Church of the Churchless

Belief in God fades away gradually for many atheists

Do you believe in God? 

This isn't an either-or question where the only possible answers are "yes" and "no." There are many shades of unbelieving and believing when it comes to God. 

Many outwardly religious people aren't inwardly sure whether God exists. This includes a surprisingly large number of clergy. 

Similarly, many atheists hold on to spiritual beliefs of one form or another, up to and including the possibility of a divine being or universal consciousness. 

Personally, I've found that after 35 years of being a believer in an Eastern/Indian variety of religion, then becoming a spiritual sceptic, I've gone through a slow but steady process of discarding religious beliefs, moving from the most obvious (like "God is guiding me") to the more subtle (like "Consciousness could pervade the cosmos").

So I resonated with quite a bit of what Elizabeth King said in her Washington Post piece, "I'm an atheist. So why can't I shake God?"

Although I’ve been a content atheist for a decade, somehow God has found a way to stick around in my mind. Not the God of the Bible who created heaven and Earth — the God that lingers with me is harder to explain. The best way I can think of to describe it is like a character from a movie that I’ve seen over and over, or like the memory of my first friends. He’s not real, but He’s present.

The idea of God pesters me and makes me think that maybe I’m not as devoted to my beliefs as I’d like to think I am and would like to be. Maybe I’m still subconsciously afraid of hell and want to go to heaven when I die. It’s confusing and frustrating to feel the presence of something you don’t believe in. This is compounded by the fact that the God character most often shows up when I’m already frustrated.

...If asked whether I believe in God, I would answer with a quick and emphatic “no.” But given that I will send a word up to a proverbial heaven if I’m on a turbulent flight, or silently ask that someone make sure my little niece and nephew stay safe, I can appreciate how some atheists may be inclined to say they believe.

...Boyer contends that there is not one part of the brain solely responsible for religious belief, but rather that the particular overlap of several cognitive systems renders religious beliefs desirable to, and easily accepted by, the human mind. This also means that when we opt for atheism, we are doing hard work to battle against what our minds are generally inclined and well-equipped to do: believe.

Great point. 

Religious people often consider that believing in God is difficult, requiring faith, courage, commitment. This is wrong. It is easy to believe. Evolution has hard-wired us for some form of belief in a supernatural being. 

I talked about this in "Religious believers are acting in accord with evolution."

Having arrived at a churchless view of reality, I'm amused when true believers accuse me of taking the easy way out by being a skeptic about God and other things divine'ish. They see religious belief as a courageous stand against rampant secularism -- a bold independent search for ultimate reality that transcends materialistic boundaries.

Actually, the truth is far different.

Religious belief is the default human condition. What takes courage, effort, and determination is going against the religious current that sweeps the vast majority of people into a faith-based ocean.

Interestingly, the evidence for this is scientific.

Evolutionary psychology has arrived at well-founded explanations for why religious belief is almost ubiquitous in cultures around the world. So those who decry the theory of evolution as undermining the Bible and other holy books are doing so because of evolutionary influences.

They can't help themselves.

Belief in the supernatural essentially is hard-wired into humans.

Thus it isn't surprising that, as King says in her piece, remnants of religious belief continue to rattle around in an atheist's brain even after the existence of God no longer appears at all likely.

I’m not sure what to do about God. If I could figure out a way to banish this figure from my psyche, I would. But psychology is not on my side. Having been conditioned to believe in God for so many years, and having a brain hard-wired for belief, I may be stuck with his shadow forever.

Understanding reality (including religion) is a matter of "likely"

After almost a dozen years of writing Church of the Churchless posts, and reading comments on them, I'm familiar with the arguments religious people use to justify their beliefs. 

When I point out that there is no demonstrable evidence supporting a belief in God, heaven, soul, spirit, angels, the afterlife, or any other form of supernaturalism, frequently I'll hear something like this:

Hey, Brian, you can't prove God doesn't exist, so there's no proof for your skeptical view either.  Thus, it's a tie! There's no proof God exists, and there's no proof God doesn't exist, so it's up to each person to decide which "no proof" to accept.

Well, typically I respond by saying that the way both science and common sense works is that we believe in the existence of something when there is good affirmative reasons to say "it exists."

If we demanded proof that something doesn't exist before giving up a belief in it, there would be no end to the absurd views of reality that would result. Such as...

"Fairies make the flowers in gardens grow. I know this because you can't prove fairies don't exist." 

Today I was reading a book I bought recently, "Human Universe" by physicist Brian Cox (it is based on a BBC program). Here's a passage that nicely presents the scientific point of view that I share, but can't express as well as Cox and Richard Feynman did.

Brian Cox writes:

I'll put my cards on the table here. I believe in UFOs. That is to say, I believe that there have been sightings of flying things in the sky that the observers were unable to identify, some of which were objects. 

But I do not believe for a moment that these were spacecraft flown by aliens. Occam's razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn't be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.

My favourite response to the criticism that dismissing the possibility of alien visitations to Earth is unscientific was provided by physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in his Messsenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1964:

'Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers -- because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers". So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?"

"No, I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?"

But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. 

To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence."

It is just more likely. That is all.'

Why "man of faith" is an insult

So, I was browsing through the Sunday Oregonian a little while ago and came across a story about how recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was remembered as a "man of faith" at his funeral. 

This is a similar story I found on Google News, "Justice Scalia eulogized at funeral Mass as man of faith and man of law."

Forever combative about the law, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was remembered Saturday as a man whose deeply held religious faith brought him peace.

Rather than a star-studded funeral service featuring judges and politicians, Scalia’s sendoff at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception — the largest Roman Catholic church in North America — was a traditional Mass of Christian Burial befitting a true believer.

The way I see it, this term, man of faith, isn't a compliment. It's an insult. 

I'd like to be known as a man of reason, science, reality, and truth. There's nothing complimentary about embracing faith.  Google tells me it means:

1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

So a man or woman of faith is someone who believes in something 100%, completely, without proof that the belief is correct.

How is this admirable? 

Hitler had such faith. So did Stalin. Ditto for everyone who believes that they have an understanding of reality that is impervious to debate, discussion, deliberation, or modification.

Scalia may have been a wonderful person otherwise. But his unduly confident religious faith, along with his equally questionable views of the Constitution, did a lot of harm to our nation. I talked about this in "An atheist Supreme Court justice would be great for this country."

Hopefully over time more and more people will react to being called a man/woman of faith with "Hey, those are fighting words. You're wrong. I'm proudly faithless."

If you disagree, tell me why it is good to have complete trust or confidence in someone or something, or to believe without proof that a belief is correct. 

Even scientists who study the seemingly immutable laws of nature are open to their understandings of those laws being wrong, capable of modification, improved. Reality is never known for certain. No matter how well we believe we know something or someone, that knowledge is provisional.

Or at least, it should be. A true believer like Scalia is dangerous, because their mind is closed off to a fuller understanding of truth. That's why a "man of faith" shouldn't be emulated.

An atheist Supreme Court justice would be great for the U.S.

Being a member of an oppressed minority -- atheists -- I'm totally on board with physicist Lawrence Krauss' call to put one of us on the Supreme Court, now that Antonin Scalia's death has created a vacancy. 

Three per cent of Americans say that they are atheists—which means that there are more atheists than Jews in the United States. An additional four per cent declare themselves agnostic; as George Smith noted in his classic book “Atheism: The Case Against God,” agnostics are, for practical purposes, atheists, since they cannot declare that they believe in a divine creator. Even so, not a single candidate for major political office or Supreme Court Justice has “come out” declaring his or her non-belief.

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries.

...the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy.

Absolutely. 

Our country's founders intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason, not of Faith. I wrote about this in "Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates."

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders.

An additional rationale for adding an atheist to the Supreme Court is that the percentage of non-believers in God's existence almost certainly is much higher than the 7% cited by Krauss. 

I say this because we need to distinguish between (1) people who merely say they believe in God, and (2) people who actually act like they believe in God.

After all, if we want to figure out how many people truly believe in the efficacy of seat belts, we wouldn't simply ask them; we'd rely on studies that measure actual seat belt use.

(But even many ministers openly say they aren't sure about God's existence, making them atheists or agnostics. Up to 16% of Anglican clergy admit to this.)

In his book, "Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World," David Silverman speaks about the hypocrisy of people who profess a belief in God, but don't act in accord with their supposed beliefs. This makes them atheists for all practical purposes.

Silverman notes several examples of political figures who engage in "lying, coveting, and adultery -- all commandments being broken over and over," then writes:

It may be distasteful, but we must admit it -- these pandering hypocrites in Congress (and in churches) who talk as if they believe in a god but act as if they don't'are probably atheists, lying about their beliefs for their personal benefit. 

In this world, there are good theists and bad theists, and there are good atheists and bad atheists, but some of the worst atheists, the ones who feign peity for personal gain, are running religion and politics.

Also, the United States Supreme Court. A Mother Jones piece about what Antonin Scalia said about homosexuality starts off with this.

Justice Antonin Scalia has written that "it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings." Judging by the things he has said in court or written in his legal opinions about gays and lesbians, he doesn't really mean it.

So likely Scalia was a closeted atheist, maybe even to himself. (People can lie to themselves just as persuasively as they lie to others.) 

Might as well replace him with an atheist committed to secular fairness and reason, then. That person would have a higher standard of morality than Scalia, guaranteed. 

The Cosmic Significance of how I get back to sleep

Here's how I ended my previous post, "When trying to get back to sleep: to think or not to think?"

Now, does this insight have any Cosmic Significance regarding the Big Questions of Life? Damn, I sure hope so! But that's a subject for another blog post. I'm starting to feel sleepy... very sleepy...

I don't want to leave the question of Cosmic Significance hanging out there.

Sure, I might be the only person on Earth who cares about the answer. But since I'm pretty darn important to me (leaving aside the issue of whether there's any difference between us), I want to tackle the question sooner rather than later. 

Like, now. 

Here's why I do believe that how I get back to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night does indeed have Cosmic Significance. Though this seems mundane, it points to profound assumptions about the nature of reality as we humans perceive it.

Things just are. Until we assign meanings to them. 

In my current churchlessness, I no longer believe that the cosmos has any meaning other than what is assigned to it by sentient beings. There is no God, no divinity, no cosmic consciousness who assigns some sort of objective meaning. Whatever meanings we find in reality, they're our own subjective creations.

But this often goes unnoticed. We confuse the inherent is'ness of things, with the ought'ness human minds assign to them. 

For example, I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, then return to bed. That's a fact. It happened. It is. Now, I can add an ought, a statement of what should be. This is optional.

"I need to get back to sleep quickly; I've got an important meeting early tomorrow morning." 

Problems are mental creations. Real, but not really. 

I'm awake in the middle of the night. It'll be a problem if I can't get back to sleep. OK, true enough. However, the first sentence possesses more truth, more reality, than the second sentence. 

Even more so are these two sentences: God exists. It'll be a problem if I don't return to God.

In this case I've made a problem out of something that almost certainly isn't true, the existence of God. Yet billions of people around the world devote huge amounts of time and energy trying to bridge the gap between them and God. 

(I have extensive personal experience of this, having been one of those people for over three decades.)

So when I stop viewing being awake in the middle of the night as a problem, but simply as a fact, I'm taking a stand for natural reality.

Human-made mental realities are something different. Highly important. Essential, in fact. Yet cognitive creations shouldn't be confused with natural reality.

Embracing what is real typically works better than imagining what isn't.

Here's how I put it in my previous post:

I've found that instead of thinking about some pleasing future state of affairs, or envisioning how good I'll feel if this or that happens (which could be "getting back to sleep"), natural reality as it is in the present moment contains all the contentment I need. 

Thus now I walk back from the nearby bathroom, slide into bed, pull the covers around me, and simply... be. 

Well, a bit more than that: I simply am aware of my being. 

My bodily being, because there isn't anything else to be aware of when it comes to "me." Brain, body, mind, awareness -- these are all physical. It makes no sense to divide myself into physical and non-physical, body and brain, matter and spirit.

Sleep is a physical phenomenon, as everything is.  

More: sleep is an entirely natural physical phenomenon. I have a natural urge to sleep, just as I have a natural urge to eat, drink, defecate/urinate, and have sex (though I hasten to add, not all at the same time!).

When I wake up in the middle of the night, bodily me, the only me, knows how to get back to sleep. So I've found that it works better to just be aware of how I feel physically in the present moment, rather than think or imagine something outside of bodily now.

In the same way, I no longer go through my day imagining God or any other immaterial divinity. I embrace the reality of what is really present, which doesn't include a hypothetical supernatural being.

So, yeah, how I get back to sleep after waking up at night sure does have Cosmic Significance. In my mind at least, the only place Cosmic Significance can exist.  

When trying to get back to sleep: to think or not to think?

Having reached the venerable age of 67, I'm familiar with the Yes! Aha! feeling I frequently have when I ponder questions in the What Life is All About category. 

Those Yes's/Aha's mean something to me, obviously, or I wouldn't feel so positive about them. But whether my personal mini-revelation resonates with anyone else... who knows? 

Well, I'll get some clues if anybody leaves a comment on this post. So here goes my attempt to explain why getting back to sleep has become so interesting to me.

Sleeping is very personal. Here's how it typically goes in my case.

I drop off to sleep quickly, soon after I go to bed, which is usually around midnight. When I first go to sleep, I don't do anything special. I sort of mull over what happened during the day; what's up for tomorrow; what events have caught my attention news-wise (I'm a political junkie).

Probably because I'm so tired, sleep just happens naturally when I first close my eyes at night. But after I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (hey, I'm 67; and a coffee drinker into the evening), fairly often it takes me a while to get back to sleep.

For most of my life, I've figured that what I did to get to sleep the first time should be good enough for getting back to sleep the second time.

And usually this works: just letting thoughts flit through my mind; not focusing on anything in particular; allowing whatever comes to mind to occupy my psyche for a while. But sometimes I have trouble getting back to sleep, especially if a certain thought overstays its welcome.

What I've noticed is that I typically envision something I'd like to have happen.

Such as, how cool it would be if my favorite presidential candidate wins the next primary contest. Or if something I wrote in my citizen activist persona changes minds and gets lots of Facebook "likes." In other words, I'm trying to get myself into a positive, feel-good frame of mind conducive to relaxing and getting back to sleep.

Being a long time meditator -- daily for the past 46 years or so -- I've also used techniques such as repeating a mantra or counting my breaths to get back to sleep. These work OK, but focusing my attention in those sorts of ways now seems counterproductive, since focusing and sleeping appear at odds.

So this gets me to my mini-revelation (which, again, may strike others as so mini as to be microscopic).

The best way for me to get back to sleep is (1) not to try to get back to sleep, and (2) to simply be aware of what my body feels like at the present awake moment.

Doing something, anything, like repeating a word or counting my breaths, this now strikes me as fostering an I-can't-get-back-to-sleep problem. I've taken a simple situation -- waking up to go to the bathroom -- and made it into an issue: I need to do something special to get back to sleep.

As an avid Tai Chi practitioner, this seems to go against the grain of Taoist principles that can summed up in modern jargon as Relax and flow with it, dude. 

Hence, my current approach to getting back to sleep mirrors my current approach to religiosity and spirituality in general: be natural; be real; be content.

I've found that instead of thinking about some pleasing future state of affairs, or envisioning how good I'll feel if this or that happens (which could be "getting back to sleep"), natural reality as it is in the present moment contains all the contentment I need. 

Thus now I walk back from the nearby bathroom, slide into bed, pull the covers around me, and simply... be. 

Well, a bit more than that: I simply am aware of my being. 

How parts of my body feel, pressed against the mattress. How my breathing feels, air going into and out of my nostrils, my chest and abdomen rising and falling. Just lying in bed, awake yet not far removed from my previous sleeping -- that's a fine state of being. 

I feel content. I don't feel much of a need to think about the future. Right now is just fine. The feelings I could envision myself feeling in the future... they're already present. Calmness. Contentment. Peace of mind.

My brain and body seem harmoniously connected. My mind isn't trying to produce a state of affairs different from what is right now, right here. Not trying to get back to sleep, I do. 

Now, does this insight have any Cosmic Significance regarding the Big Questions of Life? Damn, I sure hope so! But that's a subject for another blog post. I'm starting to feel sleepy... very sleepy...

Billionaire Shivinder Singh plans to volunteer for Indian guru

Recently someone left a comment on one of my blog posts that had a link to a story, "Shivinder Singh's ties with low-profile sect go beyond spirituality."
Download Shivinder Singh’s ties with low-profile sect go beyond spirituality - Livemint

The commenter said:

Looks like Shivinder is on his way to become the next Guru ..... What do you think Brian and Dr. Lane?

Well, I don't have an answer to that question, because I have no idea what is behind Shivinder's decision to give up being a billionaire Indian businessman and do volunteer work at the headquarters of a spiritual organization. 

What I do know, having written numerous posts on this subject, is that Shivinder Singh is the nephew of the guru, Gurinder Singh, who heads Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a group I belonged to for many years. The story talks about their financial ties.

In the 1990s, there was speculation that Shivinder’s father Parvinder Singh, the late chairman and managing director of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, would succeed Charan Singh as the guru of RSSB.

Shivinder and his older brother Malvinder Singh’s messy ascendancy to the top at Ranbaxy after a battle for control of the drug maker following Parvinder’s death in 1999 was facilitated by Gurinder Singh, who acted as a peacemaker.

When asked about the family’s relationship with RSSB, a Fortis official said that the association goes back six generations.

“There are no strings attached to this decision except for service,” the official said.

However, there are significant business links between Fortis and Religare Enterprises Ltd (both promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh) and RSSB. The family of Gurinder Singh owns a significant stake in Religare Enterprises, according to the latest shareholding pattern of the company available in the public domain.

Very significant, actually. About five years ago I calculated that the guru's family owned shares worth about a quarter of a billion dollars. 

But it was the idea of seva (or sewa), selfless service, that grabbed my attention in the story. While this is similar to volunteer work, some passages in the story show that it has a rather different meaning in an Indian religious context.

In a statement, Shivinder said, “A short while ago, I requested sewa at Radha Soami Beas, headquartered near Amritsar, and I am fortunate to have been accepted. I will move to dera, Beas, post transitioning my executive responsibilities at Fortis.”

...Sewa is the concept of selfless service pioneered by gurudwaras wherein devotees perform all tasks, from managing kitchen to cleanliness to administrative duties on their own accord.

Sure, often volunteer positions require certain skills, and not everybody is accepted for them. But Shivinder's mention of requesting sewa points to something different: seva in the Indian context is frequently viewed as being service to God or the Guru (who are often considered to be the same being). 

So seva isn't exactly "selfless" in my extensive experience with RSSB sevadars/volunteers. They usually feel special in some way -- even if the feeling is "I'm nothing special; everything I'm doing is being done by God/guru." 

I wrote about this in a 2005 post.

I’ve been to RSSB gatherings where I’ve thanked someone for giving me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Instead of the volunteer simply saying, “You’re welcome,” I hear: “Oh no, brother. Please don’t thank me. I’m doing everything on behalf of the guru. He is the real doer, not me. I am just an instrument in his hands.”

I think to myself, “Hmmmm. This humble selfless instrument standing before me sure sounds like a self-willed someone, given the lengthy response I got to my pithy ‘thank you.’” Why can’t religious people act as naturally as non-religious people?

I did a lot of volunteer work for RSSB, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, during the thirty-plus years I was an active member of the organization. Sometimes (often? always?) I fell prey to the same self-centeredness masquerading as humility that bothered me in the anecdote above.

Now that my volunteering is thoroughly secular, undertaken with an atheist frame of mind, I can compare it with the religious'y "seva" attitude I had before. 

For example, recently I spent a week writing a complex document for a community group I'm a member of. We're concerned that the City of Salem is going to waste money on an overly expensive new police facility, which means earthquake-proofing City Hall and the Library won't happen as previously planned.

Many lives could be lost as a result when the anticipated Big One earthquake hits the northwest part of the United States.

To me, this felt a lot like seva. Maybe exactly like seva.

This is the nature of all volunteer work, really. You're doing something without pay because you want to help someone or something else. It feels good to volunteer, since we humans enjoy working together for a common good.

In my view, there's nothing truly selfless about selfless service. Especially if you think, "I'm doing this not for myself, but for the benefit of God/guru." Yeah, right...

I strongly suspect that Shivinder Singh, like almost all RSSB sevadars, considers that he will be earning good karma and God's/guru's grace through his seva. Otherwise, why wouldn't he do some sort of other volunteer work, given how many unmet needs there are in India that he could help fulfill?

Understand: I'm not criticizing his decision to stop being a businessman and start being a sevadar at RSSB's spiritual community in the Punjab known as the Dera. That's up to him. During my time as a RSSB member, I knew other people who did the same thing -- become full-time volunteers at the Dera.

I'm just saying this: seva is simply volunteer work. It's no different from what countless people do without pay every day all around the world. Giving it a special name doesn't make it special.  

Malheur Refuge militants praying to God while calling the FBI evil

There's high drama playing out here in Oregon right now.

Four remaining armed militant militia members (is there any other kind?) who have taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County are now surrounded by the FBI, who apparently have moved in to within 50 feet of them with armored vehicles.

The Oregonian newspaper has a story on this, which includes an embedded You Tube live audio feed of the militants talking among themselves, and to some supporters who currently are driving to the refuge from Portland. 

The militants see themselves as Christians standing up for their twisted version of the United States Constitution. They're crazy people who have precisely zero understanding of how wacko they are. 

I'm both fascinated and appalled by this drama. I can listen to the live audio for a few minutes, then find the militants and the Nevada legislator (Michele Fiore) so irritating, I have to turn off their idiotic conversation for a while.

They do a lot of praying. Believe me, a lot.

They believe that God is on their side, and the FBI law enforcement officers are evil. This is a great example of how religion can make stupid people even more stupid, and dangerous people even more dangerous.

Here's what I said in a Facebook post not long ago:

Yes, I'll admit that the live audio feed of the militants talking their crazy talk is gripping. (Available on the Oregonian web site and many other places.) But I can only take so much of their crap before I have to turn it off for a while.

These idiots do a lot of praying to their imaginary God. If anyone wants a good reason not to be religious, just listen to the absurd blathering of the Nevada legislator (Fiore) and Franklin Graham, I believe it was.

They actually believe that the FBI agents, who have been amazingly restrained during the illegal takeover of the refuge, are evil. Along with, apparently, all other government officials. Well, as an atheist I've been doing my own form of "praying." It just isn't to any God.

"I hope these fools don't cause themselves to be shot, and they decide to surrender peacefully, then spend time in jail for the crimes they've committed. But if anything goes wrong, it clearly won't be the fault of the FBI, as anyone who listens to the rants of the militants fully understands.

So thank you, militants, for making a couple of things crystal clear. Anybody who believes in their twisted view of the Constitution doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Their demands to have federal land turned over to private ownership also can never be taken seriously. And anyone who prays to God while surrounded by the FBI because they're armed and doing something illegal shows up the ridiculousness of religion."

After getting a few supportive comments, I added this:

I don't know very many deeply religious people. But if any read this comment, I'm curious if you true believers think it makes sense to pray repeatedly to God when surrounded by the FBI because you're armed and have broken numerous laws, including threatening violence against law enforcement officers. Is that what your God wants, or do you agree with me that this sort of religious crap is ridiculous?

Since everything is "sacred," no particular thing is

I liked this letter in New Scientist a lot. It won't please religiously-minded people, because religions like to divide the world into parts -- like sacred and profane, godly and devilish, spiritual and material. 

That sort of thing.

But as letter writer Howells says, the word universe starts with uni, one. Meaning, a whole.

Once we start making manmade divisions such as sacred and profane, we're moving away from reality and into unproductive abstractions.

Wisdom leads us to either think, everything is sacred or nothing is sacred. They really amount to the same thing. Read on to understand why.

Editor's pick: The trouble with the sacred

From Dave Howells

I agree with Mary-Jane Rubenstein that we do not need to choose between God and the multiverse and that we should think differently about what is sacred (19/26 December 2015, p 64).

The problem, it seems to me, is that to define what is sacred defines, by default, what is not sacred – what is profane or mundane. Surely, it is that which has contributed so largely to our sad, violent history, and given us a licence to exploit our world with no sense of respect; which in turn has led us to our current ecological crisis.

But whether we look at it from a scientific or Western religious perspective, it has never made sense to split up the universe in this way. Perhaps the most basic assumption of science is that the universe – everything – is one coherent whole. The body of scientific knowledge we have built sees any potential divergence from that as a problem.

Religion, too, holds that the universe is God's creation. So, logically then, everything is sacred, and it would be a travesty to deem anything as not sacred. (Mystics enthusiastically tell us this, and I must say that I see their point.)

The worst we can do is redefine the sacred – we should give up the whole idea. Which leads me to the question: why do some of us feel the need to deem anything sacred?

Magazine issue 3058 published 30 January 2016

Atheism is perfect. So says David Silverman.

My wife, who in some ways has become even more fervently churchless than I am, was the one who recommended David Silverman's book to me.

"Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World" takes no prisoners.

After reading the first few chapters, I can tell that Silverman makes other anti-religion writers like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens look like comparative pussies. 

In the book's introduction, he says:

But religion is not just incorrect, it is malevolent.

It ruins lives, splits families, and justifies hatred and bigotry, all while claiming to be the source of morality. People die and suffer needlessly because of religion; such a waste.

...Some (too many?) people call me a dick because I challenge the absurd notion that religion deserves respect by default. But religion is wrong for demanding respect simply for being, and even more wrong for demanding never to be questioned.

Indeed, it is my duty as an American, as an atheist, and as a nice person to do what I can to take religion down -- not by force, not by law, but by truth.

And the truth is quite simple: all religions are lies, and all believers are victims.

Silverman takes it from there in the rest of the book, building argument after argument in favor of his atheism good, religion bad thesis. 

He's bold and persuasive. Here's his take on the perfection of atheism, which I heartily agree with.

Atheism is perfect. Yes, I know every religion says the same thing about itself, but religions are wrong. (Yes, I know they all say that about atheism too.)

What I mean by this is that atheism is so simple that it cannot have any flaws. It is simply a lack of a belief in gods, so unless there is a reason to believe in gods, it is a logically perfect position.

Once a single piece of scientifically valid evidence for the existence of any deity is unearthed, this will change, and atheism, being the single condition of the absence of a belief in a god, will have a flaw, but as this has never happened, I'm not nervous.

...In the history of mankind, atheism has never had a single moment of failure. Never, not even once, has atheism been proven wrong, and once is all we'd need to drop it completely.

If atheism had been proven wrong, if one god had been verified, if one supernatural event had been measured, if one ocean had really parted. or if one person ever really rose from the grave, I would quit my job because I'd be wrong.

[Silverman is the American Atheists president.]

...Prove me wrong, even once, and I'll convert.