Church of the Churchless

A justice system not based on a belief in free will would be much better

Free will is an illusion. There's little doubt about this, though it will make some time for this scientific fact to be accepted by most people. Wrong habits of thinking take time to change. Here's a comic strip example.

In my most recent post about free will, I gave a poor review to a book that somehow managed to conclude that even though determinism rules, and free will is an illusion, the justice system still should assume that a person was freely responsible for making the choice to commit a crime.

This continues to leave the door wide open to making retribution a rationale for inflicting severe punishments on so-called "evil doers," rather than having a justice system focus on rehabilitation of criminals and protecting society from criminals during their period of rehabilitation (which could be a life sentence in the rare cases where no possibility of of rehabilitation exists).

A regular commenter on this blog, "Appreciative Reader," left this comment on the post:

Brian, can you talk about (or perhaps link to) the specifics of what you have in mind when you advocate for our penal/justice system to focus on prevention of crime and rehabilitation of criminals (as opposed to going for something like "punishment")? What would such a system actually look like?

Well, a bit of Googling turned up some links that seem to be worth perusing: here, here, and here. 

I'm also sharing some excerpts from one of my favorite books about free will, Richard Oerton's "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up t0 a False Belief." I've written about the book in several posts, but I don't believe I've shared these quotes before. Oerton is a British lawyer, so his views about the justice system and free will are well-informed.

Here's some of what Oerton has to say in a chapter called "Towards a rational penal system."

In a system which made no concessions at all to irrationality, retributive punishment would play no part whatsoever, but the other aims of sentencing set out at the start of Chapter 21, would still be relevant.

[These are: (b) the reduction of crime (including its reduction by deterrence); (c) the reform and rehabilitation of offenders; (d) the protection of the public, and (e) the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their offences.]

The overriding purpose would simply be the protection of society through the prevention of crime. The focus would be on the harmfulness, rather than the wickedness, of the offender. Imprisonment would still be necessary in very many cases -- and in the case of offenders who were both dangerous and unreachable, it might have to last a very long time -- but subject to that, the aim of those involved in the penal system would be to decide on the approach best calculated to turn the offender away from crime.

It is here, in relation to the treatment of offenders, and not in the hair-splitting statutory rules about deserts and culpability, that their varying mental states would be important. Under our present system, reform of the offender hardly gets a look-in, and our prisons are full of people with mental illness which goes largely untreated. 

Official statistics tell us that three-quarters of prisoners have below average I.Q.s, that over two-thirds have one or more mental health disorders and that nearly one-tenth are psychotic (that's to say, insane).

The only prison in the country which is run entirely on therapeutic principles is Grendon. Its regime, far from being soft or lenient, makes much greater demands on the prisoners than any ordinary prison: a consultant psychiatrist uses unexpectedly colourful language in saying that it provides "group therapy with turbo-charged-rocket-boost-high-voltage-plasma-engines, going at warp factor ten."

A report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons in 2009 reaffirmed its "remarkable achievements with some of the ... most dangerous and difficult prisoners." It was awarded the Longford Prize in 2008, when the judges described it as a beacon of hope for the prison service.

...I feel real anger, too, about the way in which, when such criminals are caught, we ignore all the distorting influences which society has allowed to bear upon them, along with any contribution which their genetic endowment has made to their criminality, and treat their crimes, not as a result of these things, but as a result of something called free will.

If free will really did allow us to choose our personalities, or to slough them off at will, who in the world would freely choose to have the personality of a serial killer, or to act in accordance with it? Would you choose even to step into the slightly more comfortable shoes of Burglar Bill? 

Criminals are victims of causality just as their victims are, and none the less so if, as sometimes happens, causality has made them arrogant, gloating and glad to be the people they are.

There is another lesson which determinism teaches us about crime, and that is the need to intervene more often, more early, and more effectively, in the lives of those who are on the way to becoming criminals.  Although attempts actually to do this are spasmodic and half-hearted, the need to do so is becoming increasingly to be recognised. 

Even if we profess to reject determinism, we know deep down that our only hope of making a real reduction in crime lies in tackling at an early stage the chains of causality which lead to it. We cannot rely on "free will" to do the job; it will not come riding to the rescue at the last minute, like the U.S. Cavalry in an old Hollywood film. 

It is true that the imposition of penalties on convicted offenders may deter them from future crime, because it modifies the causal chain, but this comes too late -- too late for the criminals and too late for their victims.

"Free Will Explained" is a poor explanation of free will

I had high expectations when I began reading Dan Barker's book, "Free Will Explained." Being a firm non-believer in free will, I figured that Barker, an avowed atheist, would give free will the same de-bunking as Sam Harris and numerous other scientifically minded authors have.

I'm a free will junkie.

I find this subject fascinating. I've read most of the books that argue free will doesn't exist, even though we humans believe we possess it. So since the subtitle of Barker's book is How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion, I expected a rational, reasonable, factual explanation of not only why free will is an illusion, but the benefit of giving up a belief in it.

Well, even before I got through the introduction, I found myself writing more and more question marks in the margins, because what Barker was saying made so little sense.

He admits that free will is a fiction. Determinism rules through chains of causes and effects. So far, so good.

Where Barker lost me is his contention that "Free will is a product of judgment." He claims that "free will is irrelevant -- it doesn't even exist -- until you judge behavior. It is a retroactive product of judgment."

He's talking about a particular sort of judgment, moral judgments. Supposedly free will is a social truth, like marriage. Well, this goes against how almost everybody in the world, aside from Barker, I guess, looks upon free will.

Almost everybody feels like they possess free will, even though it is an illusion. Likewise, almost everybody says "the sun is setting" rather than "the Earth is revolving." We feel like we have free will when we're alone, just as we see the sun setting when we're alone. If someone is by themselves on a desert island, they are still going to feel like they have free will, no moral judgement required.

We choose a flavor of ice cream. We pick a book to buy. We decide where to go on vacation. None of these decisions entail making moral judgments, unless the meaning of "moral" is stretched far beyond its normal usage. I fail to see how a sense of free will only arises after a judgment is made, but this is a core tenet of Barker's book. 

Now, what bothers me the most about "Free Will Explained" isn't the crazy way Barker looks upon free will, but the implications he draws from that viewpoint. Unlike virtually every other author who writes about the illusion of free will, somehow Barker is simultaneously able to embrace the reality of determinism while also claiming that we are morally responsible for our actions.

"We can be completely unfree, yet also completely accountable for our own actions," he writes. Barker further asserts that "moral accountability only needs to go as far back in time as the mental decision to act was made."

So even though someone's decision to rob a bank, say, was completely determined by their genetics, upbringing, and countless life experiences, Barker is fine with the justice system assuming that they possessed free will and could have chosen to not rob the bank. Hence, it is perfectly justified, in Barker's view, to exact retribution for freely willed acts, rather than viewing criminality as something that society needs to be protected from, and the criminal rehabilitated from.

Barker goes so far as to write, "Yes, the brain tumor (or whatever) is one of the causes of the action, but the individual human being is the actual perpetrator. It is irrelevant to ask whether the person was ultimately free or not. We only assume the person was immediately free."

Huh? Barker admits that free will is an illusion, It doesn't exist. Yet somehow he is OK with a judge or jury assuming that someone with a brain tumor was "immediately free" at the moment of making a decision, even though the tumor caused them to act in a certain unlawful way.

One of the more annoying parts of Barker's book is when he raises the straw man of determinists failing to praise people or favoring moral education. He says that when his children took their first steps and he clapped his hands to congratulate them, "Should I have acted like a dull determinist and coldly remarked to my kids, 'That's no big deal. You had no choice'?"

Geez. Barker doesn't understand how us determinists view reality. Everything at the level of everyday life is determined, everything! (I'm leaving out quantum phenomena, though arguably these also are determined, albeit in a probabilistic sense.)

A determinist is going to praise their children because this is what they have been determined to do. If they don't, then they have been determined to do that. There's no getting outside of the bounds of determinism in our causal universe. 

At the end of his book Barker notes that "Free will is not a scientific truth, it is a social truth." Again, this doesn't make sense. An illusory sense of free will exists in humans because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage. This makes it a scientific truth. The illusion of free will also is a scientific truth, as Barker readily admits.

Yet he persists in believing that it is better that people believe in the illusion, than in the truth. He appears to be fine with exacting retributive justice that is justified by a judge or jury assuming that someone possessed the free will to not commit a crime. 

Amazingly, Barker goes so far as to say, "Denying free will is a put-down to human nature." Wow. Discovering the truth that free will is an illusion is a put-down to human nature? I heartily disagree. For centuries people had the illusion that some races are superior to others, which justified slavery. They also had the illusion that women are the weaker sex and shouldn't be able to vote, among other consequences of that illusion.

Belief in free will isn't an innocent illusion. It is used to justify harsh punishments, since our justice system is founded on an assumption that, aside from insanity, people are free to either commit a crime or refrain from that behavior. Books like the one Barker wrote aren't merely wrong, they are dangerous.   

 

 

What is enlightenment good for?

David Chapman, a philosophically-inclined Buddhist'y guy I follow on Twitter, raised an interesting question:

It sure is a reasonable question. But I'd like to go further by ditching the word "practical." Which makes the question, in statement form, Show us some thing this "enlightenment" is good for.

Meaning, the way I see it, how would anyone know whether someone is enlightened? 

Substitute a wording of your choice for enlightened, if you like. Spiritually advanced. God-realized. Possesses an elevated consciousness. The point is, well, to be able to point to some characteristic of such a person that distinguishes them from an unenlightened person.

If there isn't any differentiating characteristic, if there's no way to tell whether someone is enlightened, then isn't "enlightenment" just like any other abstraction that fails to point to anything demonstrably real? 

Like God or heaven. Or fairy dust. 

If someone is enlightened, or God-realized, shouldn't there be some way of telling them apart from other people? If there isn't, then how is enlightenment or God-realization a thing to be sought after? 

A baker can bake. An artist makes art. An auto mechanic fixes cars. A teacher teaches. And an enlightened person... what? ... enlights? What the heck does that mean?

I've heard devotees talk about a supposedly God-realized guru in ways like these: He's so inspiring. I feel elevated in his presence. His eyes looked right through me. I had all my questions answered. 

OK. There's lots of people who don't claim to be enlightened who merit these sorts of statements. So again, what really distinguishes an enlightened person from an unenlightened person?

If there's no outward characteristic, only a supposedly inward subjective essence, then enlightenment truly isn't good for anything. Each of us already possesses an inward subjective essence. It's called human consciousness. 

Wu wei and no free will work well together

Today I got this question via email:

Hey Brian, quick question.  But there might not be a quick answer.  LOL

Do the concept of  wu wei and the absence of free will work together? 

For some reason, I’m having trouble really understanding wu wei and how it works. Most of the time, I think I understand it from an intellectual stand point.  But then walking in it is a whole different animal.

Wu wei is a Taoist term that literally means non-doing. But "effortless effort" is how I think of wu wei. It's when things are going really smoothly, when we're in a state of flow, when this follows that in a pleasingly melodious fashion. 

Naturally I had a quick answer to the quick question.

Well, my understanding of wu wei is that it basically means effortless effort. So it seems to me that it meshes nicely with no free will. My reason for thinking this is that most of our problems arise from either believing that the past could have been different from what it was, or that we’ll make a mistake in some future decision. If we accept that both the past and future are determined, including our efforts to decide what to do, then this means that we can relax about what has happened or will happen, because what is to be, will be (as an old song says).

I mangled the words of Que Sera, Sera a bit, so here's how the actual lyrics start off.

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, What will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me:

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

Pretty damn simple philosophy of life. And an appealing one.

I've written a lot about free will, or rather the lack thereof, most recently here. But I'd never thought before about the relationship between wu wei and free will.

Now I've got another reason to embrace the almost certain reality that free will is an illusion. Determinism is the secular equivalent of God's will, fate, karma, destiny, and similar supernatural notions. 

We atheists can get the same peace of mind from accepting determinism, and hence our lack of free will, as religious believers get from those other ideas.

What will be, will be. The future's not ours to see.

I remember hearing this 1956 Doris Day song when I was just seven or eight. It rang true to my child brain then. It rings true to my senior citizen brain now.

Sam Harris sums up morality in eight tweets

Sam Harris did a nice job of encapsulating what morality is all about, from a broad perspective, in these eight Twitter tweets:

Getting from “Is” to “Ought”
1/ Let’s assume that there are no ought’s or should’s in this universe. There is only what *is*—the totality of actual (and possible) facts.

2/ Among the myriad things that exist are conscious minds, susceptible to a vast range of actual (and possible) experiences.

3/ Unfortunately, many experiences suck. And they don’t just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias—they really and truly suck. (If you doubt this, place your hand on a hot stove and report back.)

4/ Conscious minds are natural phenomena. Consequently, if we were to learn everything there is to know about physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, etc., we would know everything there is to know about making our corner of the universe suck less.

 

5/ If we *should* to do anything in this life, we should avoid what really and truly sucks. (If you consider this question-begging, consult your stove, as above.)

 

6/ Of course, we can be confused or mistaken about experience. Something can suck for a while, only to reveal new experiences which don’t suck at all. On these occasions we say, “At first that sucked, but it was worth it!”

 

7/ We can also be selfish and shortsighted. Many solutions to our problems are zero-sum (my gain will be your loss). But *better* solutions aren’t. (By what measure of “better”? Fewer things suck.)

 

8/ So what is morality? What *ought* sentient beings like ourselves do? Understand how the world works (facts), so that we can avoid what sucks (values).

 

 

Open Thread 12 (free speech for comments)

Since preachy comments are continuing to show up on posts I've written that have nothing to do with the topic, on Tuesday I'm going to start deleting those comments if they aren't in an Open Thread -- like this one.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. So you can always find an Open Thread that way.

Starting Tuesday, comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for pro-religion remarks and whatever. 

Back in 2015 I wrote "No preachiness" reminder for commenters. Click on that link to learn what is acceptable as a comment on a post other than an Open Thread. 

Look, every day I check out a bunch of web sites and blogs, mostly about news and politics on the local or national level. I enjoy reading comments on stories or posts. But it's irritating when people leave a comment about something totally extraneous to the subject of the story or post.

For example, comments on a story in our local newspaper about a City Council decision may veer off into But what about Hillary Clinton's emails??!! This isn't dissimilar from me writing a blog post about free will and finding that in comments people are praising their guru, or God.

Check out the name of this blog: Church of the Churchless. With an emphasis on churchless.

If you're religious, that's fine. Just keep in mind that if you went to a blog called Best Tips for Grilling the Perfect Steak, and you started extolling the virtues of vegetarianism in a comments section, the blogger would be justified in saying to you, "Hey, your comments are off-topic."

So I urge you to think for yourself and stay on-topic when you leave a comment on a blog post. Don't just regurgitate some religious dogma or say something unrelated to the post. Again, those sorts of comments belong in an Open Thread. 

I'm pleased that my ideas about God have changed

I just had an enjoyable hour-long phone conversation with a man who wanted to talk with me about my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization." 

It has been so long since I'd picked up the book, I read through it really quickly this morning to refresh my memory about what I'd written.

I have to say that I was impressed. Hey, I made a lot of sense! 

However, early on in our phone conversation I had to tell this guy that my views about both Plotinus, and spirituality in general, have changed quite a bit since I wrote Return to the One. 

Not completely, of course. For example, I still consider that there must be something eternal, which for me is best called "existence." If existence didn't exist, nothing else could.

Another good word for existence is the One, since existence is the foundation, or substrate, of, well, everything that exists. That makes existence an overarching unity. 

However, since this man liked Return to the One a lot, finding Plotinus's philosophy highly appealing, he was a bit (maybe a lot) taken aback by how much my views had shifted over the past fourteen years or so.

Near the end of our conversation he even read a passage from my book in an attempt to convince me that what I'd written was true. Which was kind of weird, but in a nice way.

I did my best to explain that I still believe in some broad themes of Return to the One. I just now prefer to look upon those themes in a more naturalistic and scientific fashion. Instead of "soul," I prefer to think of "consciousness." Instead of "spirit," I've come to favor "laws of nature." And as already noted, I like "existence" more than "God" or "the One."

We talked about how I was able to write the book, even though I knew next to nothing about Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, before I started to research it.

Plotinus's ideas fit fairly neatly into the Eastern form of mysticism and meditation that I'd spent about 35 years practicing before writing Return to the One. So I had a lot to draw on, including my extensive reading in other sorts of mystic philosophies both of the East and West.

What I found most interesting about our conversation was this man's surprise that my views about spirituality could have changed so much. For me, the issue was simple: when I wrote Return to the One I believed in what I said. Now, I have other beliefs. I've changed. 

For the better, in my opinion. 

Doesn't everyone change? Our tastes in music, food, hobbies, clothes, and so much else evolve over time. We also learn more about the world, so our factual knowledge is constantly changing. Yet somehow our spiritual/religious beliefs, or the lack thereof, are supposed to stay constant?

That doesn't make sense to me.

It presupposes that there's some sort of divine objective truth, like 1 + 1 =2, which, once you possess it, shouldn't be discarded. Well, if anyone knows what that truth is, please enlighten me as to what it is. I used to believe that such existed, but I don't anymore.

Change happens. Such is the way of the world. Also, the way of how we view the world, philosophically, religiously, spiritually. 

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will. 

Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts:

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose
Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will
Belief in free will linked to desire to punish

Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time through, perhaps because I've had five years since the first reading to do my own further musings about free will.

I'm going to share some excerpts from Oerton's chapter, "Free will and religion: some parallels." 

A basic parallel is that both free will and religiosity come naturally to people. It just seems so obvious that humans can freely choose to do this rather than that. It also appears so obvious that God exists, since how could the universe come into being without a creator?

Well, reality doesn't give up its secrets easily. This is the lesson of science: coming to know how things really are, as opposed to how they appear to be, is tough going. Religious belief is easy to come by. So is believing in free will. 

What Oreton does is his book is challenge the easy belief in free will. He also makes a good case for viewing religion and free will as two sides of the same faulty-belief coin. Here's some passages that I particularly liked in the above-mentioned chapter. He's just spoken about the Age of Faith many centuries ago when atheism would have been almost unthinkable.

There may have been a few who questioned the existence of God but, by and large, it would not have entered anyone's head to do so. Religious belief was in the air that people breathed, taken for granted. They were born into it, they lived in it and they died in it. 

They knew that God existed, and knew with such certainty that they would never have felt the need to say so. And don't we think now about free will in very much the same way as our ancestors thought then about God? Don't we accept it just as unquestioningly? Our own age may not be an age of religious faith, but it is an age of faith in free will.

...One of these parallels lies in the fact that God and free will are both mystical concepts. The idea that we might be able to understand God is almost blasphemous. God is by definition transcendent, supernatural, and (as the old hymn has it) moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.

If an unbeliever questions a believer about the nature or behavior of God, the unbeliever will be met sooner or later (and probably sooner) by the assertion that, because God is what God is, such questions are unanswerable. And so it is with free will: those who want to live by it must accept that there are no good answers to the questions which they might (but seldom do) ask about its nature and purported effects.

...those who believe in free will see the behaviour of their fellow human beings in such a way as to justify and reinforce their belief -- just as religious believers see the work of God so clearly in the workings of the world that they cannot see these workings in any other way.

And here's some passages that make some great points about how, if we accept the reality of evolution, as every educated person should, some tough questions about free will arise.

We can't very well say that free will has always existed, if only because the human race hasn't always existed. It would not be credible to suggest that the earth's first life forms had free will. It would not be credible to suggest that an influenza virus now has free will, or even a tapeworm, or a woodlouse.

All these living things must be creatures of causality, governed and moved purely by physical processes. If we, as twenty-first century people, are not governed by physical processes because we have what we call free will, we must have managed, at some stage of our evolution, to detach ourselves from the laws of nature which up until then had governed us.

But when and how? So far as I know, evolutionary scientists have not concerned themselves with these questions, and they are unlikely to do so unless they themselves believe in free will, know exactly what it is and manage to devise some criteria according to which its existence or non-existence can be recognized. 

We would be wise not to hold our breath.

Yet another parallel lies in the fact that like belief in God, belief in free will (so long as it remains unexamined) tends to be comforting to those who hold it.

...And the "utilitarian" argument for belief in God -- that it ought to be fostered because it is socially cohesive and leads people to live better lives -- is paralleled by a similarly utilitarian argument for belief in free will: that it is an important part of our society, our culture, our morality, our sense of self, and so on, and that we must therefore hang on to it however incoherent it may prove, on examination, to be, because humankind cannot stand very much reality.

Life of a carbon atom fills me with irreligious awe

Here's a scan of a page from a wonderful book by Caleb Scharf, "The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing."

After I highlighted the section in yellow, I wound my way through the nineteen steps in the scientifically-valid journey of a carbon atom that begins 10 billion years ago inside a massive star, and ends today with the eating of a potato. 

Coincidentally, I ate a baked (OK, microwaved) potato for dinner tonight. 

When I read the page below this morning, I found it surprisingly moving. Sure, I was familiar with the idea that we are all made of stardust, since the heavier atoms arise from stellar explosions.

But tracing the history of one of the countless carbon atoms in my body left me with a feeling of cosmic awe. Even though I'm hugely limited in time and space, my atoms have a history that spans much of the universe.

If they could talk, what a tale they could tell.

People turn to religion in order to feel like their lives have meaning. Well, science can fill that role also. And the beauty of science is that it is true. 

What follows is a creation story. One without any need for God. 

zzzz

Good Jerry Coyne piece about free will (the lack thereof)

I'm a big fan of writings that debunk free will. (Just can't help myself.)

Here's a good piece by Jerry Coyne that appeared on his Evolution is True blog: "Dawkins and Krauss on free will." It makes the same points that I've made in my own writings about free will, albeit in a clearer fashion. 

Here's an excerpt. But you really should read the entire post. 

If you don’t believe in libertarian free will, then the concept of moral responsibility becomes problematic, though the problem of responsibility itself is not problematic. What changes is how we reward and, especially, punish people.

Think about it: if people really couldn’t have chosen otherwise, and had to behave as they did, then doesn’t that have any implications for how we deal with bad behavior? After all, the law already takes this into account, somewhat exculpating people if they’re deemed mentally incapacitated or unable to tell the difference between right and wrong.  But all of us are like that, and even if we do know the difference between “right” and “wrong”, we can still act in only one way at a given moment, so that knowledge is irrelevant when determining punishment.

I’ve already discussed what reforms should be made to the penal system under determinism (see here, for instance), and that is not just “something to be discussed by philosophers”. It involves real effects on the lives of men and women, and on society at large. And it leads to more humane treatment of prisoners, treatment that can be based on science (e.g., “What forms of ‘punishment’ are best for deterring others, keeping people away from others until they’re reformed, and how can we best reform them?”)

Further, it can make a difference in your own behavior. In my case, I no longer beat myself up over decisions in my past that, I once felt, I could have made differently.  I couldn’t. Such recriminations are not only mentally sapping, but scientifically untenable.

Egos gone wild: religious believers thinking God is on their side

First off, I've been there and done that: thinking God is on my side. So when I say that this is a crazy belief, I'm criticizing an earlier version of myself -- along with everybody else who has an ego massive enough to believe such a thing.

Which includes the Green family, founders and owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Yesterday I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark, "Here's 5 good reasons not to shop at Salem's Hobby Lobby." 

As part of my Google research for that post, I listened to an interview a Slate podcaster, Mike Pesca, did with Candida Moss, a professor of theology who wrote a book about the Green family's quest to Christianize the United States ("Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby").

Here's a transcript I made of part of the podcast where Pesca and Moss discuss how the Green family just knew that God looked favorably upon their decision to close Hobby Lobby stores on Sunday.

Pesca: In fact, they made a decision early on, the family did, to close the stores on Sunday. How they decided was kind of interesting. They kind of rolled it out slowly, and it wasn't going well at first. But then when it did, they took that as proof it was the Lord's plan all along. 

Moss: That's right. They started with states that only had a few stores and closed them there. And by the time they were done with Texas, which had the most stores, then their profits took off again. And they interpreted that as a sign that they had won God's favor. 

Pesca: It seems like there are so many instances in your book where that wouldn't be the accurate interpretation, or even a logical interpretation, or an interpretation, you know, that a reasonable person, or anyone approaching a reasonable person would have. But they always interpret everything as telling them that they're right and God is on their side.

Moss: That's right.

This is a dangerous belief.

What makes it dangerous, rather than just plain crazy, is the fact that the Green family has billions of dollars to spend on promoting their fanatical brand of evangelical Christianity, spurred on by their conviction that whatever they do, God approves of it.

Here's how I summarized my blog post on Facebook:

Don't shop at Hobby Lobby, which just opened a store in Salem. Here's the headlines of my 5 reasons why. Those who shop there are having their money go to:
(1) Denying contraception coverage to women employed by corporations owned by religious zealots.
(2) Teaching the Bible in public schools as "true" and "good."
(3) Smuggling artifacts from Iraq, an act that supports terrorism.
(4) Supporting the election of Trump.
(5) Helping fund a $500 million Museum of the Bible.

Item (3) above resulted in Hobby Lobby having to pay a $3 million fine to the government after the company was caught smuggling Iraqi artifacts. So I guess the Green family believes that God approves of illegal acts that support terrorism.

I realize how easy it is for religious believers to look upon themselves as God's chosen people. This belief is comforting. It soothes the ego, even though religious people put on a false humility with words such as "God is doing everything" and "I'm just a servant of the Lord."

False, because I've seen how religious egos go wild when devotees of a particular faith are told that they are looked upon with special favor by God. Or, in Eastern religions, by a guru who is considered to be God in human form.

I've both seen this in other people, and also in myself.

For example, when I used to give spiritual talks at a Sunday meeting of fellow believers, and I was late leaving for the place where the meeting was held, if I found that all of the traffic lights were green when I came to the intersections between my house and the meeting location, I'd look upon this as a sign that God was helping me be on time.

 Crazy? Yes. Just like the Green family believing that God is on their side? Yes. 

It took me many years, decades, really, before I came to realize that I'm nobody special, and that the universe isn't treating me any differently from everybody else. 

That realization was a relief, actually. I could stop pretending and start living an authentic, honest, down to earth life. 

God isn't on anybody's side, because almost certainly there is no God. (I'd leave out the "almost," but I'm scientifically minded, and in science nothing is 100% certain.)