The kicker is that he claims in [...]]]> Wow, what a frustrating 50 minutes. I’ve just finished listening to the latest Thinking Atheist podcast, where Seth Andrews interviews Christian apologist Sye ten Bruggencate, who created the web site Proof That God Exists where he claims to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that God exists.

The kicker is that he claims in the podcast that his logic is incontrovertible because it is God given. Therefore, if you reject his logic as flawed, then the fault is not with his arguments, but with you, for not being a true Christian. If you were a true Christian, then you would have no argument with his logic. This, of course, is a classic example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

Here is the podcast. It’s worth a listen, just don’t be holding anything heavy in your hand, you might end up throwing it at your monitor.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) says he’s heard that almost half of all the Democrats in Congress are secretly part of the Communist Party.

He offered no names or proof of his accusation.

West told almost 100 Floridians in Palm City on Tuesday that “he’s [...]]]> How on earth did this idiot get be a Congressman?

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) says he’s heard that almost half of all the Democrats in Congress are secretly part of the Communist Party.

He offered no names or proof of his accusation.

West told almost 100 Floridians in Palm City on Tuesday that “he’s heard” as many as 80 Democrats in Congress are members of the Communist Party, according to the Palm Beach Post.

This is so depressing. It would be silly enough to accuse a bunch of Democrats of having secret socialist sympathies, but it’s an entirely whole new level of crazy to claim that there are dozens of actual, card carrying members of the Communist Party in Congress. Just how dumb do you need to be to believe this crap?

What’s worse is it’s likely that a majority of the constituents who voted for him believe it too, or at the very least believe it to be possible. After all, many of them believe that when Barack Obama is done being a secret Muslim Nazi during his day job, he attends midnight Communist Party strategy sessions on how to bring down America from within.

It might be funny if this type of belief wasn’t so pervasive amongst conservative voters. I mean, how on Earth can you even begin to have a rational debate over the future of country when millions of Americans believe that a large number of Democrats harbor secret plans to foment violent revolution in the streets and turn the nation into the Soviet Socialist States of America?  Not only is it not rational to believe this sort of nonsense, it is profoundly irrational. From a scale of one to ten, well, it’s off the deep end.

Over the last few years, no defection (if one can even call it that) was more famous [...]]]> One of the more pointless aspects of the continuing war of words between believers and non-believers in America is the scope and ferocity of the debate over the latest high profile defection from one side or the other.

Over the last few years, no defection (if one can even call it that) was more famous than that of the British philosopher, Antony Flew, who declared his conversion from atheism to deism, if not theism, in the last few years of his life.

More recently, a far less prominent atheist–someone I have never heard of–called Patrick Greene, claims to have become a Christian thanks to some local Christians who helped him in his hour of need. (Another blog now claims to have received an email from him that puts his conversion in doubt, but frankly, I don’t think it matters much either way.)

Going the other way, Theresa MacBain, a Methodist minister was lauded when she came out as an atheist at this year’s American Atheists Conference.

But while there is no doubt that these individual conversions spark a lot of debate, and can be a great fillip to those on the side gaining the new convert, I tend to believe that in the grand scheme of things, they don’t mean a great deal.

Why?

Well, looking at the number of believers and non-believers in America over the last few decades, there is one very striking feature that stands out. The number of non-religious people within each generation barely moves as people get older.

Here is a chart from the Pew Research Group of the number of people unaffiliated with a religion over the last 40 years, as broken down by age group:

 As you can plainly see, the percentage of Americans who claim to have “no religion” within each generation hardly shifts at all over the decades–little more than the margin of error, if that. What’s clear from the chart is that going all the way back to the 1940s (when the Greatest Generation came of age), the vast majority of Americans who are religious as they enter adulthood remain so for the rest of their lives. The same goes for those unaffiliated with any religion. Therefore, almost the entire trend away from religious affiliation in America over the last half-century can be attributed to the fact that each successive generation is growing up less religious than the last.

Of course, that doesn’t mean nobody changes sides. I didn’t become an atheist until my mid-thirties and I’m sure most people know someone who has become a Christian or a non-believer in middle age, but the statistics clearly show that they are the exception, not the rule. Contrary to frequent claims on both sides, winning a high profile convert to your side means very little in terms of getting other people to follow suit.

In fact, where the battle will be won or lost is over the hearts and minds of the young. Churches and religious groups have long understood this to be the case, and pour endless time and money into teaching–some say brainwashing–their children to follow in their parent’s footsteps. But remarkably, without much of an organized or concerted effort on behalf of the atheists, the religious community has been losing ground steadily for the last 40 years.

If the long term trend continues unabated, almost half of the children born in America today may grow up to be unaffiliated with any religion. Not that many of them will be atheists, but most will go about their daily lives without paying much attention to religion matters. This is precisely what has happened in other countries like the UK over the last few decades, and it seems quite likely that it will happen in America too, the odd high-profile conversion notwithstanding.

Thus began the ad for Brave New Books I heard on the local affiliate [...]]]> When a book store advertisement on the radio station you’ve just tuned into begins by thanking the Southern Poverty Law Center for adding them to their list of extremist anti-government “patriot” groups, you know you’ve left the rational world behind.

Thus began the ad for Brave New Books I heard on the local affiliate of the Genesis Communications Network which claims to be the “number one alternative talk radio network in the world” covering “a wide range of topics” including “current events, politics, gardening, auto, health, travel, lifestyle, nutrition, entertainment and home improvement.”

From what I have heard so far, there is one thing that unites their apparently varied programming output–it’s certifiably insane.

The fact that Alex Jones is their headlining talk show host–a man who has, quite literally, gotten fat off the profits made from scaring low information listeners with lurid tales of the New World Order takeover for the last 15 years–should be all you need to know about the sanity of the rest of their output, but sadly business appears to be booming. I guess that should not be too surprising since the majority of the advertising seems to want to provide comfort and succor to the poor, frightened listeners who have had the pants scared off them by Alex Jones and cohorts. For example, if you’ve been caught in a natural disaster, there’s no need to go to a FEMA concentration refugee camp when you can pump water out of your own well with your own handy dandy portable water pump, and there’s no need to risk being caught with worthless bank balances when you can buy gold bullion and keep all your assets safely stuffed in your mattress.

I guess one should be grateful that at least some of these companies are actually selling tangible goods as opposed to the false promises of religious radio, but that’s small comfort when you realize that most of the stuff will simply sit rotting in garages waiting for the New World Order-engineered crisis that will never come.

SOMETIMES THE NEW YORK TIMES MAKES ME LAUGH. HERE’S THE HUMOROUS HEADLINE FROM SUNDAY’S PAPER: “ISLAMIST GROUP BREAKS PLEDGE TO STAY OUT OF RACE IN EGYPT.”

IN OTHER WORDS, MUSLIMS LIE, JUST AS THEY ARE INSTRUCTED [...]]]> I happened to hear Cal Thomas’ daily commentary earlier today (April 3rd) and all I can say is “Ugh!”

SOMETIMES THE NEW YORK TIMES MAKES ME LAUGH. HERE’S THE HUMOROUS HEADLINE FROM SUNDAY’S PAPER: “ISLAMIST GROUP BREAKS PLEDGE TO STAY OUT OF RACE IN EGYPT.”

IN OTHER WORDS, MUSLIMS LIE, JUST AS THEY ARE INSTRUCTED TO DO TO INFIDELS BY THEIR KORAN. I HAVE PREDICTED THAT THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD WANTED TO TAKE OVER EGYPT AND FOR THAT MATTER THE REST OF ARAB COUNTRIES. FEW WOULD LISTEN AND NO ONE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT APPEARS TO BE LISTENING. THEY THINK DIPLOMACY AND SHOWING MUSLIMS ALL THE MOSQUES WE HAVE ALLOWED IN AMERCA WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE AND THEY WILL DECIDE NOT TO KILL US HERE IN AMERICA.

THOSE WHO BELIEVE THIS ARE FOOLS. YES, YOU HEARD ME. THEY ARE FOOLS. MUSLIMS PERSECUTE AND KILL JEWS AND CHRISTIANS IN THEIR COUNTRIES. WHAT MAKES US THINK BEING NICE WILL MAKE THEM PERSECUITE LESS, OR CEASE FROM WHAT THEY BELIEVE IS THEIR MANDATE FROM ALLAH TO CONTROL THE WORLD?

THAT ISN’T “ISLAMOPHOBIA,” AS MY CRITICS CLAIM. IT IS WHAT MANY OF THEIR LEADERS SAY. GROUPS LIKE CAIR CANNOT AND WILL NOT DENY IT. I’M CAL THOMAS IN WASHINGTON.

(Spelling mistakes are in the original, and for the life of me I don’t understand why they need to publish the transcripts capitalized and in bold. It’s as if they don’t know it brands him as being nothing more than the stereotypical religious fundamentalist ignoramus.)

Reading the transcript made me cringe as much as I did when I heard it originally, and if his diatribe not an example of “Islamophobia” then the word has no meaning. It would be hard for anyone to cram more incendiary paranoia into a minute of broadcast time.

He opens with an “I told you so” whine about  the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood reneging on its pledge not to run a candidate in the upcoming Presidential election in that country. Does he really think the New York Times is surprised that this has happened? I would be shocked if any serious observer of Middle Eastern politics had ruled out this development, yet Thomas believes himself to be a voice in the wilderness?

And unless Cal Thomas is a mind-reader, how does he know that they were always planning to run a candidate? Perhaps they made the pledge in good faith but then decided it would be more advantageous to them, to break the pledge and run. It’s not as though it’s never happened before. (“Read my lips…”)

But even if those dastardly Muslims were lying… “Stop the press!”– politicians lie! Politicians lie all the time. Muslim politicians lie. Mormon politicians lie. Christian politicians lie. Show me a politician and I will show you a liar. It doesn’t matter what religion they profess to adhere to.

Of course, Thomas isn’t satisfied with such mundane explanations. It all has to be part of a dark, nefarious plot to take over the entire world. (Cue deranged Dr. Evil cackle.) How do we know this? Well, says Thomas, we know this because that’s how all Muslims are told to think ergo, that’s what they must be thinking. (But, no, no, it’s not Islamophobia to believe that all Muslims want to take over the world, it’s all just a perfectly reasonable inference on iron-clad evidence… honest…).

But what if the Muslim Brotherhood, or Muslims in general, really do want to take over the world? Ignoring the fact that there isn’t any evidence beyond the usual religious rhetoric and empty threats from radical groups in no position to take over anything, what are the odds that any Muslim nation, or group of nations, will ever be in any position to carry out their supposed commandment to take over the world? Getting hold of a few nuclear weapons isn’t going to cut it, not when even a tiny country like Israel has enough fire power to annihilate a dozen Muslim nations at the press of a button. Even if it was the avowed intent of a large number of Muslims to take over the world for Allah, the threat would not be a credible one.

Ironically, if Muslims do yearn for the day when Islam reigns supreme over all the Earth, it’s nothing that millions of Christians haven’t done many times over the last two thousand years, and still do today. How does Cal Thomas think Christianity became the dominant religion in so many parts of the world — most of Africa, and all of Europe, North and South America? It wasn’t through love and gentle persuasion, that’s for sure.

Police captured a suspect in a shooting at a California religious college that resulted in “multiple fatalities” Monday, an Oakland police spokeswoman said.

A SWAT team entered Oikos University in East Oakland to [...]]]> News is just coming in of yet another horrific school shooting, this time at the Oikos University in Oakland, California:

Police captured a suspect in a shooting at a California religious college that resulted in “multiple fatalities” Monday, an Oakland police spokeswoman said.

A SWAT team entered Oikos University in East Oakland to make sure no other shooters or wounded people were on the campus building, police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said.

“We are interviewing the witnesses right now to try to determine if this person is known to them,” Watson said, shortly before confirming that a suspect was in custody.

This is already the sixth such incident this year, following on from ten more last year, and that’s only including shootings that have occurred on school premises.

Now, these tragedies can and do happen anywhere in the world, but for some reason they are occurring much more frequently in the United States than they do in other countries–especially when compared with other wealthy democratic nations. Here, they are becoming an almost monthly occurrence, whereas in most other countries such shootings happen only once in a generation, if that.

The question is why?

The NRA and other gun advocates like to claim that too much gun control is the problem, yet how do they explain the fact that America already has by far the highest gun ownership and the loosest gun control laws of all western democratic nations.

Some conservatives love to point the finger of blame at liberals, lefties, and socialists for the breakdown of civil society, yet America is almost certainly the most conservative democratic nation on the planet, and the vast majority of those much more liberal nations in Europe don’t have anywhere near the same problems with mass killings as America does.

Is it because America is not tough enough on crime? Well, when you’re already the toughest nation on crime in the world by a considerable margin then that argument should not even pass the laugh test. Sadly, too few people realize just how much more punitive American society is compared to every other democratic nation in the world.

I don’t claim to have the whole answer, but I don’t think you can ignore the differences between American society and those of similar nations that don’t have mass shootings on a monthly basis, and the biggest one that jumps out to me is the sheer volume of firearms in America. According to this table in Wikipedia, America is number one with 89 guns per 100 people, far ahead of the number two country, Serbia (which was recently at war) with 58 guns per 100 people, and Yemen (a war-torn dictatorship) at number three, and with the exceptions of Switzerland (46) and Cyprus (36), no other stable democratic nation has more than 32 guns per 100 people.

Therefore America is by far the most heavily armed society in the world, and absent very strict gun control laws, it doesn’t seem surprising to me that America also has the highest murder rate amongst stable wealthy democratic nations as well as the highest number of gun-related deaths. I get that a majority of Americans believe that they have a constitutional right to bear arms, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that 21st century America is a safer society because of that right. The America of today is nothing like the America of the 1791 when the Bill of Rights was adopted, and it’s ludicrous to claim that what was good for American society back then is automatically good for American society today, especially given how much safer many other countries are, even though they have far fewer guns.

I also believe that the mass criminalization of Americans through its punitive criminal justice system and the War on Drugs play a part. When you have to imprison seven times the number of citizens as France does (another country with a large immigrant population) then you’re doing something wrong, and when you refuse to invest any significant time or money into the rehabilitation of offenders because you think they don’t deserve any help with our tax dollars, you’re only storing up more trouble for later.

Of course, nothing is ever simple. Getting the guns off the street and out of the hands of those who might use them to kill people is next to impossible in a society that believes that almost everyone should have a right to bear arms. Arming even more people in an effort to counter the number of guns out there simply means that there are more people out there with guns that can either be stolen or used by owners who go off the rails. There are also a limited number of Americans who are capable of using a firearm correctly and accurately enough to save lives when they are under fire themselves. Even trained policemen have trouble shooting straight when under extreme duress. Arming lots more people is not a good solution.

So, what to do? I’m open to suggestions, but I don’t see an easy fix. Perhaps 30 years ago there could have been a sensible debate over guns, but these days the gun lobby is still spreading paranoia about the government wanting to take away their guns even though they have already effectively crushed all opposition to such laws. No politician in a competitive district dares even to bring up the subject these days.

There is a little more hope in the criminal justice arena, where some, more libertarian conservatives are beginning to realize that spending billions to lock up millions of Americans for years is a stain on the reputation of America as being “The Land of the Free.” Some are also beginning to worry about the cost of the ever increasing prison population. But without a wholesale buy-in to reforming the criminal justice system and implementing effective rehabilitation of ex-offenders–not treating them all like pariahs for the rest of their lives would help too–then I don’t see how we make many strides there either.

It’s all very depressing, and I don’t see much changing for as long as America refuses to look at the things that do work in other countries. It’s popular in some circles to trash anything that was “not invented here” these days. The shameless mocking of the Norwegian prison system was one recent example (“their prisons are like five star hotels”) even though they are over three times more effective than the American system when it comes to reforming offenders. We’re just shooting ourselves in the foot, knee, and groin, if we keep on doing that.

The bottom line is that there are consequences to living in a heavily armed society, and one of those consequences these days is monthly mass shootings in our nation’s schools. Gun advocates need to stop running away and face up to that fact. Perhaps then we can start having a sensible conversation about what to do about it.

It’s only natural for anyone who is struck by lightning and survives to question why it should [...]]]> As I was looking up some statistics for my post about the Mega Millions player who was struck by lightning, I was struck too–by the yawning gap in perspective between being a victim and being a statistic.

It’s only natural for anyone who is struck by lightning and survives to question why it should happen to them, and if they are at all religious, it’s likely that they would attribute some kind of supernatural significance to it. Someone struggling with addiction may decide that it was God’s warning to clean up their act. Someone else might believe that it’s a wake up call to pay more attention to their children, and so on.

People impacted by these events often ask questions like, “Why me?” “How did I survive?” “Why did I survive?” and are rarely they satisfied with answers like “Stuff happens” or “You just got lucky.” They typically want a more spiritual explanation for what happened to them, and they usually find it.

Yet, when you pull the perspective way back and examine the statistics for the number of people stuck by lightning in the United States every year, it’s really hard to find anything of great significance buried in the data.

Here are the numbers of lightning-related deaths in the USA between 2001 and 2010:

44, 51, 43, 32, 38, 48, 45, 27, 34, 29

Except for the possibility of a slight trend downwards in the last three years, it’s very difficult to discern any particular pattern in those numbers except that between thirty and fifty Americans are killed by lightning every year in America. How do you even begin to look for any religious or spiritual significance in the numbers? You can’t, and even if you claim you can if you knew who died and in what circumstances, that still begs the question–is God on a quota? What happens if one year God finds that he’s struck down his 50th sinner by the beginning of June, does he have to resort to another method to continue wreaking his vengeance?

Things become even more problematic when you look at the long term trend in lightning deaths. Let’s look at the decade between 1941 and 1950:

388, 372, 432, 419, 268, 231, 338, 256, 249, 219

The first reaction is “Wow, those numbers are high!” and it’s even more startling when you remember that the population of the USA in the 1940s was less than half that of today. When you factor that in, Americans were about sixteen times more likely to be killed by lightning in the 1940s than they are today.

Now if being struck by lightning has anything to do with God’s plan, what does that say about the “Greatest Generation?” Were they really sixteen times more deserving of divine retribution than Americans today, or has God simply grown tired of zotting sinners with lightning over the last fifty years?

Or could it be that a combination of better weather forecasting, storm warnings, education, technology, safety systems, communications and medical treatments is responsible for the almost 90% reduction in the lightning strike fatality rate over the last half-century? That would seem much more likely, right?

But if that’s true, are we guilty of thwarting God’s divine plan by making it harder for him to zot us? If you believe there is any supernatural component in someone being struck by lightning (whether or not they die), then that is the uncomfortable conclusion you must reach. It also doesn’t say much for the power of a supposedly omnipotent being that their plan can be foiled by the installation of a few more Doppler radar sites.

It’s no different for other forms of personal disaster or tragedy. Look at car accidents, drownings, cancer deaths, heart attacks, industrial accidents, and so on. Undoubtedly, each individual incident has a profound impact on the lives of those who are affected, whether they live or die, and there is no doubt that every Sunday thousands of personal testimonies on the power of God’s judgement and mercy are given based on those experiences.

However, once the data from all those incidents are gathered up, collated, filtered, analyzed, and shorn of all subjective claims, the only thing you are left with is the clear pattern of consistency as, year in year out, a very similar number of people suffer, and survive or die from these causes. Take another step back to look at the long term trends and you will find that they are almost always attributable to changes in public policy or advances in medicine, science and technology.

Thus, we find there is nothing to indicate that anything supernatural is going on. It can all be attributed to natural causes and any sense of a divine plan in anyone’s life simply drowns in the sea of statistics.