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.

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.

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.

I want to address another argument from the Handbook of Christian Apologetics book that I’m currently reading. As we have seen, the authors are presenting 20 common arguments for the existence of God. They aren’t necessarily claiming that all of these arguments are airtight or irrefutable, but are simply listing some of the most common polemics and their subsequent commentary. Here, I’ll attempt to deal with

9. The Argument from Miracles

I’ll address these: 10. The Argument from Consciousness, 12. The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God and 13. The Ontological Argument in a future post (s).

The argument from miracles begins with a false premise. Here is the list as presented in the book:

1. A miracle is an event whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God.
2. There are numerous well-attested miracles.
3. Therefore, theere are numerous events whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God.
4. Therefore God exists.

The authors follow this list by saying that if you believe that miracles occur, that the believer must believe in divine agency. But who is to say the miracle didn’t take place by some other means or by some other agency? It’s an elementary argument, I know, but sometimes, people label unusual happenings as miracles, when in reality, they are, indeed, very, very rare, but not divinely driven. Take a person who was cured from a presupposed incurable disease. This occurs, not with frequency, but it does occur. Did God shine on the healed folks and not others? Were other factors involved that led to the person getting better of which doctors may not have been aware? All that notwithstanding, we still have not adequately grasped the power of the mind to heal nor of the body.

Now, the authors call a miracle “an event whose only adequate explanation is the … direct intervention of God,” but a miracle isn’t quite that. A miracle is a suspension of the natural laws, and if we grant that God exists, we must also grant that any number of other supernatural or spiritual beings could exist. So, a miracle does not necessarily have to be governed by God. It can be governed by any number of other supernatural entities floating around, be them demons or angels or something else, for if we open up the possibility of God, we open up the possibility of just about anything in some supposed spiritual realm.

My thoughts on the second point are simple enough: I would like to know what the authors mean by “well-attested miracles?” Any miracle in the Bible is not well-attested. I’m sorry to break the news. The earliest gospel is at least about 40 years removed from the actual events, and even if a gospel-writer said he saw with his own eyes the miracles of Christ, that wouldn’t necessarily make them true. We are 2,000-plus years removed from those events and copy after copy after copy after copy removed from that still. Even if I claimed aliens descended on some field in the haze of night, I would have a tough time convincing someone else that I wasn’t delusional. So, the proof needed to validate the suspension of the natural order is immense indeed. I wouldn’t be able to convince the village idiot that I saw a UFO tonight in some corn field. How much more difficult is it for folks to claim the divinity of only one of numerous supposed and deluded prophets roaming around the desert 2,000 years ago, for according to the Bible’s own record, numerous false teachers were at work during the time the gospels were written. To add a few more to their number doesn’t sound like that large of a stretch to me.

Here is a hilarious look at what happens when we take “cherry picking” the Bible to its extreme ends. Sent from a friend of mine on Facebook, below is an open letter from someone, still unknown as far as I know, based on Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s previous apparent comments on gay folks. Sent to me as an innocent and funny look at the Old Testament’s questionable moral code, there’s more than meets the eye. But first, here’s the e-mail:

Why can’t I own a Canadian?

In her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant
Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus
18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance.

The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, written by a US man,
and posted on the Internet. It’s funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I
have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that
Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination … End of
debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other
elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are from neighboring nations. A friend of mine
claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you
clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
period of Menstrual uncleanliness – Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how
do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors.
They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated
to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there
‘degrees’ of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading
glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room
here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two
different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments
made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also
tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go
to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them?
Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family
affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy
considerable expertise in such matters, so I’m confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan.

I removed the supposed “author” because I don’t want to play any part in some sort of misattribution. In truth, according to Snopes.com, the letter has apparently been attributed to numerous people over the years, dating back to 2000. On Dec. 8, 1998, Schlessinger reportedly called gays “biological errors” and “deviants:”

I’m sorry; hear it one more time, perfectly clearly: If you’re gay or a lesbian, it’s a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex. The fact that you are intelligent, creative and valuable is all true. The error is in your inability to relate sexually intimately, in a loving way to a member of the opposite sex — it is a biological error.

Interestingly, the above letter has been attributed, falsely, to a certain University of Virginia professor, James Kauffman, who did not pen the letter, and said so on his website. Interesting, he kept a running log of the e-mails and correspondence that he has received because of the misattributed work.

I have often enjoyed listening to Schlessinger’s advice on the radio. Nonetheless, whoever the author, Schlessinger’s past remarks, if true, are contemptible, but for the record, she is reported to have given up her Orthodox Judaism in 2003, saying that she did not feel a connection with God and was frustrated by the effort that she had put into faith. I hope she has altered her views of homosexuality and science, but even so, we at least agree on one point.

A couple days ago I began adding some thoughts on whether faith and reason are compatible in light of my recent reading of “Handbook of Christian Apologetics.” In my previous post, I outlined three different kinds of truths that are presented in the book: faith without reason, faith married to reason and reason without faith.

As the authors state, precepts that fall into the faith without reason category are the trinity, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. These ideas can’t be proven because they violate the laws of nature (i.e., no one so far as we know is divine nor do people come back to life). But it’s here the authors claim that they can present a cumulative argument for these doctrinal concepts by answering all objections to them. And they proceed with the following:

For example, suppose a Unitarian objects to the Trinity because “it splits God into triplets.” We can show that this is a misunderstanding: it does not mean three Gods, but one God in three Persons. Or suppose a logician says it is a contradiction to call anything both one and three. We can reply that God is one nature, not three, and three persons, not one.  This is not a contradiction, any more than we are: we are two natures (spirit and animal, mind and matter, soul and body) but one person.

My inclination is that many of the arguments presented in this book will claim that thinkers down through the ages, in their rebuttals of faith, have simply misunderstood doctrine on these key points. To take up the notion of the trinity briefly, in the first place, the idea that we ourselves consist of even two natures is wildly uncertain, much less that any being can have three, and science and psychology have long-since shown that the thing that some call “the soul” is contained solely within the mind, which makes us who we are. Shut off the brain, and the body is no more. We certainly have very distinct personalities, and we have feelings and memories. But so do dogs and cats. They have a certain and specific essence just like we do; ours is just more complex because our brains are more complex.

Back to the trinity and the business about three persons. From the quote above, we learn that God is both “one nature, not three, and three persons.” But the authors also attempt to substantiate this by saying that, likewise, we have two natures. But God, as they said, just has one. I don’t see how comparing “natures” and “persons” proves anything or answers any objections. There is no getting around the claim that believers still say God consists of three persons. In psychology, we call this dissociative identity disorder.

After addressing the polytheism of Hindus, which, as he said, isn’t really polytheism, but “just different manifestations or incarnations of the one god,” Richard Dawkins, in his “The God Delusion,” at length addressed the perils of the trinity doctrine in characteristic wittiness:

Christians should warm to such sophistry (masking actual polytheism in a cloak of monotheism). Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the ‘mystery’ of the trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What ‘substance’? What exactly do you mean by ‘essence’? ‘Very little’ seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’s book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs – such has ever been the way of theology.

Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning: “In the unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.’”

As if that were not clear enough, the Encyclopedia quotes the third-century theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker: There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same trinity is immutable and unalterable forever. Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which – unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eighteen centuries.

Plus, merely saying God is three persons doesn’t even make it so, and evidence from the Bible is scant on this point as well.

Former pastor Dan Barker addressed biblical accounts in his book, “Godless,” namely 1 John 5:7, which says:

And there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word (Jesus) and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

Barker noted on page 234 of the paperback edition that

invoking the trinity solves nothing because such an idea is more contradictory than the problem is attempts to solve (and I would add, more complex and reference Occam’s razor, as if an all-powerful, all-knowing being weren’t complex enough!).  (By the way, the text of 1 John 5:7 does not appear in any ancient Greek manuscript. It was added much later by the Catholic Church into the Latin Vulgate. See Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman for documentation of this fraudulent tampering of the bible.)

Here are some more details of the later insertion of the only biblical passage that explicitly links the three entities. Other passages, of source, make reference to them.

Elsewhere, Barker brings to light other problems with trinity, and more generally, the gospel itself. On page 265, he had this to say about Paul’s account of various teachings versus Jesus’:

Paul rarely quotes Jesus, and this is odd since he used many other devices of persuasion to make his points. There are numerous places in the teachings of Paul where he could have and should have invoked the teachings of Jesus, but he ignores them. He contradicts Jesus’ teachings on divorce (1 Corinthians 7:10), allowing for none while Jesus permitted exceptions. Jesus taught a trinitarian baptism (“in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost), but Paul and his disciples baptized in Jesus’ name only — which makes perfect sense if the concept of the trinity was developed later (emphasis mine). Paul never claims to have met the pre-resurrected Jesus. In fact, one of the most glaring contradictions of the bible appears in two difference accounts of how Paul supposedly met the disembodied Christ for the first time (see Chapter 14).

Thus, through all of this, the authors of the apologetics book have a lot of work ahead of them if they are to adequately, or even minutely, answer all of the objections of the trinity and many other issues of faith. Reason, indeed, would not lead us to assume a trinity, much less a god, at all because both violate the laws of nature, and to begin on the assumption that God exists, as the authors do in Chapter 2, before we even get to the business of answering objections to faith, is begging the question, and not at all reasonable or logical. This is peculiar since earlier in the book, the authors warn of the dangers of question-begging, but appear to commit that very fallaciousness throughout the opening of their book.

On the advice of a friend, I recently began reading a book titled, “Handbook of Christian Apologetics,” which, at least in its initial chapters, attempts to weigh reason against faith and make the case that a person can be very reasonable in his beliefs. And since this isn’t the first apologetic book I’ve read as a skeptic, I thought it would be an interesting exercise, and in the future, I may investigate and blog about more books that defend the faith.

In this post, I begin with Chapter 2, in which authors Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli wed faith and reason as inevitable and necessary partners. After describing four different types of faith — what they call emotional, intellectual, volitional and heart faith — the authors then distinguish between a personal act of reason and the actual object of reason. A personal act of faith is the belief itself, while the object is that which is believed (e.g., God).

In the middle of the chapter, the authors describe three kinds of possible truths:

• (a) truths of faith and not of reason
• (b) truths of both faith and reason
• (c) truths of reason and not of faith

And it’s here that I first take issue with a portion of the text, which says:

Truths of both faith and reason (the second bullet) are things revealed by God but also understandable, discoverable or provable by reason (e.g., the existence of God, or an objective moral law, of life after death).

The authors then come to the conclusion:

If this is the correct position, it follows that the Christian apologist has two tasks: to prove all the propositions in class b and to answer all objections to the propositions in class a.

And all the propositions in class b include using reason somehow to prove the existence of God and life after death? Perhaps I may learn more about these revelations as I get further into the book, but reason or any other of our faculties can’t prove or disprove God or life after death. As for objective moral law, that can, indeed, be proven by reason and no god is needed to set out a code of morals as outlined in the Bible. Author and thinker Christopher Hitchens has challenged believers in the past with the following wager:

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever. I am still waiting for a response to this. It carries an incidental corollary: think of a wicked action or statement that derived directly from religious faith, and you know what?  There is no tongue-tied silence at that point. Everybody can instantly think of an example.

I, for instance, have no inclination to steal, kill, rape or break the law in any way. In fact, I have given to various charitable organizations, am currently adopting a kid in Honduras via Children International and plan to do more as money allows. I care about folks in need, and if I make a few people’s lives on this planet better while I’m alive, I feel I’ve served a significant purpose. Yet, I’m not a believer. I don’t need a god to make me that way. I care for people innately. So, there’s your purpose driven life, to borrow the Rick Warren mantra. I just leave out the bit about a god. It’s, indeed, not about me, as the first sentence in Warren’s book states.

I have more thoughts on this chapter from the previously mentioned book, but I’ll save them for tomorrow. Hitchens, one of my favorite authors and a fierce intellectual is currently battling esophageal cancer (Of course, he wouldn’t and did not describe himself as “battling” anything, for with cancer, there is no battle. Just a waiting game or a rigged game or end game. He called cancer an excruciatingly boring disease), and I feel a post on him is more pressing …

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan today asked what he considers some poignant questions for believers on the problem of finding ways to make the language of faith, particularly the Christian one, fresh for the modern mind.

As Sullivan, a believer, said:

I think of the term “incarnation” – a word that has come to seem like tired dogma. But what can it possibly mean that God became man? How is that different from God infusing all of us with love and hope and sometimes such overwhelming power that we lose all sense of ourselves? What made Jesus so different, so more remarkable than all the rest of us sons and daughters of God? To non-believers I know this must seem just insane; for those of us trying to get past the staleness of our faith, it’s a pressing challenge.

Sullivan also referenced this video, which the Rev. Paul Zahl of All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Md. spoke on that very topic. Both referenced this quote from Thornton Wilder:

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

So let me understand this correctly. The problem is not the message delivered but how the message is delivered? And who do we think could have possibly been responsible for these defaced and degraded words? Certainly not the unbelievers. It could have only been the people who use such words the most: righteousness, redemption, sin, sacrifice, incarnation, repentance, and the like. I’m not sure what words we could bring to bear to replace or improve on these tried and true truisms.

I don’t think Sullivan’s questions sound insane, and I have often thought about this topic, both as a believer and as a nonbeliever. I think the problem probably goes beyond rhetoric. (Or not, since those who will be taken to belief will believe so long as the language, whatever that may be, and the message inspires or compels them to do so.) For the rest of us, the issue goes beyond mere words because religion, whichever of the big three we choose, has not moved on in hundreds, or at least two cases, thousands of years. While science, astronomy, medicine, biology, physics and astrophysics offers us new wonders on a daily basis, and nature every second if we care to observe it, religion has just the one, for, as the Bible says, the message is the same yesterday, now and forever. I don’t think one has to be very imaginative to realize how that could, indeed, get quite worn out after these 2,000 years of preaching on it with no new information or revelation whatsoever, especially since the information that is allegedly divined appears cobbled together and contradictory by semi-literate folks milling around in the desert, not in China or other areas where people could read. And for those of us (I guess Sullivan isn’t in this category) who haven’t experienced God

infusing all of us with love and hope and sometimes such overwhelming power that we lose all sense of ourselves …

the crisis of faith isn’t just a rhetorical or semantical problem. It’s a real problem.

I want to return to some statistics to which I referred earlier because the point that I’m about to make was lucidly confirmed as I was recently revisiting Christopher Hitchen’s anti-theistic polemic, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

The data is, admittedly, old from 2002, but since we are still being implicated by the events precipitated on Sept. 11, 2001, they are still, more or less, useful. The figures are from the Pew Research Center and present the not-surprising evidence that America leads by wide margins every single other wealthy, modernized nation in the percentage of people who say religion is, not just important, but very important to their lives. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said religion was very important to their lives, while on the same question, 30 percent responded affirmatively in Canada, 33 percent in Britain and 11 percent in mostly godless France. On the other hand, in many parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, where localized violence or deprivation or corruption are common realities of daily life, religion has a large stranglehold over the populace and leadership. For instance, Nigeria is at 92 percent, Pakistan at 91 and Indonesia at 95.

The conclusion is clear. As Pew points out,

Americans’ views are closer to people in developing nations than to the publics of developed nations.

Pew also found that

wealthier nations tend to place less importance on religion — with the exception of the United States.

And as Hitchens notes, with much less sterility:

… as I write, a version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon. Under the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse. Its writers and artists and intellectuals are mainly in exile or stifled by censorship; its women are chattel and sexual prey; its young people are mostly half-educated and without employment. After a quarter century of theocracy, Iran still exports the very things it exported when the theocrats took over—pistachio nuts and rugs. Modernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of nuclearization.

This puts the confrontation between faith and civilization on a whole new footing. Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot.

And it has rotted, or at least, remained inert for decades. For another example, see Somalia, which has been wrecked by Islamic extremists for years.

But before readers begin to point out that the majority of countries on the list with both high percentages of devout believers and high occurrences of violence and servitude are predominantly Muslim, America again being the exception, many in both lists, those with less devotees and more, are European and Latin American. While many of the European nations function quite ably, in some cases much better than the U.S., without religion at center stage, much of Christian Latin America is woefully impoverished, with a wide chasm between the haves and have-nots.

The larger point is that religion, taken to its extreme, as it is in many of these countries, chokes free thought, free government, democracy and well, everything else. This is the disconcerting reality that Pat Robertson, James Dobson and many others would hope to bring to this country: devout House members, devout Senate members, a devout president and devout local elected officials all the way down the rung. What would be left but to declare, once and for all, a theocracy? And we only have to look beyond our shores for proof of what such a reality might bring. We can only be thankful that believers in America today don’t believe in holy writ quite as much or as fervently as believers of different holy books, or the same book, elsewhere.

I’m sure it appeared to be an ingenious progression of “F” words (“Faith * Family * Freedom”), but it is astounding to me that would-be politicians can paint mere words such as the local endorsement sign to the right (Taken in Westminster, S.C.), and folks, not knowing if the said candidate has a functioning brain or not, will vote for such candidates without knowing anything else about them.

Credit: Me

As a political exercise, I’ve got an idea. I think I will run on a “Theocracy * Domestic violence * Tyranny platform.” How do readers think that will fare? Think I will get some votes? No?!? How about the Faith * Hope * Charity platform. Surely, that one will be money.

The vote’s obviously out, but I’m willing to bet my boots that Richard Cash, who, by the way, has the endorsement of the America’s Independent Party of SC and the Tea Party of the Lakelands, will get lots of votes just based on this sign. The latter party, if I may add, has a global warning hoax section on its Web site, which tells you all you need to know about Cash and the Tea Party of the Lakelands.

That said, maybe we can set some guidelines for being a successful fringe candidate:

• First, get yourself an easy to pronounce, all-American name. Preferably three syllables or less.
• Second, and this should be a no-brainer: Drape your political message in the red, white and blue. You should include plenty of stars (nothing says “America” like objects from outerspace. We own space, fools!) and possibly add as many pictures and/or quotes from the Founders as possible, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and John Jay. The particular Founder’s stance on more government or less doesn’t really matter. Your potential constituents won’t know the difference. Just uttering the Founders’ names will get you tons of brownie points!
• Third, and finally,  use words like faith, family, freedom, Democracy, Jesus and God as many times as possible, even though they might not make sense in context. They’ll never know the difference, and the seat is yours!

Moreover, what does “freedom” have to do with anything? Is Cash saying he is going to revisit the matter, in support, of course, if he gets elected? Didn’t we settle all that in 1776 when we officially broke free from British rule and again in 1865 when we broke blacks free from slavery’s rule?