder the struggle the more glorious the triumph,” and so we see him overcom-ing the obstacles which had beset his path.

We now see him in his famous debate, with Douglas deter-mining whether the nation can remain “half slaves, and half free,” and “whether a house divided against itself can stand.”

And in this struggle let us not lose sight of the fact that Lin-coln received the brunt of the battle. He was the most misunderstood and hated man of his day. The people did not welcome the economic

and social changes, which he advocated. The vilest of arguments were used against him. Arguments now known to be utterly ludicrous. He was vilified. He was slandered. The churches of his day opposed him and bigotry supported their contention. Let us take a lesson from the way Lincoln was treated and be not too ready to dismiss a new idea or condemn a new proposal.

In his fight for human emancipation he met the bitterest foes of battle. But not once did he falter, not once did he swerve. He had tasted battle as a soldier fighting for human rights against an institu-tion whose only strength was that it was supported by “divine right.” But Lincoln knew that man had no property right in man, and that the marks of the vicious lash upon the tender skin were not and could not be right by divine sanction, and that the damnable institution of slavery was a living lie against our Declaration of Independence!

We see Lincoln gaining in his struggle. We see a Convention assembled. We see him nominated for President by an almost unani-mous acclamation! We see him at the head of the Republic. Com-mander-in-Chief of its army, to determine “whether this nation, or any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are create equal, can long endure!”

We see him appealing for support-appealing to the nation’s men to fight for the battle of freedom. After man anxious, and un-certain moments we hear the murmur of footsteps and the beating of drums and the welcome exclamation “We are coming Father Abra-ham: we arc coming 300,000 strong!”

And we see Lincoln, this giant of a man. who was too big to cry and too hurt to laugh, weeping for joy at the triumph that 3,000,000 human beings were to be released from the shackles of bondage; weeping for joy that the American Flag, the symbol of Lib-erty, was to rise once more over a united nation without a blemish and without a stain!

It is the duty of the soldier upon the battlefield to carry the flag of the country for which he fights, and if perchance he is shot and wounded and falls, another soldier must lift it from his hands, and carry it high to battle. This was the task delegated to Lincoln. He carried the flag of freedom which the American Revolutionists had given to Washington and just as victory was won, just as he crossed the line with the flag waving high, this grand man, this soldier of the Republic, this Liberator was struck down in battle and dies that mil-lions might be free!

Upon the grave of Lincoln. the military soldier, let us drop flowers of gratitude. and upon the brow of Lincoln the Emancipator. the soldier in the Army of Freedom. let us place a laurel wreath. as a symbol of the everlasting love, and thanks of the human race.

I can not more appropriately conclude this talk than by quot-ing these eloquent words of Robert G. Ingersoll:

“Abraham Lincoln was, in my judgment, in many respects, the grandest man ever President of the United States. Upon his monu-ment these words should be written: ‘Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world, who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.’”

Thank you for listening.Good night. ❋

34th Annual Convention of American AtheistsMarch 21-23, 2008 – Minneapolis, MN

details on page 7


Hans Kasten Atheist-In-A-Foxhole, dead at 90

Hans Kasten – Atheist, Bon Vivant, and World War II veteran and hero, died at his home in the Philippines on August 9. He was 90.

Mr. Kasten was a long-time friend of the Murray O’Hair family and supporter of American Atheists.

He was born on August 18, 1916 in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At age 15, he concluded that religion was “pure mythology.”

Kasten volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1943, and was among the wave of young men landing at “Omaha Beach” as part of the second European Front on D-Day. His unit was surrounded by the German Army during the infamous Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge), and Kasten along with thousands of other young Americans was captured and ended up in the notorious Stalag IX-B, and later shipped to the Berga concentration camp. There, with his fluency in German, he became the “man of confidence” or liaison between the camp administration and his fellow prisoners.

His experiences, including two escapes and a later unsuccess-ful hunt for his captors when the war in Europe ended, became the stuff of legend. He was awarded the EAME (European-African-Mid-dle Eastern Campaign) Medal; World War II Victory Medal; Combat Infantry Badge; Prisoner of War (POW) Medal; Bronze Star; Purple Heart; and Good Conduct Medal.

Hans Kasten was profiled in numerous newspaper and magazine articles and an evocative book by fellow internee Joseph Littell, “A Lifetime in Every Moment.” In the years after World War II, Kasten settled in the Philippines, married and raised a family, and collected art. He spoke at veterans’ reunions and other public forums recounting his experiences as one of “The Greatest Genera-tion” that defeated Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. Kasten provided valuable accounts of his service to the Veterans History Project and other scholarly archives preserving the memories of those who served in the war.

He also saw the horrific story of the American POWs at Berga fade from public memory.

Nearly six decades after WWII, a new generation learned the story of the POWs sentenced to forced labor at Berga. PBS aired

Charles E. Guggenheim’s acclaimed documentary “Berga: Soldiers of Another War” on May 28, 2003. This was by followed by articles and a book, “Soldiers and Slaves” by reporter Roger Cohen.

Historian, playwright and author Ward Just described the significance of this recovered history. “Before reading Soldiers and Slaves,” Just commented to the New York Times, “I never heard of concentration camp Berga, ‘an ephemeral little hell’ within the larger hell of World War II. But I know it now, and won’t ever forget it…”

Kasten was profiled extensively in the October, 2006 edition of American Atheist Magazine.

Hans Kasten was honored on November 11, 2005 at the historic “Atheists in Foxholes” event in Washington, D.C. Hundreds, including veterans of World War II, gathered on the National Mall to salute Kasten and other nonbelievers who served in the military, and to dispel the odious notion that “there are no Atheists in Foxholes.” Kasten beguiled those present with his moving account of what happened to him and fellow POWs during one of the most brutal episodes in that historic conflict. He was then, as decades before, an American hero.

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Here I am, staring mournfully out of the window, feeling a distinct

sadness. Truth be told, the ex-perience of Camp Quest 2007 was so fantastic that it has made everything, including opera, fried chicken, and even provoking Jehovah’s Witnesses, seem dull and lifeless in com-parison. This story was not al-ways so rose tinted, however, but because I do not wish to put off generations of poten-tial counsellors, I shall gloss over the long hours of forced slave labor in favour of stories about invisible unicorns and S’mores.

In case you have been living in a foxhole for 11 years (although I have it on good authority that the Atheist population of foxholes is extremely small), Camp Quest is a non-profit organization that pro-vides a residential summer camp for children of an Atheist, agnostic, freethinking or humanist inclination. It is in fact the first summer camp of its kind in North America, started in 1996 by the aforemen-tioned Edwin and his lovely wife Helen, which came about partly as a reaction to the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) pro-theist policy. In order for a person to be granted membership or a position of leader-ship in the BSA, he must sign a Declaration of Religious Belief, in which he must agree that “only a person who acknowledges his duty to God can be the best kind of citizen.” It is not specified which God they must believe in, be it Allah, Yahweh, or L. Ron Hubbard, but I do wonder what their acceptance rate of Pastafarians is. I imagine it would go down about as well as declaring your religion as “Jedi” on the National Census.

Still, the camp for non-believers took off, and soon the origi-nal camp in Ohio blossomed into five more across North Ameri-ca, including the most recent addition set up and run by Leonard Zanger: Camp Quest Michigan. It was here this August that I had the

honor of volunteering my ser-vices. But sitting on the plane to Detroit, I certainly had my doubts about exactly what I was getting myself into. To all intents and purposes I had just spent most of my worldly money on a plane ticket to a city about which I knew noth-ing (other than that a lot of people get shot there), to meet a group of complete strangers with whom I would work for a week. Throw in a multitude of potentially uncontrollable children, and you have one very nervous Brit.

Upon meeting the oth-er counsellors, my fears were

lifted. I was, without warning, thrown into a group of individuals, united in a passion for education and reason. It offered me exactly what Camp Quest is offering the campers – a retreat from the judge-ment of others, and a chance to be around likeminded people. Many of the campers were returning for a second year, but many newcom-ers arrived just as unsure and wide eyed as I, burdened with the usual camp fears added to the fact that everyone knows that Atheists eat babies, and very occasionally, small children. They were to be left, for an entire week, with lunatics who think that learning about Fi-bonacci numbers is more fun than hurling rocks at each other. There was naturally the inevitable homesickness, but once the camp routine was established, their concerns settled down, and some of them even began to – gasp! – have a good time; (you know, despite the weather, bugs and the lunatics. ... I mean, counsellors.)

After a couple of days, the children began to open up, telling horror stories from their schools. A common theme among them was how others reacted when they used the “A” word. A few had already chosen to identify themselves as “freethinkers” instead of Atheists, simply to avoid being stigmatized by the other children. It became evident that for some of them it was the first time they were in a place where it was okay to believe whatever they believed; to express their

Beyond Belief

The Joy Of A Camp For Non-Believersby Samantha Stein


thoughts and ideas without fear of mockery or reprimands and to question the supposed wisdom of authority.

I wholeheartedly shared those sentiments. Even living in the UK, where religion is far less prominent in everyday life, being able to speak my mind without fear of inadvertently offending someone’s religious sensibilities is a freedom I often miss. Not forgetting that we are not fortunate to have an official separation between Church and State, which means that the Church of England has a far greater influence on government than many of us would like. Public schools are obligated by law to have an act of “collective worship” that was amended in 1988 to be “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character,” even though an estimated 80% of schools do not abide by this. Over the last few years, “faith schools” in Britain have been strongly encouraged by the government and are set to be on the rise, causing many parents to switch religions. The reason they switch is because certain faith schools are better schools, but their policy is to take a certain number of students who comply to the religion of the school (say 75%). So in order to get their children into a “good” school, parents may often compromise their religious faith or lack thereof, making notable appearances at church around the time of the admissions procedure. The majority of faith schools in England are Catholic/Protestant, with Islamic schools on the rise. I think offi-cial secular schools are few and far between, if any exist at all. Yes, you are reading correctly – to ensure their children a place at the school of their choice, people are “juggling their philosophies of life.” I am starting to think that establishing a Camp Quest UK has become a matter of urgency.

Due to the difficulty in finding any school in the area that does not ascribe to any religion, both my junior and senior schools were Church of England. One of my favorite stories from my child-hood (apart from the one about me calling strangers “poo poos” and “wee wees” on a shaky bridge in Disneyland) was one particularly well orchestrated day at school. During history, we learned about the evolution of humans and drew pictures of ape men. All was well until it was time for our scripture lesson in which we learned about the “creation story.” Sure enough, we were being told by the same teacher who had just told us that we evolved gradually from pri-mordial “goo” that it was in fact God who created Adam and Eve, the first humans. Needless to say, after that day at school I was a lot more discerning about what I believed. I recently came across some of my school work from that time, and while a lot of it claims to be merely “the Christian version of events,” one handout we were given declares “this is a true story that took place a very long time ago.” It saddens me that such propaganda is being freely distributed in schools even today.

The fact that I was a self-proclaimed Atheist back when I was still hurling names at strangers on bridges, brings me back to the chil-dren of Camp Quest, the “Questlings,” “Questerians,” or however they prefer to be called. The most striking thing about these children was their minds. With a combined IQ of about a jazillion, they stood united on the fact that they had all rejected dogma and blatant lies in order to embrace a critical, rational approach. Not that we supervised a camp filled with Richard Dawkins clones, tweed jackets and all. They are normal kids who enjoy sponge fights and soaking their counsellors with stagnant, putrid, disgusting alligator tank water just as much as the next child. They are living, breathing, crying, bleeding kids (don’t worry; we only bled them a little for the ceremonial sacrifice) – but I truly believe these children are our future. They are set to become the people that change the world: doctors, lawyers, presidents. Some of them might even grow up to be Camp Quest counsellors.

Aside from bleeding and boring them to death by trying to be educational, the camp took on a very relaxed, informal atmosphere. The kids took part in high ropes courses, canoeing, archery, zip lines, and free swims in the lake. In the evenings we had campfires, discus-sions about the existence of invisible unicorns (though certainly not pink ones), astronomy lessons, talent shows, S’mores and near death sugar highs from Edwin’s peach cobbler surprise. It was bliss. On the last two nights of camp, we were fortunate enough to be able to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower from our camp fire ring. And staring up at the stars, I am convinced I felt both more alive and more at peace than any amount of religion or faith could make anyone. I whole-heartedly echo Richard Feynman’s sentiments: “But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me”

The most important thing that I hope Camp Quest encour-ages in the campers is for them to regularly employ the Camp Quest Michigan 2007 slogan, “How do you know?” I do however hope that they will take great pleasure in knowing that they do not have to know everything; Pretty hard for a bunch of fantastic know-it-alls. ❋

To find out more about Camp Quest please visit: http://www.camp-quest.org/ and to find out about the upcoming Camp Quest UK, visit: http://www.camp-quest.org.uk/

Samantha Stein is a final year psychology undergraduate at York University, UK. She can be reached at [email protected]

Here is a series of books by a woman writer who is outrageous, opinionated, and who says what she means! Soledad de Montalvo strips away the fantasy world of historical writing to explore the issues of women, food, and sex – the basis of all human communities, and the untold, driving forces in history. Religion has thrived on sexual control, sexual suppression, sexual perversion, says the author. Find out for yourself! With a forward by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

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Women, Food and Sex (All Four Volumes)

by Soledad de Montalvo


The following is a transcript from a tape of “The American Atheist Radio Series” broadcast over KTBC in Austin on the 17th of February, 1964.

Hello there, This is Madalyn Mays O’Hair, American Athe-

ist, back to talk with you again. Probably the single thing which angers Atheists

more than any other practice of Christianity is the insistence the reli-gious community has in bending the facts of history to conform with their dogmas.

Sherman Wakefield, who is married to Robert Ingersoll’s granddaughter, has undertaken a study of some of the specific in-stances when such liberties have been taken with history itself.

He became particularly aroused at President Dwight Eisen-hower at one point and wrote a short rebuttal to one of the president’s activities. I quote with Sherman’s permission.

“On Washington’s Birthday, President and Mrs. Eisenhower attended services in Christ Episcopal Church of Alexandria, Virginia, where George Washington was a vestryman and occupied Pew No. 60. The service was conducted by the Reverend Braxton Bragg Com-er Lile, the rector, who did not tell his congregation that Washington refused to take communion and walked out of the church before each communion service. When taken to task by the Reverend James Ab-ercombie of Philadelphia for this conduct, Washington stayed away from church entirely on communion Sundays. However, according to tradition in. the parish church, the Reverend Mr. Lile read Wash-ington’s so-called ‘prayer’.”

Now, this “prayer” has been known to New Yorkers for some years, as it is inscribed on a bronze tablet adjoining the Washington pew in St. Paul’s Chapel in that city. As a prayer this is a forgery. It was made up from a circular letter which General Washington ad-dressed to the governors of the 13 states upon his disbanding the army, dated Newl:JUrg, 8 June 1783.

Forgery Done In God’s Name The “prayer” was manufactured from the last paragraph of

Washington’s letter by omitting words in the original and replacing them by words of divine petition. The letter was addressed to the respective governors of the states, and not to god, and the original “you” was changed to “thou” in the prayer. The text of the “prayer” follows, with additions as I will note. First, the “prayer:”

Almighty God, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep these United States in Thy holy protection, that Thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedi-ence to government to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow citizens and the United States at large.

And, finally that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy and to demean ourselves with that charity, humil-ity and pacific temper’ of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Au-thor of our blessed religion and without an humble imitation of Whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy na-tion. Grant our suppli-cation, we beseech Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

Now, I have underlined [ital-ics] in the text the insertions which were put into this letter in order to read into it an ac-tual prayer to god. Let me see how I can explain this forg-ery to you.

The original letter from which this “prayer” was manufac-tured is to be found in W.C. Ford’s edition of Wash-ington’s Writings (Vol. 10, pp. 254-265) and also in the official govern· ment edition of Washington’s Writings, edited by J.E. Fitzpatrick (Vol. 24, pp. 483-496).

Lifted From A Letter The text of the last paragraph of the original letter follows, and

includes the words that the prayer-makers omitted. I think you will see the difference immediately.

I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination

Christian Rewriting of History


and obedience to government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethern who have served in· the field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do justice, to love mercy, and to demand of ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the charac-teristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.”

I have the honor to be, with much esteem and respect, Sir, your Excellency’s most obedient and most humble servant, George Wash-

ington. Now, the amount of material in this short paragraph

which has been omitted and changed to make the “prayer” is about 33 percent of the whole, thus making the “prayer” a real pious fraud. When Washington wrote the gover-nors it was his “earnest prayer” – he meant, of course,

his earnest wish, and his use of the word “prayer” ac-cording to the custom of his day does not justify forging a letter into a prayer to a deity.

Washington never actually penned any of the 13 letters to the governors, and they were

written by different aides on different days. The copy written on 8 June 1783, as pub-

lished, was penned by David Cobb. Wash-ington may have made the original dicta-tion, or furnished the ideas expressed in the letters, but they may also have been piously embellished by those who wrote them, after the custom of those times. In any event, the last phrase of the “prayer,”

which is similar to the Episcopal Prayer Book, is not in Washington’s style and no-

where else in his writings does he mention Jesus Christ by name.

The fact of this forgery has been point-ed out to the officials of St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church, many times in past years, but the bronze tablet remains in the church and in addition the “prayer” is inscribed in a large

framed background which rests in the Washing-ton pew and is much easier to read than the tablet

itself. This is all in spite of the fact that in 1935 a group of Atheists sued Trinity Church for capitalizing

on a fraud, during which suit the alteration was admitted but was justified as making the quotation “appropriate for

display and distribution in a place of religious worship.” This is by a leading representative of Christianity,

which claims to be the arbiter of our morality. Sherman Wakefield spends much of his time

tracing down some of the forgeries in American history which the churches have perpetuated and he gets more and

more furious with each one he uncovers. And, so do we all. He became quite incensed over Abraham Lincoln’s alleged let-

ter to Mrs. Bixby. He began to trace the original letter and readily found several facsimilies – only to discover that there were several variations in the handwriting, discrepancies in the formation of single letters, entire words between the two. Mr. Wakefield has facsimilies of three of these letters, all with differences in handwriting and test, and he queries:

“If facsimilies from a supposed original document do not agree among themselves, which one, if any, is correct?”

The two most famous copies stemmed one from Michael F. Tobin, a dealer in pictures and prints of New York City, who applied to the Librarian of Congress for a copyright on a facsimilie on 25 April 1891. This was about 30 years after the letter was written. Later in the same year, Humber’s Museum which dealt in a collection of freaks and fakes of various kinds started to exhibit a document which was claimed to be the original. The letter was supposed to have been written on 21 November 1864, and sent directly to Adjutant General Schouler in Boston, who delivered it in person to Mrs. Bixby on 25 November.

Mrs. Bixby is said to have lost five sons in the Civil War. Yet strangely a search of the records reveals that two were

killed in battle (Charles and Oliver), one was honorably discharged (Henry), and two deserted to the enemy (Edward and George) .

The Bixby letter is much quoted because in it, Lincoln, who was known as a non-believer in religion, was purportedly to have said, “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement.”

The battle over these letters has been long and enduring and the authenticity of the three quite different facsimilies of the original letter has not been a barrier to the Christian communities’ intent endeavors to authenticate this as a true Lincoln letter, and after its having found its way into a number of Lincoln’s collected works the stamp of authority is now upon the letter.

Completely ignored are three rather striking documents. One written by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, a president of

Columbia University, in which was recounted a story giving the au-thorship of this letter to a Lincoln secretary, John Hay.

The second document is a letter from Rev. Gildart Arthur Jackson, in which it is recounted that Lincoln had instructed Hay to write a suitable letter of condolence and that Hay had done so.

Herndon, a friend and one-time law partner of Lincoln, re-counts that Lincoln once made him erase the word “god” from a speech which he had written because the language indicated a person known as “god,” whereas Lincoln “insisted no such personality ever existed.” In the original drafts of the Gettysburg Address, twice Lin-coln wrote out that speech without mention of this nation “under God,” an insertion later suggested by Simon P. Chase, a member of Lincoln’s cabinet.

We wish our Christian brothers would be more honest and permit us our heroes. We do not deny them theirs. ❋

$6.00 57pp. Stapledstock # 5096 (Please see order form for member discount and S&H charges)

The Case Against Religion: A Psychotherapist’s View and The Case Against Religiosity

by Dr. Albert Ellis


Spirituality at Faith’s Funeral

There is something decidedly weird about this business of spirituality. Just say the word “spiritual,” or, if you prefer more gravitas, “mystical,” and you will witness a strange phenomenon. You will find many tough-talking, God-is-

dead rationalists morph into Mahesh Yogi lites, peddling sweet-noth-ings about merging the “self ” into the universe, and promoting world peace and reason while they are at it.

In his much acclaimed The End of Faith, Sam Harris declares the death of faith, only to celebrate the birth of spirituality. He wants to convince us of the proposition that “Mysticism is rational…reli-gion is not” (p. 221). Traditional Judeo-Christian and Islamic con-ceptions of God-who-heeds-your-prayers is a mere leap of faith, “an epistemological black hole, draining the light out of our world”(p. 35). Faith in a personal God is “intellectually defunct and politically ruinous” (p. 221). It is time to grow up, Harris tells us, and trade faith for spirituality or mysticism, which is “deeply rational, even as it elu-cidates the limits of reason” (p. 43). Unlike religion, mysticism is only a “natural propensity of the human mind, and we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it” (p. 221).

To my skeptical ears, though, this sounds like a clarion-call to leave the frying-pan and to step bravely into the fire. It is easy to debunk faith. Faith, by definition, is a “leap of faith,” a relationship of trust regardless of evidence. In contrast, spiritualism has learned to dress up its metaphysical abstractions in the clothes of empiricism and neuro-physiology. But the empiricist pretensions of mysticism do not make the experience itself any more reasonable and empirically justified than the faith of those who believe in God. Consistent em-piricists can hardly afford to take the scientistic rhetoric of mystics at face value, as Harris, a practicing spiritualist himself, ends up doing.

But in order to understand Harris’s celebration of spiritualism, it is important to understand what he is pitting it against.

A Rationalist Jihad against Jihad

The End of Faith is a response to religious extremism from a rationalist extremist perspective. Disturbed by the rise of religious violence around the world, especially the 9-11 attacks on America, Harris has taken on the traditional theological beliefs about God and afterlife that motivate some to kill innocents. Brushing aside all po-litical and historical factors that have contributed to religious extrem-ism in the contemporary world, Harris singles out theological beliefs as the primary (and pretty much the sole) cause of religious violence. He indulgently turns a blind eye on the “spiritual” teachings of Hin-duism and Buddhism, both of which have a proven track-record of justifying nationalistic wars and ethnic cleansings. Instead, he saves all his venom to use against the Koran, condemning it as if it were a manual of war. His analysis of religious extremism goes along these lines:

Question: Why do Islamic terrorists do what they do? Why has Osama bin Laden chosen the path of violence against the West, especially against America?

Answer: Because men like bin Laden actually believe in the literal truth of the Koran. And because the literal truth of the Koran is “intrinsically” violent and intolerant, they have no choice but to commit acts of violence.

In short, it’s the theology stupid!In his rationalist Jihad on Jihadi theology, Harris’s motto seems

to be (with due apologies to Barry Goldwater): “Extremism in the de-fense of reason is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of secularism is no virtue.” Harris can barely curb his enthusiasm for George Bush’s disastrous wars, announcing gleefully that “we are at war against Is-lam” – not at war against violent extremists, mind you, but against the very “vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran” (p. 109). He finds tortured justifications for torturing suspected terror-ists in America’s Gulag. He goes even further:

Trading Faith for Spirituality The Mystifications of Sam Harrisby Meera Nanda


some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them….Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justi-fied in killing them in self-defense. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas. (p. 53).

The villains who are beyond the pale of reason and who de-serve to die are all Muslims. While he has some harsh things to say about Christians and Jews as well, he spares them the wars and the torture, for unlike the Muslim barbarians, they have had their refor-mations and their enlightenments.

This bilious attack on faith only sets the stage for what seems to be his real goal: a defense – nay, a celebration of – Harris’s own Buddhist/Hindu spirituality. (He has been influenced by the esoteric teachings of Dzogchen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta and has spent many years practicing various techniques of meditation, Harris in-forms his readers). Spirituality is the answer to Islam’s and Christian-ity’s superstitions and wars, Harris wants to convince us. While he is quick to pour scorn on such childish ideas as the virgin birth, heaven and hell, the great rationalist has only winks and nods to offer when it comes to such “higher” truths as near-death experiences, ESP and the existence of disembodied souls, all of which he finds plausible. Our fearless crusader against faith puts his reason to sleep when it comes to the soul-stuff of the Eastern faith traditions that he himself subscribes to.

Harris has made a name for himself as an uncompromising and fearless champion of reason. His The End of Faith has made it to the New York Times best-seller list, and he is being feted by secularist organizations and thinkers in America and around the world. I am sure that Hindu nationalists in India, who have long condemned “Se-mitic monotheisms” (their preferred label for Islam and Christianity) as irrational and superstitious compared to Hinduism’s rational mys-ticism, will find much to celebrate in Harris as well. Be that as it may, if being a rationalist has come down to declaring a war against those who we deem beyond the pale of reason in the name of “higher” truths of mystics, then at least this rationalist wants no part of it.

One disclaimer before we go any further. I grew up as an observant Hindu in my native India. My critical engagement with Hindu spirit-centered metaphysics and Hindu nationalist politics is often painted by my Indian critics as an act of disloyalty to Mother India and, even more weirdly, as a sign of my hidden sympathies for Christianity and Islam! Not unlike Harris, these critics can not imag-ine that one can be a consistent, equal-opportunity skeptic and ma-terialist, rejecting faith in both, a creator God and the subtle spiritual “energy” that is supposed to animate the entire world. Unlike Harris, who seems to have found a shelter in spirituality after he found faith wanting, I insist upon subjecting both to an equally rigorous test of reason and evidence, and I find them both equally wanting. I have no axe to grind, for or against, any particular religious tradition. If I have any axe to grind at all, it is for a naturalistic worldview which denies all forms of supernaturalism, regardless of whether they are located in God, in heaven, or spread out in all of the cosmos.

What I find particularly galling about spirituality is its preten-sions of “higher” rationality, its false and dangerous claims of being “empirical” and “scientific” in the sense of being testable by “expe-rience” (which invariably means non-sensory experience). Western

converts to Eastern spirituality, along with Eastern apologists them-selves, end up presenting an air-brushed, sanitized picture of the real thing. That is the reason why I felt that Harris’s brand of rational mysticism had to be examined carefully and challenged.

New Age Mystifications

Spiritualism is not just good for your soul, Harris wants to convince us, it is good for your mind as well: it can make you “happy, peaceful and even wise …by searching for truth” (p. 215). Results of spiritual practices are “genuinely desirable [for they are] not just emotional but cognitive and conceptual as well,” and Harris wants us to actively seek them out (p. 40).

In the rest of this essay, I want to examine these cognitive and social virtues that are supposed to follow from spiritualism or mysti-cism. (Harris uses the two interchangeably. I will follow the practice as well.) I will use Harris’s own criteria of rationality of beliefs to ask if the existence-claims routinely made by mystics can stand up to the demands of empirical evidence. Likewise, I will use Harris’s own di-agnosis of dualism between subject and object as the source of all the evils of faith, to ask if ending dualism is really the path to peace.

But let us first look at what Harris means by spirituality.Harris offers a standard characterization of the mystical/spiri-

tual experience. He describes it as tuning, or focusing, the mind through meditation, fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation or using psychotropic drugs, that enables it to overcome, or dissolve, the sense of the self that stands separate from the objects of its consciousness. The goal of spiritual experience is to “experience the world perfectly shorn of self… to lose the subject/object perception …to continue to experience the world, but without the feeling that there is a knower standing apart form the known. Thoughts may arise, but the feeling that one is a thinker of these thoughts vanish.” (p. 212-213) The goal is to dissolve the ego-bound, individuated subject by ending its separation from the object itself. Harris is describing the classic all-is-one and one-is-all experience that mystics and spiritual adepts tend to report.

For Hindus, this attempt to divest the ego by consciously real-izing its identity with the ground of the entire macrocosm – what the Hindus call the Brahman – is the very essence of what the Vedas and Upanishads teach: “Thou art That,” “all this Brahman” and the atman (self ) in you is the Brahman. Brahman, the Vedas teach, is the sole, truly existing, non-material, eternal reality which is beyond space, time and causation. Once you experience the sense of being beyond space, time and causation through yoga, breath control and meditation, you will realize the truth of the Vedas, namely, the self in you (atman) is identical with Brahman, your consciousness encom-passes the entire macrocosm, and that you are, in fact, God.

Once you reach this state of mind, you are not held back by fears or tempted by desires: the here and now of the material world become illusionary and lose their grip on one’s mind. Thus, the achievement of the sense of “one-ness” with the universe is a cen-tral commandment of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. While Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have their mystics, only the Eastern traditions provide a doctrine that can make sense of the mystical ex-perience of unity or one-ness.

I would have no argument with Harris if he were only rec-ommending spiritualism as a means for mindful relaxation, and the delight and even ecstasy that sometimes accompany the sensation of losing one’s sense of space, time and self. Indeed “wise mystics” have long realized that the mystical experience does not confer existential


status on its content. Rather than construct metaphysical systems, wise mystics have learned to simply enjoy and value the experience itself.[1] There is enough data to believe that meditation, if done con-sistently and over many years, does bring about a deep state of relax-ation, with dramatically lowered heart rate and brain activity. If the goal is to reduce stress, even the most militant rationalist will have to admit that meditation does provide some benefits. (It does not follow, however, that all the claims of yoga and pranayam, must be accepted. There is very little rigorous controlled testing of the more extravagant claims of those who believe in the power of the mind to cure everything from blindness to cancers).

Unfortunately, Harris is not one of the wise mystics. He loads spiritual practices with metaphysical baggage, all the while claiming to stand up for reason and evidence. By the end of the book, I could not help thinking of him as a Trojan horse for the New Age. While Harris tries to distance himself from the more extravagant Whole Life Expo type fads (crystals, colonic irrigation and the like), he ends up endorsing fundamental New Age assumptions as rational alternatives to traditional religiosity. Here are three of his assumptions, in an in-creasing order of obfuscation.

To begin with, there is this nugget, tucked away in the end notes, which celebrates the prospect of revival of the occult: “ Indeed, the future looks like the past… We may live to see the technologi-cal perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Re-naissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for eso-teric knowledge and a desire to excavate …the mind –in dreams, in trance, in psychedelic swoon – in search for the sacred” (end note 23, p. 290).

It is hard to believe that the author of this stuff is the most celebrated rationalist of our troubled times.

Secondly, Harris rejects a naturalistic understanding of nature and the human mind. He sets consciousness free from such mortal things as brains and bodies, allowing the possibility of pan-psychism, the doctrine of immanence of awareness or consciousness throughout the universe. For someone studying to be a neuroscientist, Harris holds rather unconventional views. He scoffs at the physicalism of the mainstream of scientists who believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of the brain, treating it as an irrational “article of faith” which methods of science can neither prove nor disprove. He gives full credence to reports of near death experience and leaves open the possibility that the disembodied soul can survive the death of the body, claiming that we don’t know what happens after death. After denying that consciousness is a product of our physiology, he presents it as a fundamental ingredient of nature, “a far more rudimentary phenomenon than living creatures and their brains” (p. 209). This is nothing but the good old mind-matter ho-lism, the first principle of all New Age beliefs.

Again, the problem is not that Harris holds these beliefs. The problem is that Harris wants to convince us that it is the very height of rationality to hold these beliefs.

Thirdly, and I examine this more closely in the next section, Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences, or as he puts it, altered mental states induced by spiritual practices can “uncover genuine facts about the world” (p. 40). Investigation of our own subjectivity, Harris believes, is a “proper and essential sphere of investigation into the nature of the universe, as some facts will be discovered only in consciousness.” (p. 209). Again, as before, he tries

to distance himself from the more extravagant metaphysical schemes. But he buys into the basic idea that what mystics see in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds. Or to put it in the vocabulary he prefers, when the gap between the subject and object vanishes, “pure” awareness of one’s subjectivity can tell us something about the objective reality.

Here, Sam Harris is not all that far apart from Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra and others who claim that spiritual practitioners have the most objective view of the world because they can see it “directly,” just the way it is, completely “shorn of the self,” and the many biases and dogmas that “I-ness” brings.

How Rational is Mysticism?

In loading spirituality with ontological baggage, Harris is mak-ing, let us say, a leap of faith. He is falling in the noetic, or intellec-tualist, trap that William James identified in The Varieties of Religious Experience when he noticed how mystical experience has the quality of a profound knowing: “although similar to the states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance… and as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority” (emphasis added).[2] [Ed: where is the emphasis?]

At their peak, meditative experiences invariably bring about a feeling of having touched something far deeper and far more real than what is normally experienced by the five senses in our ordinary lives. And this conviction itself becomes a source of validation of the objective reality of what they have seen: what they see in their minds, they assume, must exist outside. Vision gets fixed into metaphysical systems built on super-sensory entities and processes. The experience of losing the boundaries of one’s ego, the feeling of having transcend-ed time and space, gives the feeling of becoming one with the uni-verse, of “seeing” the entire macrocosm in one’s own mind. It is not a coincidence that the teaching of Vedanta – “Thou art That” – has been interpreted by so many as implying that I (the enlightened one) am Brahman, that I am the universe, that my mind is the mind of the entire cosmos and by controlling my mind, I can control the cosmos. Contrary to Harris’s attempt to rationalize it, the mind-matter unity has been the metaphysics underlying the search for paranormal pow-ers and extra-sensory perceptions. It is not a coincidence that rational mystics like Harris who subscribe to the thesis of mind being an ele-ment of matter, end up making excuses for paranormal phenomena such as ESP and near death experiences (see p. 41).

This noetic propensity to make existence claims with absolute certainty is not a metaphysical excess or a delusion: It is part and parcel of the mystical experience. Neurosciences are revealing the bio-logical grounds for why mystical experiences feel as if they are actu-ally uncovering genuine facts about the world. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, in their well-known Why God will Not Go Away, offer a clue. They believe that the ontological fallacy stems from the process of reification – “the ability of the brain to convert a concept into a concrete thing, or more succinctly, to bestow upon something the quality of being real or true. Reification refers to the power of the mind to grant meaning and substance to its own perceptions.” On this account, meditative practices slow down the transmission of neu-ral information to the posterior superior parietal lobes of the brain, which control spatial orientation, resulting in the sensation of pure awareness which is incapable of drawing boundaries between the lim-ited personal self and the external material world. This sensation gets


reified into the image of “reality as a formless unified whole, with no limits, no substance, no beginning and no end.”[3]

What the neurosciences seem to be telling us is that while the neurological processes that give rise to mystical experiences are real, they prove nothing about the ultimate nature of reality or God. Just because we can study the neuro-physiology of mysticism in a scientific manner, does not make the experience scientific or rational in any way. (We can study schizophrenia in a scientific manner, but that does not mean that schizophrenics are rational). Harris has a ten-dency to confuse two things; the fact that spirituality can be taught and studied in a rational manner, and the rationality of the beliefs about the world that such experiences engender.

Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience, hardly needs a primer on these matters. He realizes, of course, that reification works on all experiences, sensory as well as non-sensory. The sights and sounds we hear, Harris tells us, are not raw data from the world out-side, but are processed by the higher centers of the brain. The brain is not a mirror to the world outside, but more like a radio or TV receiver that is “tuned to deliver a particular vision of the world” (p. 42). Harris wants us to believe that mysticism is only a matter of tun-ing your brain differently so that it receives signals from an altered, boundary-less relationship between you and the world (p. 41-42). The information that this altered state of mind is “tuned” to receive is nevertheless rational because it “uncover[s] genuine facts about the world” (p.40) and discloses closer interconnections in the universe than are apparent to us in our ordinary sates of consciousness. (One cannot help wondering, why faith in God is not just such a method of “tuning the brain differently” for those who believe in the personal God of the Bible and the Koran? Neurologically speaking, why is God a “delusion,” if mysticism is “astute”?)

But Harris can defend the rationality of mysticism only by completely contradicting himself, by forgetting the criteria of ratio-nality which he applies so energetically when he is eviscerating faith in God. If he were to apply these same criteria to spirituality as rig-orously as he applies them to faith, he would have no choice but to admit that mysticism is as much of an “imposter” as faith. He will have to admit that mysticism, like faith, is an “act of knowledge that has a low grade of evidence” (p. 65). He will have to admit that mystics, like believers in a personal God, “seize upon extraordinary phenomena” and extraordinary experiences, as confirmation of the beliefs which have gripped their imaginations and filled them with a sense of awe (pp. 65-66). Mysticism fares no better, and no worse, than “mere” faith, when judged against the demands of evidence. Here is why:

What do people mean, Harris asks, when they say that they believe a certain proposition about the world? What they mean is that the proposition “faithfully represents some state of the world (51).” When someone says he believes that God exists, he means that God’s existence is the cause of his belief. Likewise, when someone says he believes in consciousness suffusing the whole world, he means that the consciousness suffusing the world is the cause of his belief.

The obvious next question is: how do we know if our beliefs, however real they feel to us, are in fact faithfully representing the world? For beliefs to faithfully represent some state of the world, they must have some kind of a hook into the world: there must be “some mechanism that guarantees that the regularities in our nervous sys-tem consistently mirror regularities in the environment…something in our experience must provide a causal link to the actual state of the world (p. 58, emphasis added).

Harris rejects God because none of the traditional justifica-tions for belief in God – spiritual experiences, the authority of the Bible and/or the church— have an adequate hook into reality: none of them can assure that God exists, or that “belief in god is a con-sequence of the way the world is” (63). God has to go, because the experience of God cannot be shown to be caused by anything that actually exists.

But by this standard, spirituality is no less irrational, for it is no less lacking in a hook into the reality. Harris has to tell us what “casual links” do spiritual experiences offer into “the actual state of the world”? What assurance there is that the “deeper connections” mystics see in their minds, actually “mirror the regularities in the environment”? All we have is the mystic’s word that he has been able to vanquish the constraints of his “self,” and has come to see world “directly” by becoming one with it. There is no independently test-able reason for non-mystics – for the vast majority of people who find their non-altered states of consciousness to be perfectly adequate and satisfying – to accept the mystics’ word as evidence. I don’t find the usual analogies with consensus in natural sciences very persuasive at all (p. 220). In science (Thomas Kuhn notwithstanding) anyone with functioning senses, adequate training and right apparatus can see the same star, the same DNA molecule, the same electron. But not everyone with adequate training in meditation techniques, and the right atmosphere, sees the same mystical reality: some see God, some see nothing at all and some, without any meditation at all, see what the mystics see. I believe that William James had it right: mysti-cal states… are absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. But mystics have no right to claim that we ought to ac-cept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences…. Non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior au-thority (p. 460, 645).

In sum, Sam Harris is right in that “mysticism is a natural pro-pensity of the human mind.” But he is dead wrong when he claims


that mysticism does not demand that we “believe anything on insuf-ficient evidence to actualize it” (p. 221).

Why does it matter?

The attitude of many moderate rationalists on matters of spiri-tualism has been of benign neglect or even indulgence. It all appears so harmless and it might even have some positive contributions to make to one’s health and tranquility of mind. What is more, the attacks by feminists and environmentalists on the sins of “reductionist Western science” have created a positive aura around “holistic science” which overcomes the gap between the subject and the object. The notion that the reality and our knowledge of it depends upon how we see it has gained many adherents in the postmodern academe.

But what kinds of claims are made by spiritualists and how they justify these claims, matters a great deal. It matters because, be-liefs matter. What we believe in is of utmost importance, as Harris himself so correctly emphasizes, because “beliefs are actions in poten-tia, as a man believes, so he will act” (p. 44). I am in full agreement with Harris when he says that “Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified can lead to intolerable consequences” (p. 46).

Mysticism matters because beliefs matter. And for this reason, metaphysical claims that follow from mystical experiences cannot be given the appearance of rationality, as books like The End of Faith are wont to do. As Harris himself admits, while mystical experiences can be rational, they can become “irrational when people begin mak-ing claims about the world which cannot be supported by empirical evidence” (p. 210)

I have indicated, above, the neurological and philosophical reasons why mystical experiences show a pronounced tendency to erect metaphysical systems. I have also indicated why these meta-physical systems lack a causal link, a hook, into reality and therefore escape the reach of empirical testing.

These issues are not of theoretical interest alone. In countries like my native India where yoga and spiritualism enjoy the blessings of the highest religious authorities, metaphysical beliefs that follow from mystical experiences exert a great deal of social influence. (While India has a fairly large and advanced scientific workforce, science has not succeeded in displacing the authority of metaphysical truths from the cultural sphere. If anything, science has been largely co-opted into Hindu spiritualism.[4]) These beliefs do not only structure the worldview of ordinary people, they also serve as their paradigm of knowledge and truth.

As a Western follower of Buddhism and Hinduism, living and working in the USA, Harris can afford to pick and choose what he likes and downplay what he doesn’t. But the fact is that, in situ, East-ern religious traditions have encouraged beliefs about nature which, if accepted, would completely contradict just about every known scien-tific theory about life on earth. I am referring to the family of meta-physical tenets of Hinduism which support a vitalistic, pan-psychical conception of life and biological evolution, including such familiar ideas as rebirth and karma, the belief in a subtle (i.e., inaccessible to all human senses) life-force, or prana, which is supposed to animate all that exists and the belief in innate moral qualities in nature. Add to that the doctrines of spiritual evolution – call them Vedic theories of “intelligent guidance,” if you will – that see spiritualization of all life until the emergence of “supermind” that merges with the Brahman.

Now we come to the crux of why mysticism matters and why the kind of scientistic gloss Harris offers is not helpful. Each and

every element of the Hindu worldview described above makes an ex-istence claim about the workings of nature, especially living beings, their birth, death and destiny. And each and every element of this worldview is defended as an actual “fact” that the authors of the Ve-das, the rishis, actually “saw” in their minds in a state of Samadhi, the state of mystical one-ness. The defense of mystical seeing as experi-ence-based and therefore scientific serves to present poetic, existential and philosophical speculations as if they are actual facts of nature, empirically accessible to minds tuned to a different frequency by yoga and intense meditation.

Take for example, the concepts of kundalini and chakras, pop-ular among the yoga-Ayurveda crowd. Kundalini is often taught by modern gurus and yogis as if it were a real biological entity, a “coil of power” that lies at the bottom of a hollow canal called “sushumna” that is supposed to run through the spinal column. An explicitly re-alistic description of kundalini first appeared in Swami Vivekananda’s lectures on Raj Yoga which introduced the ancient Yoga Sutras of Pa-tanjali to the West sometime in the waning years of the 19th century. Vivekananda describes kundalini as if it were a real physical force that “forces a passage through this hollow canal [the non-existent Su-shumna, that is], and as it rises step by step, layer after layer of the mind becomes open and all the different visions and wonderful pow-ers come to the yogi. When it reaches the brain, the yogi is perfectly detached from the body and the mind…”[5] According to those who have studied Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in the original, kundalini and chakras were never intended to be referential: they were meant to be imaginary aids to help in yogic meditations. The “subtle body” of the yogis was never meant to be some kind of a “quantum mechanical body,” made up of morphic fields or unified fields. It was a body im-age, an abstract image that a yogi could focus his mind upon. Like-wise, chakras, which are often presented as actual nerve centers, were “rungs on an imagined ladder for the yogi to check his progress.”[6] Clearly, Vivekananda and his countless neo-Hindu gurus, were reify-ing imaginary concepts into actual physical entities.

How is this feat accomplished? Vivekananda’s writings set the tone and every modern guru advertising the “scientific” nature of Hinduism has followed Vivekananda’s lead. Vivekananda essentially presented mysticism as scientific in spirit and content: whereas scien-tists see “merely” with their senses, yogis were seeing the universe in a “supersensory” state of consciousness. Thus the existence of kundalini gets translated into an objective fact of human anatomy on the testi-mony of the mystics. Just like science, mystics’ vision was also based upon “experience” and was therefore scientific and commanded ra-tional consent (as compared to the faith-based consent of Christians and Muslims). One finds exactly similar arguments, dressed up in quantum mechanical terms in the writings of modern gurus like Ma-harishi Mahesh Yogi and Deepak Chopra.

When I picked up The End of Faith, I did not expect to find a very similar defense of mysticism coming from such a militant ra-tionalist as Harris. Harris concedes the basic point that the Hindu gurus cited above are making, that mystical experience is a knowledge experience, and that mystical seeing tells you something about the objective world.

I believe that Harris is making the same two mistakes that neo-Hindus routinely make: They confuse the method and rigor of medi-tation with the rigor of its conclusions, and they confuse the mystical “seeing” with ordinary seeing that takes place in science. They forget that empiricism in science is a class apart from the spiritual empiri-cism of the mystics. Not all experiences qualify as scientific: to forget that is to open the door to all kinds of pseudo-sciences.


Will spirituality end all wars?

At the root of all wars, Harris tells us, lies the separateness, or the dualism, between human beings, between the “I” and the non “I”: “Every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feeling of separatness” (p. 214). He ascribes this separateness – as have so many theosophists and mys-tics, many of whom held deeply anti-Semitic views, before him – to the Abrahamic tradition itself which has demanded faith in a God who is Himself separate from his creation.

Recall that for Harris, it is the content of religious ideas that alone motivates religious violence. His working principle is “as a man believes, so shall he act.” Those whose faith tradition teaches them separateness will be intolerant, aggressive and always fighting wars.

If it is all about theology, stupid!, it follows that the solution to wars will also be theological. Harris’s solution is simple: shed the “I.” The more ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling they call “I”, Harris tells us, the more they will divest the feeling that they are separate from the rest of the universe (p. 40). And the more they feel themselves connected to the universe, the less they will have the feelings of fear and anger. Love and compassion will follow (p. 219-220). Mahesh Yogi could not have said it any better!

But even if one played along with Harris’s badly flawed, the-ology-centered diagnosis of religious extremism, it is simply not true that spiritual, non-dualistic Eastern religions are free from violence. And it is simply not true that shedding the “I” makes for a free and peaceable society. Streaks of violence and authoritarianism run deep in societies which worship at the altar of “one-ness.” Harris, who is so alert to the “inherent” violence of the Koran, is completely blind to the religious sources of violence in the “spiritual East.” (Having said that, I don’t want to turn around and start pinning the social problems of the East on to Eastern religions alone. I reject the very premise that any religion is inherently violent or inherently peace-ful. One simply cannot brush away the social and political context in which religious ideas express themselves for the good and for the bad.)

The Jains of India may not be committing acts of suicide bombings, as Harris reminds us repeatedly.[7] But can one honestly say that Jains and pious Hindus, many of whom are strict vegetarians, have shown any compassion and “one-ness” for the Muslims, Chris-tians and other religious minorities in India? Has their Hinduism prevented Tamil Tigers from conducting suicide bombings against the equally “spiritual” Buddhists of Sri Lanka? (And conversely, has the Buddhism of the Sri Lankan majority prevented their vicious dis-crimination against the Tamils? ). Didn’t Zen Buddhists actively and enthusiastically support the violent ultra-nationalism of the Japanese people in Japan’s brutal imperialist wars against China and Korea? Were the Japanese kamikazes not motivated by the teachings of Bud-dhism? Don’t some Hindus interpret the Bhagvat Gita to support violence in defense of their dharma? There is a complex history of nationalism, religion and racism behind each one of these historical episodes. Critical scholars have begun to question the image of peace and harmony that is supposed to be the hallmark of the non-dualist Eastern religions. Harris would do well to study this emerging lit-erature to bring some balance to his faith-bad . . . spiritualism-good fairy tale.[8]

Moreover, Harris is completely oblivious to the authoritarian implications of the one-ness he worships. Shedding one’s “I-ness” is a recipe for group-think and authoritarianism. The individual in her everyday life, with her everyday sensory knowledge of here-and-

now is treated as an illusion of no consequence when seen from the mystical high of one-ness. The Gnostic vision of one-ness, mind you, is not supposed to be available to the hoi polloi, who are sup-posed to be weighted down by the “gross matter” of their bodies and fooled by their senses. The enlightened have always constituted a spiritual aristocracy in Eastern societies. The holism of caste soci-ety is what you get when one-ness is made into the highest religious ideal.

To conclude this review: Mysticism is not a rational alternative to faith. Dissolving our sense of individual self in a larger spiritual one-ness will not end wars and oppression. Those who cannot accept a personal God on faith alone can’t hide behind mysticism or spiri-tualism either. Reason bars them both, and human good transcends them both. ❋

Notes

[1] This distinction between wise and unwise mystics comes from a very wise mystic, Agehananda Bharati, a Viennese who became a Hindu monk. See his The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism. Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1976. I count Susan Blackmore, the ex-ESP researcher and now a major exponent of naturalistic view of consciousness and a serious practitioner of Zen meditation among wise mystics. John Horgan’s exploration of rational mysticism is far wiser than Harris’s. See John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Dispatches between the Border be-tween Science and Mysticism, New York: Hougton Mifflin, 2003.

[2] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2002, p. 414-415.

[3] Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause, Why God won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, New York: Ballentine Books, 2001.pp 149-152.

[4] I look at the co-option of science into religion in India and America in a comparative perspective in a recent essay, “Godless States in God Lands: Dilemmas of Secularism in America and India,” in Axess, 2005, no. 8. See also, Is India a Science Superpower? Frontline, Sept. 10-23, 2005.

[5] Swami Vivekananda, Raj Yoga, in The Collected Works of Swami Vive-kananda, Mayavati Memorial Edition, Vol. 1 (Kolkatta: Advaita Center), p. 160.

[6] See Agehananda Bharati, note 1, p. 164-165.[7] Established in the sixth century BCE by Mahavira, Jainism is one of the

oldest religious traditions of India and shares Hindu beliefs in reincarna-tion and karma. Jains reject belief in a creator god and seek release from endless reincarnation through a life of strict self-denial. In addition, Jain-ism places a special emphasis on ahimsa (“non-injury”) to all living beings. Monks and nuns are sometimes seen with muslin cloths over their mouths to keep out flying insects, and they are enjoined to use small brooms to gently sweep away living creatures from their path, so as to not acciden-tally crush them. See beliefnet.com for more details.

[8] Some important writings include: Brian Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhill, 1997. Robert Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Donald S. Lopez, Jr. ed, Curators of the Buddha, Chicago University Press, 1995. Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer (eds.) Violence/Non-Violence : Some Hindu Perspectives, New Delhi, Manohar, 2003.

Meera Nanda is the author of a forthcoming book, Reclaiming “Scientific Temper” in the shadow of Hindu nationalism: Arguments for Indian Enlightenment. Her preivous books include Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernist Critiques of science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers U P, 2004) and Breaking the Spell of Dharma, Three Essays Collective, New Delhi, 2002. She is trained in both biology and philoso-phy of science. She can be reached at [email protected]

Reprinted with permission from www.butterfliesandwheels.com.


Keith Porteous Wood and Anthony C. Grayling, a National Secular Society (NSS) honorary associate, took part in a high level seminar entitled “Religion in Public Life; the Atlantic Conversation” at Windsor Castle earlier this year.

Many of the delegates were senior politicians from the Commons and Lords as well as prominent lawyers and academics.

Anthony Grayling set out the secularist position in the open-ing session. He emphasized that religious organizations (churches etc) are self-selected interest groups on a par with political parties and trade unions. As such they have a right to put their point of view in public, provided they stay within the law, but they have no greater right to do so than political parties or trades union. He denounced religious privileges and the attempts by religious organizations to seek to impose their doctrine on others, for example through the law.

Secular speakers were heavily outnumbered. Apart from An-thony and Keith, out of the 30 attendees, only one other delegate took a consistently secular line.

Keith was the opening and principal speaker on the secular perspectives, and set the tone for the remainder of the seminar. He drew attention to the overwhelming evidence for the long term de-cline of religious adherence in Northern Europe and particularly in the UK. It is acknowledged by Christian Research that this decline will continue for the foreseeable future – in fact, they project that only 2% of the UK population will attend church on an average Sun-day by 2040.

Keith also presented the evidence showing that the public no longer looked to the churches for guidance nor did they any longer give automatic respect to religious figures at any level. The Church’s claim to “speak for the people” is difficult to sustain in the face of these facts: on issues such as extra marital relationships, homosexual-ity and voluntary euthanasia, the churches are completely out of step with the populace. Yet the degree of influence of religion in public life had grown alarmingly, both internationally and, domestically.

Internationally, the influence had grown often as a fearful re-action, especially post September 11, 2001. Domestically, we should not forget – as if we could – that Blair has been the most religious PM since Gladstone, and many of his cabinet and advisers have been devout Christians determined to use their positions to further their faith. Nowhere could this be more evident than in the expansion of religious schools with their privileged selection criteria - to the point that the non-believing non-practicing majority are having to resort to subterfuge to secure admission in good schools – such as attending church. Keith raised some laughter by expressing wonderment that, despite this, the church attendance figures were still in freefall.

He noted the chasing of Muslim votes, which was so evident in the repeated attempts to introduce the Racial and Religious Ha-tred provisions, which would have severely compromised freedom of expression. He criticized the totally disproportionate attention that

is paid to unelected minority religious leaders. All this practically disenfranchises the non-religious in minority communities, many of whom actually feel oppressed by their families and communities. And, to a lesser extent, the non-religious in the wider community are disenfranchised too.

Fellow delegates

He characterised many of his fellow participants as seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, of saying “religion” when they often meant “Christian” and sometimes even just “Protestant”. The many privileges that they had enjoyed for so long were not only un-justified but unsustainable in a multi-cultural society. Other religions were starting to demand what they saw as their share of the cake, and often would not subscribe to Enlightenment values.

Keith had been outraged by the suggestion made by an influ-ential Christian at the seminar that since bishops came from the same background as judges, they therefore are just as able to adjudicate on Human Rights as judges were. This provoked Keith to assert that religion was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, threat to Human Rights, and was it not natural justice, far less a human right, for trials to be conducted by someone unbiased?

Other delegates coming from a religious perspective were only too aware of such tensions and were happy to meet on com-mon ground where we all left our preconceptions behind. This was when the best results were achieved and barriers broken down. Every opportunity was taken to learn more about, challenge and possibly influence those, some very influential, coming from other philosoph-ical perspectives.

Delegates came from the United States and the Netherlands as well as the UK. It was evident how different the three countries are

Britain’s National Secular Society Prominent at Windsor Castle Seminar

Keith Porteous Wood and Anthony C. Grayling


in their degree of religiosity and the attitude to religion in public life, and this frequently informed other delegates’ contributions.

The international dimension in the seminar provided some interesting contrasts. While freedom of expression was clearly greater in the United States than Britain, non-religious perspectives are rarely expressed in the public domain, even less by politicians. Whether or not the Dutch were ever as liberal as the British preconception, that liberality is definitely on the wane. And the motor for this is of course religious; both from Islam and, perhaps as a reaction to growing Is-lamic influence, a revival of Christian power (if not adherence).

Many people will be startled to learn that much of Dutch so-ciety is split into religious pillars. So, for example, welfare is provided along religious lines. There are Protestant and Catholic universities and even a humanist one. As in many other continental countries, there are specifically religious political parties and the Dutch Christian party is once more gaining ground, giving concern to social liberals.

Back in Britain, we have our problems too. The UK is the only Western democracy left giving prelates the right to sit in its Parliament. Yet what does the Government want to do under the meaningless guise of “modernization”? Extend it to those of other faiths. It would become a Synod, not a Parliament, and totally out of touch with the country, especially on moral matters. The perspective of non-believers, those non-practicing a religion and indeed religious liberals between them representing the vast majority of the popula-tion would be outvoted time and time again.

So, what are we to do? Keith concluded that we should all seek to coalesce around: the values of Human Rights and Secularism. Religious moderates had everything to gain and little to lose from subscribing to these ideals.

Human Rights are under sustained attack as being some kind of “Western construct,” rather than being Universal and inalienable. We must resist this dilution at all costs; our civilization depends on it. Keith found it moving that he had support from a Muslim woman on this point. And while secularists fight religious privilege, Secularism is not anti-religious, it is about a level playing field for all. Theocracies have a pretty poor record on religious freedom. Secularism has a vital role to offer whether a country is dominated by one religion, where countries have become more multi-religious, and indeed have become less religious. In none of these cases can one religion or several religions be allowed to dominate. So, a pre-

condition to living together in harmony and equity is Secularism. ❋

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SCIENCEDAILY (Oct. 18, 2007)—By peering deep into evolution-ary history, scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered the origins of photosensitivity in animals.

The scientists studied the aquatic animal Hydra, a member of Cnidaria, which are animals that have existed for hundreds of mil-lions of years. The authors are the first scientists to look at light-re-ceptive genes in cnidarians, an ancient class of animals that includes corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones.

“Not only are we the first to analyze these vision genes (opsins) in these early animals, but because we don’t find them in earlier evolv-ing animals like sponges, we can put a date on the evolution of light sensitivity in animals,” said David C. Plachetzki, first author and a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. The research was conducted with a National Science Foundation dissertation improvement grant.

“We now have a time frame for the evolution of animal light sensitivity. We know its precursors existed roughly 600 million years ago,” said Plachetzki.

Senior author Todd H. Oakley, assistant professor of biology at UCSB, explained that there are only a handful of cases where sci-entists have documented the very specific mutational events that have given rise to new features during evolution.

Oakley said that anti-evolutionists often argue that mutations, which are essential for evolution, can only eliminate traits and cannot produce new features. He goes on to say, “Our paper shows that such claims are simply wrong. We show very clearly that specific muta-tional changes in a particular duplicated gene (opsin) allowed the new genes to interact with different proteins in new ways. Today, these different interactions underlie the genetic machinery of vision, which is different in various animal groups.”

Hydras are predators, and the authors speculate that they use light sensitivity in order to find prey. Hydra use opsin proteins all over their bodies, but they are concentrated in the mouth area, near the tip of the animal. Hydras have no eyes or light-receptive organs, but they have the genetic pathways to be able to sense light.

The findings are published in PLoS One. Co-author Bernie M. Degnan, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, provided bioinformatics tools to complete the study.❋

Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Santa Barbara. (www.sciencedaily.com)

Dawn Of Animal Vision Discovered

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Atheist On Board


What can you say about a prominent Atheist whose lat-est work has earned him criticisms such as “Hitchens has nothing new to say,” because “‘his argument pro-ceeds principally by anecdote,” and besides he offers

nothing more than “sly distortions and grotesque errors,” “sloppiness,” “ignorance,” “factual errors,” and “obvious misstatements.” I say he must have written a helluva good book. And he has. Hitchens has dis-placed Richard Dawkins as the guy that Christians most love to hate. And with good reason. Dawkins comes off as the scholarly, person-able, quiet-spoken and careful scientist that he is, but Hitchens in per-son and in his writing, is sullen, insulting, acerbic, self-assured, and full of condemnation of everything religious—and he condemns a lot. I had not seen him on television before reading “God is Not Great,” but I remember as I read, visualizing him as Richard Burton in the role of drunken George in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” . . . before learning about his admitted excessive use of alcohol.

“God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” is a no-holds barred forthright attack upon all religions, but it is mostly aimed at the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) using the approach and systematic outline of a scientist, de-spite the fact that Hitchens is primarily a journalist. Like many Athe-ists, Hitchens tells us that he began life as a member of a family of believers, but, as with many Atheists he began to question the illogic of his indoctrination early on.

This fact alone ought to give pause to the hysterical rebuttals and cries of “Foul!” from conservatives, believers, clergy and other outraged reviewers who want to charge Hitchens with every literary crime from plagiarism to ignorance in their frustrated obsession to argue that god really is great: and religion is actually a wonderful and necessary support system for the human race. What they don’t seem to get is that some percentage of intelligent and courageous indoctrinees manage to see through the scam and rise above it. We call them Atheists.

When Shakespeare had the insight that prompted the line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he elucidated a fact that bewilders rationalists to this day. The extreme reaction that accompa-nies awareness of the irrefutability of an opponent’s logical, argument can only represent despairing acknowledgement of a hopeless cause, when instead it should elicit honest self-examination.

The book’s nineteen chapters appear at first to proceed like a legal indictment, but they actually follow Hitchens’outline of his own

detestation of all things religious. He wanders at times, spending an entire chapter on topics such as “A Short Digression On the Pig; Or, Why Heaven Hates Ham.” But even these excursions are informative and full of the bantering whimsicality that characterize his style. Ev-erywhere his sense of humor and biting wit are interjected along with his skewering of celebrated Christians and other theists like Mel Gib-son, all of which is presented in an exceptionally systematic manner.

His logical attacks upon concepts such as “the argument from design” or biblical inconsistencies involving morality, history and ge-ography are well presented (and at times scathingly humorous) and most of them are not at all undermined by the undisguised contempt with which he holds most believers and beliefs, and it would not be unfair to say that Hitchens is far from an objective reporter.

Although he claims that he really doesn’t object so much to religion as he does to its encroachment upon government and the individual freedom of non-believers, it his hard to accept that this is all that motivates the outpouring of contempt that emanates from Hitchens’ pen. Similarly, with regard to his villifiers, many conserva-tive writers whose excoriation seems frenzied at times, may still be reacting from disguised or latent “McCarthyism” because Hitchens is or was a Marxist and anyone who has ever thought about “taking from the rich, and giving to the poor,” much less advocated it, be-comes immediately in league with the devil.

It isn’t hard to understand why some would be offended by this book especially when Hitchens describes the evolution of Joseph Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—usually known as the Mormons—as being “founded by a gifted opportunist” who, demonstrated for all who wanted to see “what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes.” It becomes par-

God Is Not GreatA Book Review by Gil Gaudia, Ph.D.

book review

God Is Not GreatHow Religion Poisons Everythingby Christopher Hitchens 307 pp. Twelve/Warner Books. $24.99


ticularly barbed when that erstwhile racket is practiced by one of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney. But Hitchens spares no one no matter how adored or idolized, as he did in an earlier work about Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position,” and he certainly did not spare the Clintons’ feelings when he described them as the biggest liars in America in his brief but excoriating 2000 book “No One Left to Lie to: The Values of the Worst Family.” The title tells it all.

I found myself wanting to take notes on some of his more in-teresting points for future reference when discussing (fighting about?) the Bible with believers, especially crucial dilemmas like Moses’ viola-tion of some of his own received commandments. Atheists who feel the need to engage believers in discussion or debate will find more in this book than in most other contemporary best sellers on the subject, especially because its 320 pages are packed with anti-religious (I hate to use the word) ammunition. But Hitchens, along with many other Atheists are tired of being swamped with unexamined propaganda that goes unrefuted until someone with the courage and erudition that he possesses decides to put it all together under one cover and throw it out for all to see.

I was pleased to discover that Hitchens agrees with one of my pet theories, namely that religion is largely a product of fear, especially the fear of death. As I wrote in an article in the Nov/Dec 2006 Ameri-can Atheist Magazine, “Fear is the real reason for the (Christmas) sea-son,” Hitchens argues in his very first chapter that unless and until the fear of death can be eradicated, religion will continue to be with us.

Hitchens makes assumptions about his readers’ literary acu-men that will definitely not apply to all of them. He is a master wordsmith and more than one reference sent me to my Bartlett’s or Webster’s for clarification. But there is elegance and poetry in some of his constructions, and any reader with a desire to stretch his own creative skills will find exemplars that are worthy of emulation.

None of the Atheist “best sellers” can even come close in num-ber of books sold, to the books of Dennis Prager, and Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” religious blockbusters that have sales reaching into the millions. Hitchens’ book has not reached 100,000 in sales, but Hitchens has added an important link in the chain of writings from the skeptical positions of the ancient philosophers through Bertrand Russell to the Atheist quintet of literary defenders we have today in writers Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Hitchens, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and astronomer Victor Stenger, (whose book “God: The Failed Hypothesis” shows how cosmology and as-tronomy need no supernatural concepts to account for the creation and development of the universe.)

It is tempting to rank their literary output. I personally prefer Sam Harris’ writing, with Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger following in that order. I like to visualize a pair of “good-cop; bad-cop” teams of interlocutors going forth to do battle with believers of all stripes. I would send Christopher Hitchens along with” good cop” Daniel Dennett to do battle with the theologians and apologists while Dawkins and Stenger (the good cop) would be dispatched to the uni-versities to put the eggheads in their place. Sam Harris could coach from the sidelines with prompts like, “Don’t forget to point out the fallacy of the Uncaused Cause.” ❋

Gil Gaudia is professor Emeritus at the SUNY college at Fredonia. He was also a clinical psychologist and a fellow at The Albert Ellis Institute in Manhattan, and now devotes his time to writing. His novel, Outside, Looking In, is a thinly-veiled autobiography of an Atheist. Dr. Gaudia can be reached at [email protected]

Atheist Singles02-01-08 – (Writer lives in Italy) Man of 39 years old. Mem-ber of American Atheists for some years now. Single. No children. I would like to join the US Army. I need an I-557. I’m looking for a woman no more than 25 years old with no children. Would like a recent photo.

The “Atheist Singles” service is a benefit of membership in American Atheists. It is intended to help members find that special someone. If you are a member and wish to participate in this service, please limit your “Atheist Singles” ad to 100 words or less. Please include your name and postal address so we will know where to forward your replies when they come in. Entries should be mailed to: Atheist Singles, P.O. Box 5733, Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733.Members of American Atheists who wish to communicate with any of the Atheist singles who placed ads should do the following: Write your response and place it in a stamped, self-addressed, sealed en-velope. On the back of the envelope, place the notation, “A.S.” and the reference number (for example A.S. 00-05-03) of the entry to which you are responding. Place the envelope inside another en-velope, seal it, and mail it after addressing it to the Atheist Singles address in Parsippany listed above. When your letter arrives at the American Atheist Center, the outer envelope will be removed, the inner envelope extracted, and the address corresponding to the reference number you wrote on it will be written on the front of the envelope. The envelope will then be mailed forthwith. Please include your phone number or e-mail address in case we have ques-tions with your ad. American Atheists reserves the right to reject any singles ad.

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MILITARY DIRECTORKathleen JohnsonCMR 422, Box 910APO AE [email protected]://www.atheists.org/mil

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