A custody battle is brewing in Indiana, and it hinges on whether or not Satanism is a real religion. Jamie Meyer, a 30-year-old factory worker, is the divorced father of three young girls, and a member of the Church of Satan. Meyer’s ex-wife is suing to restrict his visitation time to allow his girls to attend Christian church. She also argues that the Church of Satan isn’t a real religion, that Meyer’s beliefs embarrass the children, and that Meyer’s may not really believe in Satanism.
Satanic pentagram: tres creepy
But the Satanism being practiced by Meyer isn’t what you might think. It’s nothing like what you saw in Rosemary’s Baby. Instead, Satanism is a “carnal religion.” Its members are atheists, anti-spiritualists, and proponents of pride, liberty, and individualism. That’s according to the current high Priest of the Church of Satan, Peter Gilmore. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?

A trip to the Church of Satan website (definitely not safe for work) proves otherwise. Here are the slightly creepy Nine Satanic Statements: 

1. Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!
2. Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!
3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!
4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!
5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!
6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires!
7. Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!
8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!
9. Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years!

There are also Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth, including, “Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.” And my favorite: “Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.”

But what’s at stake in this case has little to do with mating rituals or magic. Meyer’s ex-wife is suing on grounds that raising the kids with two conflicting faiths in their lives could be emotionally damaging, in addition to her discomfort with the Church of Satan in general. In a time when more and more people are intermarrying, the core issue of whether two religions can cause emotional damage to a kid is fascinating and tricky. The Church of Satan is a particularly potent example of how things can conflict, but a kid with a Jewish father and Christian mother can be plenty confused, too (see: Half/Life). Or he can be totally well-adjusted. It may have more to do with the parents than the religion, right?

I never thought I’d feel a little defensive about the Church of Satan, but in this case, I don’t want an anti-interfaith precedent to be set. 

I'm tired. Most of my reading time in the last few weeks has been devoted to the "Four Horseman of Atheism"-Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And now that I've emerged from my self-imposed sequestration-blinking in the sunlight and desperate for a beer-I deeply regret ever suggesting this article to Zeek.

My problem is not with atheism per se. If someone does not believe in God, that's no concern of mine. Just as it's no concern if, say, another Jew practices a more stringent level of observance than I do. (Or a lesser one, but he'd tough to find.) My problem, rather, is with these authors, for their smugness and dogmatism. I felt alternatively harangued or patronized or downright bored. Reading their books, one after the other, was an enervating experience.

Champion of Godlessness: Christopher Hitchens

The exercise did begin well, with Hitchens' god [sic] is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens is a gifted writer, so his book is actually entertaining. He explores many of the same themes as his colleagues in godlessness-how religion leads to ignorance, oppression, and ethical confusion-but in a more diverting way, despite, or maybe due to, his rhetorical excesses. Those who read this kind of book looking to be offended will come away satisfied: Hitchens calls the God of the Hebrews "ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial"; he refers to Jesus as one of many "deranged prophets." Strong stuff, but why should he pretend to be reverent?

Many people dismiss Hitchens as a bloviator, an armchair warrior against "Islamofascism." But this book, anyway, is not an anti-Muslim screed. It's a sustained argument against the broader tenets of all religions-against the infallibility of scripture and the claim that religion "improves people." When Hitchens does discuss the murderous meetings of religion and politics (e.g. Belfast, Beirut, Belgrade), it's in support of his assertions, not to score points for "The War on Terror." And he is capable of tolerance. (Although I did wonder why, if, as Hitchens suggests, he'd be fine with religion if its adherents would just "leave [him] alone," he keeps running off to participate in televised debates.)

Extremist Atheist: Sam Harris

Anyway, if Hitchens goes overboard occasionally, Sam Harris falls in the water with disturbing frequency. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that reason (e.g. secular humanism) is in a fight to the death with the forces of irrationality (e.g. evangelical Christians and every living Muslim). This is a plausible, if not original point. There is no place for faith in political discourse, and we are facing real threats, such as an "Islamist regime" acquiring "long-range nuclear weaponry." (Or short range, for that matter.) But Harris often evinces his own form of extremism. To him, even religious moderation is a hypocritical "myth." In fact, he wants to chuck the whole thing out the window-baby, bathwater, and baptismal font (or bimah). And unless we do, he argues, we're all gonna die-we risk a global, religious-based conflict that causes the end of civilization.

Okay, I suppose that this is a possibility. But so was Y2K. And I'm still scratching my head over his limited support of-wait for it-torture. In all fairness, this issue is a small part of The End of Faith. Still, it highlights the book's bizarre mixture of rationalism and fearmongering. Harris paraphrases Alan Dershowitz, that subtle thinker, who proposed that we consider torture if, say, we have custody of a "known terrorist" who "has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city." Harris himself suggests that if we can accept wartime "collateral damage"-which he defines as "the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children"-then we should be able to accept the purposeful torture of guilty people. In other words, "If there is even one chance in a million that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda," it would be "perverse" to disallow it.

Actually, what's perverse is using extreme examples to justify an unreliable, corrupting practice. And to assume that it's possible to use torture with judiciousness. Listen, if Dershowitz's scenario comes to pass, I will personally pay for the car battery. Until then, one chance in a million is not enough.

Scientific Fundamentalist: Daniel Dennett

With Harris' apocalyptic warnings ringing in my ears, I turned, with relief, to what I supposed would be the coolly objective realms of science. "Supposed" is the key word here, for the proponents of natural selection, apparently, can be just as unappealing as its detractors. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Tufts professor Daniel Dennett "[extrapolates] back to human history with the aid of biological thinking." What this means, in English, is that Dennett speculates about the origin and development of religion through the lens of natural selection. For example, he explains that early "folk religions" may have served Darwinian needs-in terms of group survival through social cohesion, or individual survival through the placebo effects of superstitious rituals. Today, though, with democracy and antibiotics, we have no need for these outdated belief systems, whose benefits are "mixed" at best and "toxic" at worst.

While these ideas seem reasonable, there is something oppressive about Dennett's (and Dawkins') assumption that natural selection explains everything-that human development can only be seen in terms of competitive advantages. I admit that I am oversimplifying, and I would never argue against natural selection. I only wish to point out that irrespective of his "humble philosopher" persona, Dennett can be as smugly dogmatic as an evangelical preacher. Surely he can admit that some aspects of human behavior remain mysterious, if only because no one was around to observe their development? Probably not. The condescension, the self-satisfaction that oozes from every page of Breaking the Spell suggests otherwise. And there's really no excusing Dennett's assertion that atheists should call themselves "brights"-which Hitchens, to his infinite credit, refers to as "cringe-making."

Misfired: Richard Dawkins

I had similar problems with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion-he, too, is hopelessly arrogant; he, too, cannot conceive of human behavior outside of the terms of natural selection. Take altruism. Why, Dawkins asks, should we want to help strangers-the "orphaned child weeping," or tsunami victims-if they can be of no direct help to us? It's an important question; one, Dawkins admits, that Darwinism doesn't "easily explain." But instead of turning to sociology or brain chemistry, he speculates that altruism is like sexual desire. We don't desire only those with whom it would be advantageous to mate. But hey, when we were baboons in "strong, stable bands," we helped and desired each other. So maybe, in humans, these are vestigial urges-maybe when you give a bum a quarter and feel strangely attracted to a surly barrista, you are experiencing Darwinian "misfirings," "blessed, precious mistakes." Maybe. Or maybe humans, having higher cognition and more complex societies than baboons, have these urges for reasons that are only related to natural selection. But why bother asking that, when we already have our theory of everything?

Most of Dawkins' book, though, isn't about religion and natural selection. Really it's an atheist tract. Or think of it as a primer, containing everything from refutations of Thomas Aquinas' "proofs" to the dubious morality of scripture. All this would be illuminating, if The God Delusion didn't read as if it were written with closed fists. Dawkins is a reputedly a good writer, and this may be evident in his other books. In this case, though, I grew impatient after the fifth time he (a) announced that a joke was coming; (b) told the joke; (c) reminded the reader that he had just read a joke. This may seem anti-intellectual: perhaps I should critique only the quality of his ideas. But style matters too. Especially when one has just read about the same topics in three previous books.

Not a Horseman: R.D. Gold

Now I must cop to another mistake. When I came across R.D. Gold's book, I assumed that he had written a kind of atheistic primer for Jews-which was why I thought Gold should ride with the Horsemen. Instead, with Bondage of the Mind: How Old Testament Fundamentalism Shackles the Mind and Enslaves the Spirit: Towards a Better Understanding of the Religious Experience Gold seems to be going for the world's longest subtitle.

Well, that and a book-length debunking of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism-which, to Gold, is synonymous with fundamentalism. An American Jew, Gold is troubled by the growing "aggressiveness" of Orthodox Jewry's proselytizing. Although there's little personal information about him, in his book or on the web, it seems safe to say that he was inspired by the Horsemen: he calls fundamentalism "one of the most noxious forces in the history of mankind." But Gold doesn't go as far as atheism, arguing instead that religion "can play a positive role in one's life-sociologically, philosophically, and psychologically."

Gold spends the better part of his book explaining that the Torah is "a fanciful account of Jewish history, not a historical record of what really happened." In other words, the Torah was not revealed at Mt. Sinai, the Exodus never occurred, there was no conquest of Canaan, and so on. In addition, Biblical prophecy, the "uniqueness of the Jewish people," and the "superior morality" of the Orthodox are all illusions or logical fallacies.

All of Gold's arguments are sound. As is the second, shorter part of the book, which presents a guardedly positive description of Reconstructionist Judaism. Here, the author also suggests that a propensity for religious or spiritual longings may be "hard-wired" into the human brain. But just whom is Gold addressing? Less religious folks like me are not going to start shlepping to shul just because "the operating system of the brain" says that it's a good idea. Nor will fundamentalists, Jewish or otherwise, be swayed by neurology.

Who's Still Reading?

Actually, the question of intended audience is a crucial one for all the aforementioned books. Only Dennett overtly wishes to cajole a religious reader into re-examining faith. The rest of them seem to be talking to people who already believe what they do. And what is the point of that? I did find it instructive to read Dawkins' speculations about morality and natural selection. But I'm not a creationist. Indeed, while I have reservations about all these books, for the most part I can't argue against their theses. That's because while I do believe in God, I also know that belief in His existence is not proof of His existence: there is no logical argument for faith.

Similarly, I know that you cannot claim a causal link between religious belief and ethical behavior. You could even argue the opposite, considering just how many religions have a long history of oppression and slaughter. Thus while I may irrationally ascribe to Judaism, I believe that religion has no place in any government or legal system. But these books aren't really about the separation of church (or synagogue) and state. These books are against religion, or fundamentalism, even though there's barely a chance in hell that an "Islamofascist" or a Kahanist or a Rapture-ready Christian will ever read them, let alone become "brights."

Why not? Because human beings are irrational. Against our own self-interests, we smoke, we eat too much cake, and we don't save money. Against all evidence to the contrary, we believe in God, or gods, or that a savior was born in Nazareth. And we kill each other in the names of these gods. It's depressing, but I don't see how we can stop it. Even if we could, we'd find "reasons" to bash each other's brains out anyway. I'm not concerned about the apocalypse; nor, paradoxically, do I place much faith in the elevating power of reason. People being what they are-that is, venal and stupid-I can easily imagine bloody wars over the question of who is more of a secular humanist.

Certain Atheists: still looking for pot of goldA newly released survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reveals all kinds of things we already knew—lots of American are religious, Pentecostalism is on the rise, faith and politics are closely linked—and a few fairly shocking revelations.  For instance, 21% of people who identify themselves as atheists believe in God. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Moving on, 12% of atheists believe in heaven and 10% believe in hell, which leads me to wonder what exactly that even means? Why would you call yourself an atheist if you believe in God, heaven, and hell? Is this some bizarre way of covering bases? I don’t believe in God, but I kind of do? I only believe in God on Tuesdays, Fridays and alternate Mondays?  They're asking a lot of these same questions over at Hot Air, where they notice 10% of atheists pray once a week.

If I’m doing my math correctly, that’s about 120 atheists who said they believe in God (35,556 respondents, 1.6% identified as atheists, 21% of those believe in God). There’s a word for people who opt out of religion but still feel connected to some kind of spirituality: agnostic. (More than 850 respondents identified as agnostic.)  This atheism confusion is almost as upsetting as the revelation that one in five Christians speaks or prays in tongues from time to time. Holy shit. Or should I say Baholloy Gutoirily Falswatahlisa?

There is a version of the Argument from Design, one of the traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, that has caught some popularity recently. It figures prominently in the work of theistic public intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza, and it is (allegedly) what enabled some unscrupulous people to take advantage of Anthony Flew in his dotage. It's usually called the "Fine-Tuning Argument," for reasons that will shortly become apparent, and what makes it both salient and insidious in our political scene is that it pidgins the discourse of science, mathematics, and philosophy well enough to appeal to people who fancy themselves intellectuals, and at the same time provides the basic argumentative structure to propaganda on behalf of the peasant revolt against knowledge known as the Intelligent Design movement.

The Fine-Tuning Argument goes something like this: The laws of nature areGod: Still not proven specified not only in terms of variables like force, mass, charge, spin, color, flavor, etc., but also in terms of fundamental constants, real number values that are (at least presently) irreducible from physics. These constants are measured to an extraordinary degree of precision: the fine structure constant is 7.297352570(5) x 10^-3; Planck's constant is 6.62606893(33) x 10^-34 J⋅s; and so on (the numbers in parentheses are uncertainties of the last digits). Suppose each constant is set or tuned by some vast cosmic dial. If any dial were turned just a little bit --- and "a little bit" here means by magnitudes far smaller than anything human beings can consciously comprehend --- the formation of the universe would have been radically different from what it turned out to be, and in particular, there would have been no life in the universe.

Here's where the proponent of fine-tuning comes in. (The term itself, obviously, suggests an anthropomorphism.) Only a tiny range of values for the fundamental physical constants, a range smaller than any human imagination can conceive, permits the existence of life in the universe. Yet there is life in the universe --- look around. With that background established, the proponent of fine-tuning can now deliver her decisive blow: "Sure, maybe the fundamental constants just randomly all happened to settle on values conducive to life rather than the vastly larger range of values that would not have supported life. But isn't it infinitely more probable, given the apparent fine-tuning of the universe and the vanishingly small probability of the universe randomly fine-tuning itself, that some intelligence deliberately fine-tuned the physical constants so that they would support life? From a purely rational perspective, therefore, doesn't the fine-tuning of the universe warrant belief in a Fine-Tuner?"

At the extremes of the debate, this argument doesn't tend to move many people. Theists are already in the position the fine-tuning argument wants to take them to. Atheists, on the other hand, are far more likely to think there's something fishy about the argument than to be persuaded, but are seldom in a position to say just what's wrong with it. However, in the broad ecumenical center where those who "just know there's something out there" reside, an argument like fine-tuning that doesn't explicitly contradict evolutionary theory (indeed, it's a means by which religious believers can be Darwinists) and instead maintains the trappings of scientifically-informed discourse has great potential to shore up people's faith. It also --- and this is not the intent of all its proponents --- shores up the reasoning that supports Intelligent Design theory. It's a truly ingenious little argument.

But in addition to being ingenious, it's a bad argument. There are at least three fatal objections to it, which recur in one way or another in debates over Intelligent Design --- hence understanding them is a key to understanding how ID proponents mislead their audiences. The first objection undermines Fine-Tuning on its own premises, so I'll dwell on it a little more than the others (bear with me). In order:

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As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this..."

[...]

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

[...]

"As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Last night the 92nd Street Y hosted a debate between Mr. "Shalom in the Home" Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God, something so wholly unprovable that the only guaranteed outcomes were bruised egos and hangover scars from all the ecclesiastical elbowing and bad kosher wine. The buzz around the sold-out event was louder than a book-selling rabbi's shrill or a drunk Englishman's demand for another drink. (Just speaking stereotypically of course.)

The 92Y Blog has a video excerpt from the evening, and we asked bloggers in attendance for feedback. Looks like God took a beating of Biblical proportions:

Felix Salmon: "I can't recall ever seeing such a lopsided debate -- if 'debate' is the mot juste, which it really isn't. Boteach didn't even attempt to defend his side of the motion, preferring instead to bash Hitchens's book; he ignored substantially everything that Hitchens said. His logorrhea was an embarrassment, especially when it became obvious that he had no strategy at all: all of his points about evolution, for instance, even if they had hit their mark (which they didn't) did nothing to bolster his purported cause. In any case, he was disqualified on account of Godwin's Law so many times that Hitchens would have won by default even if he didn't win overwhelmingly on the merits."

Rex Sorgatz: "Rabbi Shmuley Boteach proved, once and for all, that god is not dead. He's just exceptionally boring."

Neal Ungerleider: "Here's the thing... despite both Hitchens and Boteach being annoying, self-righteous egomaniacs, there's a difference between the two. Last night's debate taught me that Hitchens is an intelligent, annoying, self-righteous egomaniac. I wish I could say the same for Boteach. However, he still didn't convince me on the non-existence of God. Sorry, Hitch."

Lilit Marcus: "Thanks, Shmuley Boteach, for caring more about selling copies of your latest book than about making people who believe in God not come off like complete morons."

Phoebe Maltz: "I found myself wishing the rabbi could make one coherent point, not just evoke the Holocaust every two seconds, only to call Hitchens 'not a Nazi, but.'"

Sara Ivry: "Boteach’s repeated use of the name 'Christoper Hitchens' really made me think of the Bill Murray segment of Coffee and Cigarettes where RZA and GZA keep calling Bill Murray 'BillMurray,' as if one word. It made the whole debate seem particularly absurd, but at least brought back the good days of Wu Tang."

Daniel Radosh: After the way Hitchens treated Boteach, it was a little hypocritical of him to chastise God for condoning bloodbaths. To see the rabbi reduced literally to incoherent sputtering was almost sad, but then again, he had no one to blame by himself. Declaring that Steven Jay Gould, author of the classic essay 'Evolution as Theory and Fact,' did not believe in evolution, was probably not the wisest strategic gambit. I think the exchange that best captured the evening came when Boteach accused Hitchens of 'character assassination,' and Hitchens retorted, 'you should be more concerned that your character is committing suicide right here in front of everyone.'"

David Kelsey: "In a strange twist demonstrating that this debate was not personal in the least, both men argued that the other’s moral decency proved his own point. Boteach argued that morality came from religion generally, and Judaism’s influence specifically. 'It’s our morality he is embracing,' insisted Boteach. But Hitchins countered that, 'Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.'”

Jeff Bercovici: "Hitchens wiped the floor with Boteach to such an extent that it was actually Hitchens who lost, in a sense, just by showing up. Lost stature, that is. He should be debating his equals, not publicity-hungry TV rabbis."

Rachel Sklar: "In the cab on the way home, we coined a new phrase: 'To Shmuley,' denoting the making of pathetic, unsupported non-sequitur arguments and the taking of flailingly weak intellectual positions, with a dash of name-dropping bluster thrown in for good measure. Excruciating. Christopher Hitchens could Bo-teach him a few things about theology!"

Emily Gordon: "Is God a mystical force or a conscious mind (I liked the moderator's vision of 'a New Yorker cartoon kind of God'), a present parent or a deadbeat dad, the same idea in many forms (including nonreligious ones) or accessible only by secret red phone? How can people be born moral, or inherently moved by religion or the Golden Rule, given all the baddies that both Hitchens and Boteach included in their survey of humanity, and how do you account for their nasty behavior? There are countless questions that could have made for a spirited and genuinely intellectual debate instead of the ping-pong of statistics, political arcana, and smooth putdowns--all of which I enjoyed, of course--that stood in for it. I would have liked to have heard how humanism can transcend the question altogether, or account for both points of view in a civilized and meaningful way, but it was not to be. I admire the Y for holding the debate, though, and perhaps it can be reprised with different and more fruitful combinations."

(While Tamar's at Jewish learning conference Limmud NY, she's bringing us regular updates.)

Robert Sugarman, who chairs the Religious Freedom Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League, gave a session discussing how religion is taking a bigger and bigger role in elections and on the Supreme Court. This isn’t news to most of us, and I’m getting to the point where I nod and sigh when I hear another story about how Huckabee told everyone how much he loves Jesus. But Sugarman pointed out that religion is becoming so central to political campaigns and personas that candidates have to make statements saying that they’re all for religious freedom for all faiths. No one seems to be standing up for the rights of those who don’t believe in God, though. Sugarman brought examples of both Romney and Huckabee saying things that seemed to in some way condemn atheists.
God (any God): is the only option

It took a few hours for this to sink in, but when I really thought about it, it was terrifying. Of course it’s imperative to me that I always be allowed to keep Shabbat and observe various mitzvoth, but I think my Jewish atheist friends deserve to have their rights protected, too. If they want to go to a mall on Saturday mornings, or eat ham all day long, even if I’m not crazy about it, they need to always have the right to do that.

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God: Well, or what happens when you image Google "God"Every day, like Rod Stewart, I'm going to look to find a reason to believe. That's right: I'm questioning the existence of some kind of higher intelligence behind the workings of the universe ... based on things I find on the Internet. Yes, that's the tree I'm barking up.

There's a God!

*Choire's blogging over at Kottke.org about Kathy Acker and Maureen Dowd's party girl days.

*Someone finally realized that there should be a restaurant called "I Fucking Hate Monday's."

*The term "hatewatching" (usage: "The other day I was hatewatching Cashmere Mafia and I realized that the portrayal of gay men on those shows is not unlike the portrayal of African American mammies in films such as Gone with the Wind.") was coined.

There's No God!

*Former Indonesian dictator Suharto is still alive, in spite of having had several strokes, multiple organ failure, and now, pneumonia in one lung.

*While rushing to erect Trump SoHo, which a leading preservationist called "a monument to greed and hubris," three construction workers were injured and one died.

*"The biggest-selling album of the year was Josh Groban’s “Noël,” which sold 3.7 million copies despite being released in October."

Three vs. three -- jury's still out, I guess! We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Believers in Community
Atheists Enjoying Social Benefits of Church Even if They Don't Believe in Religious Rituals

By Jonathan Mummolo

Omar Latiri is an atheist. But the former Muslim has begun going to church and even decorated a Christmas tree, albeit a plastic one, this year.
Humanist Judaism: makes sense to me
"I don't believe," said Latiri, an Air Force reservist who is a member of a Unitarian Universalist church in Bethesda with his wife. "But that doesn't mean I don't see the benefit of something that is from the Bible in terms of humility, caring for other people, forgiveness, charity."

In a society filled with religious references -- the Pledge of Allegiance with its "one nation under God," weddings, funerals and other events -- some atheists such as Latiri attend houses of worship and enjoy the traditions and sense of community they provide, minus the sacred interpretations. Other atheists have adopted alternatives to rituals such as baptisms.

"I was looking for a place with a sense of community without any animosity toward people of other faiths," Latiri, 32, of Silver Spring said.

Latiri, and atheists like him, are choosing to personalize religion rather than abandon it. They like the congregations, the moral codes and the food and festivities that religious communities offer. They say that just because they can't accept the idea of God, they don't see the need to throw the rest away.
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"Sometimes if the atheist looks upon what's going on as a cultural experience, it's more palatable,'' said Carole Rayburn, a psychologist in Silver Spring and former head of the American Psychological Association's division that researches the role of religion in people's lives. "Intellectually, one could disagree . . . but could say that emotionally, this has a certain appeal."

Brenda Platt, 44, a Takoma Park atheist of Jewish ancestry who was raised secular, is a member of Machar, the Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism, a nontheistic group that retains Jewish culture, education and celebrations.

The group, which she joined about seven years ago, has a cultural school, holds monthly Shabbat services and celebrates High Holidays, although a deity is never invoked.

Platt said she has found simple but meaningful benefits: "The food, the music, the dancing and the feeling that that's my heritage, that's my tribe, that's my blood."

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I think this is completely awesome. For a long time I’ve been saying that my biggest beef with atheism is that it leaves people without a network to fall back on in times of crisis and joy, and these people have said, “Okay, I think this whole God thing is a crock, but I want a community, and I want to have something in my life reinforcing humanistic values, so here’s how I’m going to get those things without praising any Almighty anything.”

I mean, of course I believe in God pretty intensely, but I think it’s really great that people have come up with a way to embrace their heritage (in the case of Machar) and/or to embrace values like “humility, caring for other people, forgiveness, charity” without feeling like they have to sign on to a theology they don’t believe in.

Finally, some solid options! Also check out this article from Time magazine about atheist Sunday schools.

Dinesh D'Souza has a blog hosted by AOL. Who knew? Lots of people apparently, since he gets not five or six, or one or two dozen, but hundreds of comments on every post. (If Nick Gillespie hadn't pointed it out, I at least wouldn't have known.)

I find D'Souza an infuriating figure, because he is, on the one hand, an extremely formidable debater with a far more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical tradition than most pundits, and on the other hand, enthusiastically prepared to trade in ugly and half-baked arguments in order to advance an agenda. For an example of the former, check out the debate with Christopher Hitchens on D'Souza's website; I'd say D'Souza gets the better of the affair though I basically agree with Hitchens on all the issues. For an example of the latter, see here. Or check out D'Souza's latest blog post, in which he cuts through the arguments of libertarians and gets at their core motivations:

Many libertarians are basically conservatives who are either gay or druggies or people who generally find the conservative moral agenda too restrictive. So they flee from the conservative to the libertarian camp where much wider parameters of personal behavior are embraced. To the sensible idea of political and economic freedom many libertarians add the more controversial principle of moral freedom, the freedom to live however you want as long as you don't harm others.

This from somebody who insists that non-believers need to make an effort to get inside the Christian worldview and understand it in its own term, before they criticize it. What makes D'Souza's caricature particularly galling is its sheer laziness; he could have been disabused of his misperceptions by talking to actual libertarians, the vast majority of whom, shockingly, are neither gay nor junkies. As for finding "the conservative moral agenda too restrictive," there are two ways to interpret this. (1) Libertarians think the conservative moral agenda is wrong. And that's true; libertarians do think this, and have arguments for their position. (2) Libertarians live in ways that violate conservative moral precepts. Perhaps, but not more so than any other group, like, for example, conservatives.

D'Souza is at his absolute most infuriating, however when his philosophical training augments rather than restrains his tendency toward cheap point-scoring.

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Last time we checked into the freakout-fit over "the New Atheism," we learned via Damon Linker's misreading of the philosophical tradition, that the New Atheists distinguish themselves from other atheists through their illiberal radicalism. Linker's analysis, in turn, recapitulates and expands upon Matthew Yglesias's fine philsophical distinction between jerk and non-jerk atheists. All of which is silly for reasons I've elaborated on at some length, most importantly that the praiseworthy atheists of old are by and large exactly as acerbic in their treatments of religion as they could afford to be without winding up in jail or on an executioner's block. For a refresher, David Hume, the father of modern philosophical atheism, a father of the liberal tradition, concludes his Enquiry as follows:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry or illusion.

Anyway, whatever else is wrong with the Yglesias-Linker story, at least it's internally consistent. Then along comes John Haught, evolution-believing Catholic theologian, witness for the good guys at the Dover ID trial, and author of God and the New Atheism (forthcoming), to announce that what's wrong with the New Atheism, contra Yglesias and Linker, is that it's not radical enough:

They [Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus] wanted us to think out completely and thoroughly, and with unrelenting logic, what the world would look like if the transcendent is wiped away from the horizon. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have cringed at "the new atheism" because they would see it as dropping God like Santa Claus, and going on with the same old values. The new atheists don't want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.

There is, for one thing, the slight problem that the logic of the Continental tradition in philosophy, while perhaps unrelenting, fails pretty miserably at being logical. (The old joke is that at the University of Jena, they may teach Logik and Metaphysik, but they certainly don't teach logic or metaphysics.) Then there is the problem that for Nietzsche at least*, the absence of God and religion most certainly do not entail moral nihilism. (I assume Haught means moral nihilism, and isn't suggesting Nietzsche believed nothing exists.) On the contrary, Nietzsche saw the Christian moral dualism of good and evil as an inversion of an older, more natural and humanistic duality, of good and bad.

On this understanding, "good" was originally a term noble people applied to everything strong and vital, like themselves, while "bad" applied to the weak, powerless, and pitiable. Along came the Christians at some point, and invented the concept of evil to demarcate everything theretofore understood as good, and redefined "good" to refer to what was previously called "bad." The argument of Beyond Good and Evil isn't that Christianity is false and pernicious so we should abandon moral values; it's that Christianity is false and pernicious so we should change our values or create new ones --- basically the opposite of nihilism. Haught should read Beyond Good and Evil sometime; it'll clear up his confusions about Nietzsche, and it's actually kind of a fun book apart from everything else.

The most salient issue here, though, isn't Haught's misreading of Nietzsche, though that misreading does allow Haught to lend his own claims an imprimatur they don't deserve. The issue is Haught's claim that without God everything is permitted, that we "should" conclude nihilism follows from the dismantling of religion. This is a hoary old charge, of course, and I suppose it's too much to hope that it will ever go away.

Look. Lots of people lose their religious beliefs, and find (sometimes to their surprise), that they nevertheless retain their moral beliefs, and what's more, that life continues to have meaning for them. The idea that everyone has to choose between embracing religion and embracing bleak despair is a pretty clever way of marketing religion in a post-modern age, but it's absolute bollocks. You can't say, well early and mid-twentieth century existentialists held that life without faith turns into a grey meandering nothingness, so atheists who maintain that their lives are meaningful, that they still have all the beliefs they used to have minus one, had better knock it off. It's just an empirical fact that many people do jettison faith and have no trouble upholding the same universal, objective ethics as everybody else, and many others do so without ever having had religious faith in the first place. (Daniel Dennett has a nice essay in Philosophers Without Gods, "Thank goodness!", where he reflects on the heart surgery that saved his life, and observes that a makes a lot more sense to be grateful to goodness --- literal, human goodness --- and pay it back with further good works, than to be grateful to Yahweh and pay Him back with sacrifices.)

Moreover, we don't need to consider the empirical verdict to see that the old lack-of-religion yields nihilism canard falls flat on its face as a purely theoretical matter. It is an example of what Will Wilkinson aptly calls "a retarded ponens/tollens showdown." There is no reason to ask what follows from the conditional, if there is no God, then nihilism, because we already know tbe consequent of the conditional is false: nihilism isn't true, morality exists and is accessible to reason, our lives have whatever value we imbue them with, etc. Given that nihilism isn't true and either God exists or God doesn't exist, either [God exists and nihilism is false] or [God doesn't exist and nihilism is false]. In the latter case, what makes nihilism false, what makes the moral, mental, aesthetic, political truths true, is whatever non-God stuff makes up the universe. Since we know that morality exists, if atheism is true, then atheism is compatible with the existence of morality. QED.

To conclude, I suggest Linker, Yglesias, Haught, Leon Wieseltier, and whichever anti-antitheists are going to confuse themselves and their readers in the future, should get together and decide just what the unfounded complaint against the New Atheism is supposed to be. Get your stories straight, fellas.

*I'm not knowledgeable enough about Camus or Sartre to offer an interpretation.

There's been a lot of talk about the "New Atheism" recently. Last week, I confessed to not having a clue what distinguished "new" atheism from "old," and not for a lack of acquaintance with atheist ideas, past and present. The Damon Linker piece Stefan links to below is helpful in that it both acknowledges that the supposedly identifying feature of "new" atheism isn't new at all, and also gives a historical and analytic account of atheism's two strands. Unfortunately, Linker's analysis is barely more rigorous than Matthew Yglesias's (new atheists are jerks; old atheists were not), which is unsurprising given how superficial his understanding of the history of the relevant ideas is.

According to Linker, there are two basic approaches (for lack of a better term) to atheism, "one primarily concerned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the other driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others." True, the latter is relatively newer than the former, but since each stretches back at least to the 18th century, 'old' and 'new' aren't terribly informative descriptions of them. So Linker goes with "Liberal Atheists" (the good kind) versus "Ideological Atheists" (the bad kind).

The deficiencies in Linker's argument come to the fore almost immediately. Among the liberal atheists are: Socrates, Sextus Empiricus, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Among the ideological atheists are: Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Some prima facie objections: In what sense can Socrates or the ancient stoics plausibly be called "liberals" (or "atheists," for that matter)? In what sense can their liberalism, whatever on earth it might consist in, be comparable to the liberalism of the Enlightenment? What is the common ideology uniting Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Dennett? (Illiberalism, apparently. More on that in a moment.)

Let's pause on just a few of Linker's examples. I have in front of me a copy of David Hume's Enquiry. Hume, let us recall, is supposed to be a liberal atheist. Here are the famous concluding lines of his masterwork:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry or illusion.

Granted, this isn't quite as radical an idea as Diderot's hope of strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest, but it is at least as radical as Sam Harris's proposal that public schools "announce the death of God." In fact, simply announcing the death of God is considerably less likely to halt the transmission of religious belief to younger generations than burning all books of theology. Perhaps Linker should have another go at explaining how it is that Hume belongs to one intellectual tradition and Sam Harris another, and try harder this time. For that matter, perhaps he can explain why having public schools instruct children to proclaim "one nation under God" every morning is a liberal value. (I must pause here to observe that misinterpreting David Hume seems to be a stock in trade of TNR writers. As I explain at some length here, whereof Linker and Leon Wieseltier cannot speak, thereof they should remain silent.)

Linker's remaining examples are similarly risible. Socrates, presumably in virtue of the fact that Plato records him as questioning the preconceived beliefs of his fellow Athenians, is counted among the liberal atheists. Presumably this is so because there is no other evidence of any kind that Socrates was an atheist, let alone that atheism in the modern sense is a concept that can be applied to ancient Athens. (Linker, noting that Aristophanes' inculpation of Socrates in The Clouds contributed to the latter's execution, seems to be endorsing the idea that Aristophanes' accusations were accurate.) In the Phaedo, by contrast, Socrates recounts for his followers an elaborate myth of creation and reincarnation, and as he approaches his death, instructs Crito to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius. (Needless to say, Linker completely elides the difficulty inherent to attributing any views to Socrates in light of the fact that everything we know of Socrates' beliefs is filtered through Plato, and further, that Plato, as a proponent of a kind of totalitarian aristocracy, is hardly an exemplar of the liberal politics Linker seeks to foist on Plato's teacher.)

Likewise, Sextus Empiricus' beliefs are just totally incongruous to modern ideas of theism and atheism. I leave it to readers to decide whether Sextus' claims that we should suspend all judgments, that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible, and that we should live our lives utterly indifferent to whether we are on a torture rack or in the throes of ecstasy, constitute a hitherto unrecognized thread of the liberal atheist tradition, or whether instead including Sextus in the liberal atheist camp is a desperate effort to get recalcitrant data to fit a theoretical procrustean bed. It's worth noting, however, that the Pyrrhonian cosmology --- eternal recurrence of the same --- is also Nietzsche's cosmology.* Yet Sextus and Nietzsche, neither of them atheists in the same sense that Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins are, sit on opposite sides of Linker's divide. Funny, that.

We can go on. Kant represents liberal atheism? But Kant was not an atheist, and whether or not he can meaningfully be called a liberal is very much up for debate. (I say he can't.) Kant and Hume both belong to the same camp? But Kant and Hume sit at opposite poles of the most contentious debate of Enlightenment philosophy, namely empiricism vs. rationalism. Rousseau's skepticism was "self-limiting"? Are we talking about the same Rousseau whose policy prescriptions for education are as radical as anything in Plato (let alone Sam Harris), and who advocated government acting according to a "general will" which might not bear any actual relation to the preferences of the governed? Etc. etc. Read all of Linker if you don't believe me that every single example he adduces in support of his analysis is historically or theoretically confused, and that every thinker he cites could be construed according to criteria he provides as belonging to either of his camps.

The reason Linker's distinction is so historically flimsy, that his proffered exemplars of each tradition could just as easily belong to the other, is that it is not a conceptual distinction, and no logical rule precludes maintaining both sets of beliefs that Linker suggests characterize each camp: There is nothing inconsistent in affirming, on the one hand, that people should be free to reach their own conclusions about ontological and theological questions, and on the other hand, that certain answers to ontological and theological questions deserve contempt. Nor is there anything illiberal in trying to convince one's peers of the rightness of a certain view, provided one makes no effort to coerce them.

Conceding this point without realizing it, Linker writes that

[T]he tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished?

Well, so what? The fact that Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris adopt a hostile tone doesn't mean that they don't wish to persuade anyone. They could have simply embraced a poor strategy for persuasion. Even if so, their strategy is at least as effective for persuading believers as the one Linker endorses in citing the example of Sidney Hook: quietly noting that the evidence for theism is minimal, and observing that religious belief is a comfort for many people against loneliness and fear of cosmic meaninglessness (Marx made this observation too, by the way, and in fairly stirring language). Is the idea supposed to be that believers who read Hook's line on religion, finding his civility irresistible, will take the next possible opportunity to resign from their congregations and join the closest chapter of the Ethical Culture Society?

Or is the idea, instead, supposed to be that to try to persuade one's peers that their beliefs are false is in and of itself illiberal? I suspect this is indeed Linker's argument, as I can't find any other way to interpret the conjunction of the purely descriptive claim that

[A]lthough I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God.

with the claim that atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris cannot accept this state of affairs. Since all three of them do in fact acknowledge that this description of the world is true, in what sense can they not accept it? The fact that it is "highly unlikely" that a free society will reach unanimity about theological questions does not entail that it is impermissible to both pose and answer such questions in a public forum. Either Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris' beliefs about religion are true, or they're false. If they're false, then by all means refute them. If they're true, then adopt them. The tone in which they are expressed doesn't enter the calculation.

*Well, there's a question in both cases of whether eternal recurrence should be interpreted literally or as a heuristic device.

Matthew Yglesias took a trip to the Netherlands recently, and, as if struck by Zeus's own thunderbolt, discovered that secularists in Europe tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity there, whereas secularists in the United States tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity here. What he takes away from this observation is that secularism in Europe can be allied to right-wing nationalism, as it shares, according to him, a common goal of minimizing the spread of Islam, though each group has its own motivations. In fact, there is no reason why European secularists couldn't in principle welcome immigrants from Muslim countries; what they can't and shouldn't abide is any effort to amend European civil law to conform to Islamic religious norms, including calls for exceptions within Muslim communities to equal rights for women and gays.

Granted, there are European political figures who are both secularist and anti-immigrant, e.g., Pim Fortuyn --- though it's worth noting that his party, the List Pim Fortuyn, like Connecticut for Lieberman, was an ego trip and not a movement. In general, however, collaboration between anti-immigrant and secularist forces in Europe is a tactical accident, and as there is no reason a secularist who does not maintain anti-immigrant priors should have any principled objection to Muslim immigrants per se, such an alliance is likely to dissolve as Muslims assimilate into European culture.

Conversely, the same rationale that Yglesias points to as the cause of xenophobe-secularist cooperation in Europe exists in the United States. Right wing nationalists here are doing their (thankfully insufficient) damnedest to keep out the Mexicans. Secularists might just as easily be alarmed by a huge population of Catholic would-be immigrants. Yet there is no such alliance between anti-immigrant populists and secularists in the US. And that's because Mexican Catholics neither aggressively proselytize on behalf of their faith, nor do they engage in efforts to subvert or amend the law to restrict other people's personal freedoms. Instead, it's illiberal native-born Protestants who do that, and consequently, it's illiberal native-born Protestants against whom American secularists direct their efforts.

The root of Yglesias's analytic confusions is his free susbtitution of the concept of atheism for the concept of secularism, and back again. I'll assume he, and Jewcy's readers, are well aware of what the difference is, and refrain from elaborating. What he takes to be the voices of strident anti-religiosity are atheists. The warm and fuzzy ecumenical pluralists who tolerate religious diversity over here are secularists. Except that, when push comes to shove and Christianists make efforts to insert their faith into civil law, secularists push back as strongly as they can, just as European secularists push back against Islamism. Amazing, I know.

Whereas Yglesias fails to draw relevant distinctions between atheism and secularism, he ahistorically fabricates distinctions among varieties of atheism. What, pray tell, is this innuendo supposed to mean:

the "new atheism" -- which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks

The "jerks" he has in mind are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Which leads me to wonder, what point in time is the dividing line between the "old" and the "new" atheism, 2006? It certainly can't be very long ago. In 18th century Scotland, where the Enlightenment produced Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, and David Hume, the father of modern philosophical skepticism and atheist par excellence (nobody has ever substantively improved upon Hume's savaging of the argument from design) --- in other words, the birthplace and birth time of modern materialism --- people were still burned at the stake for heresy. Even so, atheist literature throughout history treats religion every bit as caustically as Hitchens and Dawkins do today. The "old atheists" that David Broder might approve of are figments of Yglesias's imagination. The only "new" development in atheism is that by the late 20th century, the combination of free speech doctrines and changing mores enabled atheists to come out of the closet in relatively large numbers without fear of ostracism or worse --- and even today, atheists are a reviled minority in the US. So is the distinction between "old" and "new" atheists anything other than that the latter express their views openly?

To Yglesias, the "new" atheists are distinguished by their strident rhetoric, which is entirely unlike the un-strident rhetoric of, say Matthew Yglesias, in the very same post, alleging that "Will Saletan...proclaim[ed] the truth of white supremacy." Not that I particularly disagree. But please explain to me what makes Yglesias's remark an example of civility while Hitchens' and Dawkins' oratory remains vicious. On the other hand, if nothing intrinsic to each specimen of rhetoric makes any more intemperate than the others, we should consider the possibility that the Hitchens-Dawkins line on religion only strikes anyone as especially strident because religion in our society continues to be elevated to a protected sphere of discourse, such that criticizing religion in terms just as forceful as one would criticize anything else is somehow out-of-bounds purely in virtue of the fact that it is religion being criticized. One of the premises of the "new" atheists (if we must), is that religion deserves no such special privilege.

Have I mentioned that sneering at the supposed stridency of contemporary atheists is reading from a worn-out, hackneyed, lazy, positively Pragerish script?

I’ve said before that as far as I’m concerned, atheists are like people who wear leggings. I disagree with their choices, but it doesn’t keep me up at night. We’ve had some pretty fascinating discussions about atheism here at at Jewcy, but what we’ve learned is mainly that atheists who don’t walk around spewing their version of fire and brimstone are a lot easier to listen to and engage with than, say, the kind of person who just keeps telling us that only weak people believe in God.
Atheists: giving God the finger
I was thinking about this whole debate over the weekend because my new favorite book there’s a brief scene where the protagonist, who I love, pretty much rolls her eyes and sighs about those dumb religious people, and consequently makes my blood pressure rise about sixty points.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading all about this new book coming out in February, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman, and even though I doubt it will change my life dramatically, I can already tell it’s going to make me think and reexamine things and almost certainly keep me up at night.

But I can tell you right now that even if Ehrman makes an un-convert out of me, I’m not leaving the Jewish world. The thing is, even if Judeo-Christian understandings of God or theological laws is flawed or even completely unfounded, the people who think it’s great are still the people who I go to when I’ve been having a rough time. They’re the people visiting my mother when she’s not feeling well, and raising money for charity and watching each other’s children and just generally acting as a wonderful and impressive community. I’ve yet to see any atheist—angry or otherwise—address this issue seriously.

Maybe it is weak to want your friends to come help you and be with you when you grieve, or dance and sing with you at a wedding, or join in welcoming your child to the word, but honestly, that kind of weakness is fine with me.

Josh’s post about the Hitchens / D’Souza debate reminded me of Tobias Wolff on his wicked stepfather: “[A]n atheist of the Popular Science orthodoxy. (Jesus hadn’t really died, he had taken a drug that made him look dead so he could fake a resurrection later. The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a comet passing overhead. Manna was just the ancient word for potato.)” I’m in sympathy with Josh, but his neuroscience is of a piece with this triumphalist literal-mindedness:

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. . . . Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

That last question certainly begs the question: In order to take Josh’s point, one has to take it on faith that the soul or the moral will can be surgically removed. This is hardly so apparent as he makes it seem. Evelyn Waugh, asked how someone as horrible as himself could claim to be a Christian, supposedly retorted, “Were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.” In God Is Not Great, Hitchens takes this idea and runs in the wrong direction with it. Some interviewer has just wondered how an atheist can possibly lead a moral life. Hitchens notes rather astutely that what the interviewer is really wondering is how he himself would lead a moral life without religion.

I no longer have my copy of the book—I liked it so much that I gave it to a family member. As I recall, and readers should correct me if I’m wrong, Hitchens regards this slip merely as proof of the interviewer’s moral turpitude. Don’t ask me why: I was fascinated by it, as I’ve always been by the story about Waugh, because it reminds me that people often force themselves to behave contrary to their nature, whether by reason or unreason. It’s nothing short of miraculous that one can use his brain against itself. My own neurological configuration, for instance, gives me the desire to smash the headlights of the guy who steals my parking space, but it also taketh it away. I see this as evidence that my brain is in working order.

But suppose I do smash those headlights. Suppose the gentleman in turn beats me into baby food—thus putting the moral reasoning center of my brain out of commission. Does this mean my soul has been “surgically removed”? A carpenter doesn’t cease to be a carpenter because he can’t use broken tools. Perhaps the soul is the carpenter, not the tool—the one who exercises the will, not the will itself. (I promise that this isn’t a coded Jesus reference, just the first analogy that came to mind.) This is by no means my own view of the conundrum, but the ease with which it presents itself suggests that the matter isn’t closed just because our understanding of the brain has deepened.

I can’t hope to address the question of the soul in the space of a blog post. What I hope to address is the lack of curiosity on both sides of this debate. Now, as Josh rightfully points out, D’Souza is by far the guiltier party. I first suspected that D’Souza was a lazy, thoughtless fraud when I read this post by James Wolcott about an advance copy of The Enemy at Home:

D’Souza makes a tired Buchananite reference to Piss Christ, so tired that its creator is misnamed as Jose Serrano. It’s Andres Serrano, of course, which any philistine should know. Perhaps the name will be corrected when the book is published, but there is no way to correct falsehoods such as labeling “Jose Serrano” a “liberal hero,” because these are fancies lodged in the penny arcade of D’Souza’s dim imagination.

Serrano’s work, despite its artistic deficiencies, wasn’t meant to be anti-Christian, but this fact does nothing to advance D’Souza’s paranoid views and must be ignored. No surprise there. D’Souza’s mind is so childish that when criticized by Scott Johnson in The New Criterion, he resorted to schoolyard taunts. Josh zeroes in on D’Souza’s accidental auto-refutation, to hilarious effect:

D’Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I’d have liked to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one’s unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity . . .

This “hypocritical selectivity” and lack of curiosity reminded me of a letter sent to The New Criterion by a prominent and, for my money, breathtakingly brilliant Eastern Orthodox theologian, in response to my Hitchens review: “[I]n agreeing with Hitchens that the ‘argument from primary cause’ is infinitely regressive . . . he commits a very basic logical error. The one thing the idea of a primary cause cannot be is regressive.” Well, he’s right. He’s also pretending not to grasp my very basic objection, which is that believers choose the “vanishing point” of this regression to suit themselves. In Catholic high school it was presented to us very simply: “What caused the Big Bang, then? It must be God.” But the Big Bang could just as easily be the “uncaused cause,” as any schoolboy can see, and Young Hitchens would surely have demanded to know what brought about God.

Even the smartest guys in this knock-down, drag-out fight cling to their irrational prejudices and untested hypotheses. We can be thankful for that: It forces us to see that none of us really has it figured out. And we can take comfort in the fact that no matter what their faults, at least they’re not Dinesh D’Souza.

In the climate of our postmodern culture, few things are less "post" than defending science and rationality against superstition and wooly thinking. With most engaged in the hysterical bid to adopt the correctly "nuanced perspective" and a "wide reaching respect for difference" combined with an "open mind" that is "resistant to totalizing," it seems as if today one needn't look far to find the next public conversation where cognitive dissonance is celebrated and clear thinking is dismissed as "arrogance." Last night's King's College-sponsored debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the Center For Ethical Culture was only another such event.

Debate roundups for these scenarios can be every bit as useless as the book reviews of Hitchens and D'Souza's respective diatribes against and in favor of religion. Both debaters make their cases about as well as they can be made. Whether you prefer the acerbic anti-theistic style of one or the pulpit punditry of the other is a matter of taste. Whether you think one was more right than another, however, depends on your basic understanding of rational argumentation and the scientific method as well as the limitations of both.

What's most interesting in this regard is not D'Souza, who essentially regurgitates theistic errors and rhetorical sidesteps, but those in the audience who applauded his points. But this isn't to say they were all idiots. D'Souza himself is a well-spoken fellow, with a decent enough command of the history of science and the ins-and-outs of certain philosophical problems. It is precisely what he upheld in spite of intelligence and knowledge that becomes the most intriguing/disturbing. D'Souza knew the speed of light off the top of his head (easy enough, but still uncommon), he knew the legacy of seminal geneticists, and a few basics about Einstein (even if he tried underhandedly to pass him off as a theist). The majority of the great scientific minds throughout history, he said, were religious, therefore science is proof of religion's truth. He had the auditorium's Christians alight with the notion that their camp had been responsible for the majority of scientific accomplishment throughout history. But for the things he did know, did he not know that the majority of minds throughout history have been religious due in no small part to the threat of death for proclaiming any other worldview--a threat that has been with most humans for most of their years on this planet?

D'Souza's compartmentalized his thinking and is thus so unaware of what it feels like to stand on solid argumentative ground, he couldn't possibly be aware how much he's leap-frogging. What do I mean by leap-frogging? One example: in his opening