This website points out that some 2.5 million (2,476,633 to be exact) were apparently killed by God in the Bible, which as the site creator points out, is a gross underestimate of the actual total. As the site notes,

It doesn’t include, in many cases, women and children, and it completely leaves out some of God’s more impressive kills. (Like the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn Egyptian children, etc.)

So what happens if you use estimates when the Bible provides only numbers for adult male victims or no numbers at all?

25 million. That’s what happens.

This is the estimate of the number of people God killed directly in the Bible, including women and children. And this is our moral guidepost? Our moral playbook? Our moral role model to the world?

Here’s a detailed chart of the divine bloodletting.

If you haven’t heard about Operation Medical Libraries, visit this website to learn how volunteers and health care professionals in the United States and elsewhere are helping rebuild medical and science libraries in developing countries. Originally known as Books Without Borders, the  organization has delivered more than 13 tons of textbooks to Afghanistan and Iraq as of August 2008.

According to the organization’s website:

OML exists to shrink the educational gap in all areas of the health sciences in developing countries, which globally face the same problem: doctors and nurses go without the latest professional information they need to provide proper health care to their patients. In response to this urgent demand for life saving knowledge, OML has built a powerful collaboration between publishers, authors, universities, and hospitals to provide formal medical references and continuing education materials for health sciences students and professionals living in the developing world. In recognition of OML’s valuable contribution to medical health worldwide, several U.S. Government agencies have also joined in the effort.

Current textbooks in the health sciences fields of dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, and physical therapy are desired, as well as anatomy and basic science books.

One acute problem for medical professionals attempting to treat people and teach health care in these countries is religious extremism and the belief that showing certain parts of the human anatomy, in medical classrooms, for instance, is blasphemous. A story from The New York Times put it thusly:

Imagine cutting out a diseased appendix without ever having seen a Gray’s Anatomy diagram, or calculating drug doses without a Physicians’ Desk Reference, and you’ll have an idea what it’s like to practice medicine in Afghanistan.

Nearly three decades of war and religious extremism have devastated medical libraries and crippled the educational system for doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Factions of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, singled out medical texts for destruction, military medical personnel say, because anatomical depictions of the human body were considered blasphemous.

“They not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of California, Los Angeles.

…

“It’s hard to imagine working in an environment where you don’t have access to medical literature or the Internet,” said one donor, Dr. Lawrence Maldonado, director of the medical intensive care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “I have unbelievable resources where I work — libraries, lecture series, online — and I know that everything I read or learn helps me make better decisions and take better care of patients.”

Walker is also the founder of Books Without  Borders. For more information on how to help, here’s the contact e-mail address: info@operationmedicallibraries.org.

Both American believer and nonbeliever alike can be very thankful that we live in the land of the free.

I was heartened recently to read the story of a Saudi Arabia native who was attempting to maintain a position of disbelief in a nation in which said disbelief just may well get one killed. Here in the United States, we are lucky to be able to believe, or not, without the threat of any sort of consequences from the establishment. Unfortunately, many, or most, portions of the Middle East are still shrouded by dark intolerance. Thus, this particular Saudi bravely has stepped forward, at least in a public forum that I frequent, to announce his disbelief, although, in his native land, he’s forced, with his life at stake, to keep his lack of belief on the down-low. Here is part of his testimony:

Since I was kid I’ve been asking “inappropriate questions” about the all-mighty Allah. I was very curious about this invisible god who everyone fears, and the answer was always the same: “You shouldn’t ask these questions, you don’t question his judgment.. you just do as he says and you’ll be rewarded”. Fair enough, can I at least see him? BTW that wasn’t me asking these questions.. it was Satan trying to shake my believe and turn me to his side.. And I should never ask anyone else these questions (so I don’t embarrass my parents), I should just come to them and get the exact same answer every fucking time

For some reason I wasn’t convinced that god existed, but I’m only a child and my parents know better. If everyone believes in him then I’m sure they’re right and there’s something wrong with me, I kept telling myself that until I actually believed it

I was a very devout Muslim in my early teens.. Never dared to even look at a girl even though all my friends had girlfriends, hated infidels (but loved Newcastle United ) and was brainwashed by my religion teacher to love and even look up to Osama bin-Laden! I was on my way to become a world-class terrorist until my father saved me.. Even though the geezer’s a very traditional guy he was quite open minded (for a Saudi). He studied abroad and still is in contact with some of his foreign friends, loathes bin-Laden and the religious police, he was the one pushing me to learn about the world and force-fed me books about, well.. everything, he insisted that I go to English schools in the summer so I can improve my language (money will wasted obviously)

He kept saying to me “Think for yourself, think for yourself, think for yourself.. Take the knowledge anywhere you can get it from, but never take opinions, form your own. You have a brain so use it.. and for god’s sake eat a damn orange! you’re so skinny you can pass from under the damn door!”. He was a master in pointing out my faults in the harshest way possible, but I still love that frightening bastard

And this person should be, and is, very thankful for his father, who appears to be a fellow free thinker.

The utter oppression in those lands nearly have led this person to attempt suicide because of the intolerance to those who might dare to spit in the face of Allah.

Thus, the writer has appealed to a forum for support, and here is his conclusion:

… I tried telling myself that it’s Satan messing with my head again, but the voice of reason kept getting stronger and stronger. The struggle was hard, and the fact that I will get KILLED if people knew didn’t help either

I got so depressed I lost 20 pounds in 3 months and became my old walking skeleton self again.. cut all my friends off because I was worried about what might happen if the (they) found out.

I went to the UK for a couple of months to study English and LIVE, and I have to say that those few months were the best times of my life. But unfortunately the good times had to stop and I came back to a place where I’ll be killed just for having a different opinion.

Depression hit me harder that time, and I started to loose weight again. Now after a year and half I realized something: I’m alone
at first it was because the fear for my life like I mentioned, after that and when I finally got over it I realized I forgot how to be around people! After all it’s not easy living between doors for half a year all by yourself

I have seriously considered suicide and tried to attempt it 3 times, but every time I do I hear a voice in my head telling me tomorrow will be better.. But no matter how I tried it all seems hopeless.

I, in some ways, sympathize with the writer’s anguish, for I too, at times, feel like a stranger in a strange land in a region of the country obsessed with belief, although my situation here in America by no means approaches the struggle of a nonbeliever in the Middle East. Here in the South, I sometimes feel out of place and awkward and often isolated, and my inclination on some occasions is to seek new ground in the north or elsewhere, where I might find some folks with whom I have something in common.

Recent philosophy graduate Chris Hallquist (http://www.uncrediblehallq.net) has recently published an open letter to believers about the problem of evil against an all-loving god. In the letter, Halquist references the following chilling news story:

IN THE EARLY HOURS of New Year’s Day, 1986, a little girl was brutally beaten, raped, and then strangled in Flint, Michigan. The girl’s mother was living with her boyfriend, another man who was unemployed, and her three hildren including a nine-month-old infant fathered by her boyfriend.

On New Year’s Eve, all three adults went drinking at a bar near the woman’s home. The boyfriend, who had been taking drugs and drinking heavily, was asked to leave the bar at 8:00 p.m. After several reappearances he finally left for good at about 9:30 P.M. The woman and the unemployed man remained at the bar until 2:00 A.M. at which time the woman went home and the man went to a party at a neighbor’s home. Perhaps out of jealousy, the boyfriend attacked the woman when she entered the house. Her brother intervened, hitting the boyfriend and leaving him passed out and slumped over a table. The brother left. Later, the boyfriend attacked the woman again and this time she knocked him unconscious. After checking on the children, she went to bed.

Later, the woman’s five-year-old daughter went downstairs to go to the bathroom. The unemployed man testified that when he returned from the party at 3:45 A.M. he found the five-year-old dead. At his trial, the boyfriend was acquitted of the crime because his lawyer cast doubt on the innocence of the unemployed man. But the little girl was raped, severely beaten over most of her body, and strangled by one of those men that night.

Hallquist then says:

The only point I have to make in this letter is that I’ve never been able to think the following thought: “An all powerful God who loves us all might well have allowed a five-year-old girl to be raped, beaten, and strangled to death,” and that I honestly can’t begin to understand how anyone could think it, though apparently some do. The rest of the letter will provide an indirect sort of explanation as to why.

While his letter was addressed predominantly to believers and how they can possibly believe in an all-powerful god who watches such things take place and does nothing — and Hallquist raises numerous interesting questions — he addresses the final portion, at least partly, toward non-believers and how they might address Alvin Platinga, who argued from the

doctrine of libertarian free will, that free will exists and is incompatible with our actions being determined. This leads quickly to the point that, if God wanted to create a world of people who have free will, he couldn’t have determined that they always freely do right, even being omnipotent. That much may seem obvious, but Plantinga’s real contribution, as I understand it, was to argue that it’s possible that God, even being omnipotent, might not have been able to create a world where people freely do good without there being any evil.

We aren’t referring to a university professor’s letter, but that of a recent college grad. As such, some points seemed a touch forced or misunderstanding of doctrine. For instance, doctrinally and from a believer’s standpoint, it’s not that God necessarily allows evil to take place but that evil is a consequence of man’s fall in the Garden and a consequence of living in a fallen world. So, when speaking on the matter, I typically, as indicated above, usually avoid the word “allowed” and tend to simply say that God oversees evil taking place and does nothing (For this surely can’t misread doctrine if God is omniscient). But this was a thought-provoking letter, and I recommend both believers and non-believers read through the 10 or so pages.

Hallquist did invite replies to the letter from both non-believers and believers, and here was mine:

Chris,

Intriguing letter on the problem of evil. I’m a former believer, and while the problem of evil was a convincing reason not to believe, it wasn’t my only reason for making the decision.

From that standpoint, I can, perhaps, offer a clue into what I suspect many of my former churchgoers might say in response, and it runs parallel to Platinga’s case: God would not create a being without free will because he wants us to choose to be good to each other and, most importantly, choose to believe in Him. Believers, I think, would say that God was not interested in creating slaves or robots or mindless followers. Man absolutely needed to be able to make up his own mind on whether to believe in his creator, or else, we are zombies. I, to the contrary, think that creating a perfect, or at least, better, environment for humans, and stamping out evil at every turn (immediately stopping the rapist before the act occurs, for instance), would not be outside the grasp of a truly all-powerful god. It would surely present a better case for his existence rather than utter silence in the face of untold anguish and misery down through the ages.

Of course, I can take it a step further: If God created us, and knew that evil would be introduced into the world and knew that he was introducing us, without our input, into some spiritual chess match between good and evil (God and Satan, or whatever other unknown dichotomy might be at play), and then demanding we make a choice between him and eternal fire, then we are and were never really free. Free will, if you believe in a divine creator and in his allowance of evil into the world, is an illusion in my view.

Or, as Christopher Hitchens likes to say, from the believers standpoint, we are made sick and commanded to be made well. This is not free will. And I think believers are wrong in making such claims unless the claim is only from deism. In that case, it may be possible to have true free will without the threat of an intervening god throwing us down to pits of perdition for not choosing correctly.

The nation has potentially, and regrettably in my view, taken another backward step on the subject of embryonic stem cell research.

In a ruling made Aug. 23 by Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, chief judge of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary injunction that would not permit President Obama’s previous executive order from taking effect. The order overturned George W. Bush’s previous research restrictions. The Obama administration plans to appeal the judge’s decision.

It will be an important appeal because the suffering of many hangs in the balance. From Wikipedia, here is a short list of diseases that could be helped if stem cell research were allowed to continue:

a number of blood and immune-system related genetic diseases, cancers, and disorders; juvenile diabetes; Parkinson’s; blindness and spinal cord injuries.¹

But these pursuits have since been stifled by the faithful who claim that they have knowledge about the human condition that the rest of us do not. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent (non-differentiated) cells gathered from the inner cellular mass of the blastocyst. Extracting or separating the inner cell mass from the blastocyst results in the death (if you can call it that) of the three-day old fertilized embryo, thus the controversy.

But it’s here that author Sam Harris grounds the issue for us. Speaking on the immorality of attempting to derail stem cell research in favor of 150-cell clusters to living, breathing, suffering human beings with chronic diseases, he raised the important point that some embryos either split into identical twins or fuse into chimera. So, what then, of the potential souls that these embryos apparently embody? No one knows, and here, we catch up with Harris:

I suspect that there are theologians trying to figure out what has happened to extra soul human in such case. It’s time we realize that this arithmetic of souls doesn’t make any sense. It’s intellectually indefensible, but it is also morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings. … If you think that the interests of a blastocyst, a three-day old human embryo, just may trump the interest of a little girl with a spinal cord injury or a person with full body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphyseal, and this is a kind of blindness that is very well subscribed in our society, and it’s a blindness that goes by another name. It goes by the name of religious faith, and we have been cowed into respecting it.²

Here is the full clip:

Now, I could, and I’m highly tempted, to greatly ratchet up my language on this topic because it does inspire anger that we put the cares of 150 undifferentiated cells above those of human beings out of the womb, suffering immensely in the here and now and very close to returning to their former state of unconsciousness and even so, we can’t get a thing done medically because of our unfounded moral misgivings about tampering with the souls of three-day-old cell clusters. Harris might have been too kind in his critique. And I’ll leave it at that.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_stem_cell [↩]
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUwnMX8ht3U&feature=related [↩]

Frightening, just frightening what some folks are cooking up …

Pastor Terry Jones plans to burn multiple copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Credit: Chip Litherland for The New York Times

Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., whose plan to memorialize 9/11 by burning copies of the Koran, represents everything that is wrong with evangelical America and with our collective response to the debate about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero: intolerant, filled with animosity toward those who don’t believe as he does and as fanatical as the rest. Jones forgets that it wasn’t Muslims in general that performed the heinous acts in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, but religious fanatics like himself, willing to do whatever it takes to assure that their particular savior’s message is heard. In short, no better or worse than those who are willing to live or die for their faith. For believers, of course, it makes no difference.

Religion, if left unchecked and nonsequestered, will tear our existence as human beings apart and that fills me with despair. And as much contempt as Pastor Jones might feel toward the Koran, I feel toward this type of dogged and demonizing intolerance toward other faiths. I don’t care what another human being believes, but if that belief oversteps its bounds and meanders into the public sphere, then there’s a problem. And this egging on of other religions, especially those known to be the harborers of terrorists is, there is no other way to put it, dumb to the Nth degree. But I don’t hold much faith that Pastor Jones has caught on to that nuance.

Below is a video illustrating a previous point of mine that I have maintained: that, in my search for the truth with regard to human existence and religion in general, hope, wishful thinking and fantasy are three things that I’ve respectably discarded in the pursuit of truth. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, forward to 3:30 to see the point.

Here, Christopher Hitchens has this to say about the eventual heat death of Earth, the meaning of his life and the pursuit of truth:

We don’t particularly welcome the idea of the annihilation of either ourselves as individuals, the party will go on and will have left, and we’re not coming back, or, the entropic heat death of the universe. We don’t like the idea, but there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that is what’s gonna happen. And there’s very, very little evidence to suggest that I’ll see you all again in some theme park, one nice and one nasty experience. There’s absolutely no evidence for that at all. So, I’m willing to accept on the evidence conclusions that may be unwelcome to me. I’m sorry if I sound as if I’m spell that out, but I will. Now you want to know what makes my life meaningful, generally speaking it’s been, struggling myself to be free, and if I can say it without immodesty, … to try to help others to be free too. That’s what’s given a lot of meaning to my life.

Not only does religion, more or less, have to answer for 3,000 dead on 9/11 (and slavery, the Salem witch trials, the Crusades and many other blights on mankind), but it has to answer for the crazies who are currently protesting the addition of the Cordoba House near Ground Zero. The proposed mosque and community center is two blocks away from the former World Trade Center site and not within view of the hallowed ground. Yet, Sean Hannity and others continue to refer to it as the Ground Zero Mosque.

Credit: Handschuh/News

Interestingly, and I found out about this from Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed, oddly enough, The Associated Press has ordered its reporters to cease referring to the proposed center as the GZM and simply call it, as I have, the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. For, that’s what it is or will be once it’s built. According to the story referencing the news organization,

The AP suggests that it might “useful in some stories to note that Muslim prayer services have been held since 2009 in the building that the new project will replace.”¹

Folks have been holding services at that location since 2009, you say? So what’s the big deal about the current fiasco, then? I’m not sure. And neither is Rachel Maddow, who has refused until Monday to even mention the story, dubbing it fabricated and non-news:

“I’d rather not cover it,” she tells me [Lloyd Grove], never mind that President Obama has entered the fray. “It’s just one of those fake, non-controversial things that has been ginned up into a controversy for a political purpose. Participating in the discussion of this, as a political matter, is playing right into the hands of the people who ginned this up.” (By “the people who ginned this up,” she means Fox News and its allies—about which more in a moment.) “Adding to the volume—in both senses of the word—of the coverage, um, grosses me out a little bit,” she says.²

To that point, Hannity has been one of the most outspoken rabble rousers in this regard, ginning up all kinds of hysteria on his radio show today, and I’m sure, on his FOX News program tonight, although I haven’t watched. I got my fill of Hannity on the radio earlier. He actually said today that he believed with all his heart that we were headed down the road toward some 1930s-era final solution in which it will be the Muslims who will this time seek to destroy us all. I guess this would be in addition to the gloomy trail we are plodding toward Nazi-style socialism? But I digress.

Shew, hold on folks. If you believe these guys, it’s going to be a tough road to hoe going forward!

Actually, Hannity’s partly right but generally wrong. Some Muslims, a select few, say, Osama and his followers, are probably whittling away whatever brain power they have to conjure some sort of end game. This would be in the form of a modern day caliphate, in which us infidels will be conquered, subdued and/or killed, and radical Islam would become the rule of the land, not the exception. This vale of woe will be similar to that which existed prior to 1924 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkish Republic, abolished the caliphate institution. Radicals today want to see this reinstalled in the Middle East, and eventually, one can only imagine, everywhere, since Islam officials through history, including Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, have stated the goal clearly:

• “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god by Allah.’ – Muhammad’s farewell address, March 632
• “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.” – Saladin, January 1189
• “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.” – Ayatollah Khomeini, 1979
• “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is not god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.” – Osama bin Laden, November 2001³

All that notwithstanding, we are talking about the radicals among the believers of Islam. We are not talking about the millions of peaceful Muslims. And here is where Hannity’s rhetoric hits dangerous territory regarding Islam. We want to, and should be, very clear that our beef as a nation is not with Islam itself. For Hannity, as he did today, saying he doesn’t care what religion a person follows, and then in the same show saying we are heading toward some kind of wild, 1930s-style takeover plan, this time with Islam as the potential threat, no doubt is offensive to the millions of well-meaning and quietly faithful believers around the world. Hannity seems to suggest that we are on the cusp of a gigantic wave of Islamic fervor. There are, indeed, a few crazies running around this planet, Sean, but few people of any religion, believe enough in the voices in their heads to board a plane and launch it into a building or strap themselves with a bomb. And we can be very thankful that their numbers are small.

1. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alana-goodman/2010/08/19/ap-orders-staff-stop-using-phrase-ground-zero-mosque [↩]
2. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-24/rachel-maddow-on-the-mosque-and-fox-news/?cid=hp:mainpromo6 [↩]
3. “Islamic Imperialism,” Efraim Karsh [↩]

Here, Jon Stewart brilliantly brings to light some of the utter stupidity surrounding the possible Cordoba House location near Ground Zero:

So, continuing on, I want to comment briefly on the “Handbook for Christian Apologetics‘” 15th argument for the existence of God, which is from conscience.

Page 75 states,

For if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist. Dostoyevsky said, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Atheists may know that some things are not permissible, but they do not know why.”¹

Dostoyevsky did not state this, only through his character Smerdyakov, and here is Christopher Hitchens on the matter:

If I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms. It is also fully aware of the ever-mounting evidence, concerning the origins of the cosmos and the origin of species, which consign it to marginality if not to irrelevance. I have tried to deal with most faith-based objections as they occur in the unfolding argument, but there is one remaining argument that one may not avoid.

When the worst has been said about the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament, is it not true that secular and atheist regimes have committed crimes and massacres that are, in the scale of things, at least as bad if not worse? And does not the corollary hold, that men freed from religious awe will act in the most unbridled and abandoned manner? Dostoyevsky in his Brothers Karamazov was extremely critical of religion (and lived under a despotism that was sanctified by the church) and he also represented his character Smerdyakov as a vain and credulous and stupid figure, but Smerdyakov’s maxim, that “if there is no God there is no morality,” understandably resonates with those who look back on the Russian Revolution through the prism of the twentieth century.²

To go back to the top, the statement that “if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist” is simply wrong.

We can be and are moral beings with or without a god, and as the quote above suggests, oftentimes than not, more so without. I am currently supporting a child in Honduras whom I’ve never met. I am not a believer. So, what does that make me? An ambiguously moral person? A good person but not a spiritual one? Why does one have to be spiritual before he is good? Where are the priorities? Moral values are self-supporting because without them, society fails.

Let’s now take the ridiculous 17th argument, as presented in the book:

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore, there must be a God.

Yes, well again, Dawkins addressed this one as well:

I have given up counting the number of times I receive the more or less truculent challenge: ‘How do you account for Shakespeare, then?’ (Substitute Schubert, Michelangelo, etc. to taste.) The argument will be so familiar, I needn’t document it further. But the logic behind it is never spelled out, and the more you think about it the more vacuous you realize it to be. Obviously Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare.

Thus, the sublimity of artworks or pieces of music proves the existence of their creators alone, not the creator of all.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Christian-Apologetics-Hundreds-Questions/dp/0830817743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281932499&sr=8-1 [↩]
2. http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446697966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281932475&sr=8-1 [↩]