Fundamentalism

"Let's hear it for the vague blur!"
-A Scanner Darkly

One of the accusations often leveled at outspoken non-believers is that we're no different than the fundamentalists of other religions who sow seeds of hatred for homosexuals, who justify flying planes into buildings and who otherwise make life unpleasant down here on the pale blue dot.

Why do we have to be so strident? Can't we just content ourselves to not believe?

For some such questioners, religion basically breaks down to hymns, bingo and tea with the vicar. What they hear us saying is that they are idiots for participating in these simple pleasures

Why do we want to spoil everyone's fun by taking away gentle Jesus, meek and mild? Without religion, what would we talk to the vicar about?

Other questioners come at it from a more philosophical point of view. They point out, with tireless patience, that real theologians don't take religious myths seriously and that genuine theology is the study of people's relationship to the mysterious.

People need a source of ultimate answers, even if it is a myth-shrouded vague blur of generalized otherworldliness.

And while you can be a good person and do good things without pondering the vague blur, you can't ultimately know why you're not an unhinged serial murderer without acknowledging the vague blur.

So, let me just say out the outset, that I don't have any sort of real problem with these variants of religion. If it's all to be vague blurs and tea with the vicar, by all means, carry on.

But it's not all vague blurs and tea with the vicar, is it? Sometimes it's planes into buildings and superstitious gobbledygook in science class, isn't it?

Unfortunately, religious fundamentalists can not be reasoned with, because they reject reason in favor of faith in their whacked out world view. And, unfortunately, they're using your holy books and your religious stories to justify their anti-human lunacy.

Since religious fundamentalism cannot be argued with using reason or appeal to basic human decency there's simply no recourse but to attack it at the very core. Unfortunately, there's no way to do this without also attacking moderate religiosity.

For this reason, religious fundamentalism is a greater threat to religion than atheism could ever be on its own.

Keeping an Open Mind




I get asked sometimes if I should have a more open mind.

Isn't the scientific world view rather closed-minded? Isn't it better to keep our minds open to the possibilities? Isn't that more imaginative?

The short answer to this is 'no.' The long answer follows.

The universe is filled with questions. Where did we come from? Where are we going? What are those lights in the sky? Etc.

The scientific method prescribes gathering evidence in a demonstrable, repeatable way, developing theories to explain the evidence and then testing those theories by using them to predict the outcome of experiments.

In addition to keeping your theories and observations aligned to reality, this method for examining the universe is also much, much more stimulating to the imagination than mystical explanations.

When you encounter a question you cannot answer with your scientific tools, it stays unanswered.

If you want to answer it, you have to use your imagination to expand your scientific toolset while staying within the lines of evidence and reason.

Doing so will often lead to deeper insights and to the discovery of still more questions, which may require still more creative answers.

For example, early conceptions of Darwinian evolution imagined that only the single-minded pursuit of self-interest should be selected for. But, thanks to economic theories of cooperation and biological theories like the selfish gene, we can now understand why it is that nature produces creatures capable of altruism, sacrifice and other seemingly counter-productive behaviors.


Mystical explanations, on the other hand, allow you to answer questions without straining your imagination or discovering any deeper mysteries to be solved, short of the mysterious contradictions any theory based on made up mumbo jumbo will inevitably produce. Attributing altruism and sacrifice to the divine, for example, tells us nothing about why the gods should grace us with attributes that seemingly defy our survival instincts.

Keeping an open mind means keeping your mind open to where the evidence may lead you and thinking creatively about the implications of your theories. Allowing yourself one-size fits all answers to complex questions is just an excuse to stop thinking.

Consider, for example, the germ theory of disease.

Before we developed the germ theory of disease, epidemics were attributed to the wrath of the gods.

Unfortunately, once you've attributed something to the wrath of the gods, there's precious little you can do about it because the gods don't seem to behave in any kind of predictable way. The best you can hope for is to appease them with prayer, which is tough considering that they, you know, don't exist.

If, on the other hand, you study the behavior of a disease, watch how it spreads over time, look for common factors between infected persons, and otherwise, you know, gather data, you can develop a pretty good basic epidemiology even if you still don't know what the underlying mechanism is.

You can then use this theory to help control or at least predict the spread of disease, and the discoveries you make in so doing will lead you to germs, drug regimens, vaccines, quarantine protocols, prevention measures and all manner of useful things the gods never seem to mention in their holy books.

This is why no truly innovative discoveries come out of theology, astrology, feng shui, crystalography, tarot cards, the i ching or any other non-evidence-based system of natural understanding. It's not because they have too few answers; it's because they have too many.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the imagination is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

The New Atheists

It seems strange to count myself among the class of so-called "new atheists."

I've been an atheist all my adult life. And though it is a negatively-defined word, atheism is about so much more to me than just denying someone's religion; it's a way of looking at the world that is life-affirming, astonishing and ultimately fulfilling.

I've been content for most of my life to just console myself with the deep inner satisfaction that comes from a reason-based understanding of our world and ourselves, but I have been compelled to action by the recent madness in the global body politic.

Faith-based war, global jihad, intelligent design, "abstinence-only" sex education, stem cell research. These are not just trivial matters. They're not even as "trivial" as mounting the ten commandments on a courthouse which, at the end of the day, doesn't rob anyone of education or health or kill anyone.

I've come to realize over the past few years that tackling each of these issues in isolation is like playing whack-a-mole. You cover the same ground a lot.

Instead, it is time to attack the very foundational framework of these and other odious social toxins: unreason, mostly in the form of religious faith but also in the form of knee-jerk patriotism and leader worship of all kinds.

That's what this blog is about. It's a "me too" from one among many, meant to encourage many, many more.

-Jason Shankel
non-believer