From a letter in The Fresno Bee this morning:

If [a] predator is convicted on circumstantial evidence, they should get a life sentence with no chance of parole and only one appeal. If convicted with evidence that only points to him, the authorities should take that person straight to the death chamber.

Really? How is that going to work? What kind of standard is “evidence that only points to him”? Since prosecutors would never present evidence that someone other than the accused commits the crime, I suppose this would shift the burden to the defense to present evidence that someone else committed the crime. In other words, if you are a “predator”—which the letter-writer does not define, but which appears to mean anybody previously convicted of a violent crime with a sexual aspect—then you should be considered guilty until proven innocent. (Or at least until the defense presents evidence that credibly suggests someone else might have done it, so that there is evidence “pointing to” someone other than the accused. No, that wouldn’t just create another “technicality” for these bloodthirsty enemies of law to complain about later!)

And how exactly is curtailing the constitutional rights of these “predators” so we can kill them with the machinery of the state going to make society any safer? Justice is not and never will be prevention. Deterrence will never be complete. How many people do we have to kill before society is safe? (Hint: Everyone.) This letter-writer does not present a principled approach to justice; she bares her sharpened teeth in bald ignorance and unthinking vengeance.

But that is not justice. Not in the United States of America. If you want to see true “predators,” look to the people with views like that letter-writer—people who place no value on due process or the rule of law, people whose only solution to crime is simply a quick death delivered by state-sanctioned executioners with no commitment to rational standards of distributing punishment. Kill them, kill them all, and do it now!

Most unfortunately, the letter-writer is not alone in her despicable views. Here is one of the rabid, poorly-reasoned, and misspelled responses in the online comments:

Until those in society are ready to abandon the absurd notion they have as to what constitutes “civilized” behavior towards criminal punishments, this Nation will never deal effectively with criminals. When a person is found guilty (beyond doubt) he should be executed immediately following the trial, within the same day. Then cremated and his ashes flused down the toliet.

The rage hampers its coherence, but the message, spittle-flecked though it is, comes through clearly: let’s forget all that stuff about the accused being innocent until proven guilty, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishments, and due process. Forget all that! Why bother? Kill them all! Today, if you can!

The ignorance and stupidity shows through, too, in the midst of that vicious and bloodthirsty repudiation of the rule of law, when the responder suggests that immediate execution following trial should occur only when there is proof of guilt “beyond doubt.” Really? “Beyond doubt”? You mean we should have a higher standard of proof than “beyond a reasonable doubt”? Surely the responder doesn’t mean we should only executed these hated “predators” when they are convicted by proof beyond any doubt. And even though the letter-writer does not explicitly repudiate the idea of “innocent until proven guilty,” doing so is the only way to carry out her hideous proposal. Neither of these would-be destroyers of justice and law has bothered to think about the viability or consequences of their views.

People like this letter-writer and her responder are more dangerous to society than the “predators” they want to kill. Violent criminals can destroy individuals, but views like the ones expressed in that letter and that response, if given credence, stand to destroy society itself. (And—supreme irony!—I have no doubt that both of these Vicious Predators and Would-Be Destroyers of Justice and Law would call themselves “conservative.” What are they conserving?)

What have we done that our society can breed these kinds of anti-ideas? Did our education system fail? Should religion be blamed? Are the principled defenders of law and civility just not speaking up? Has the marketplace of ideas failed? Where are these people coming from?

A few weeks ago, someone asked me to read The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. There is not a single compelling argument in the book. Worse, Keller inexplicably fails to reach the foundational question until the first sentence of his eighth chapter, more than halfway through:

How can we believe in Christianity if we don’t even know whether God exists?

His answer is not persuasive: The universe had a discrete beginning, therefore it is contingent on something that came before, which might be God. (Except nobody really knows if the universe had a discrete beginning, and some people argue that it didn’t, so that argument goes nowhere.)  The universe is fine-tuned for human life. (But if it wasn’t, nobody would be here to notice, and nobody has figured out a way to calculate the probability that it should have come out this way.) Science relies on assuming the regularity of nature, which is a correct assumption, because God caused the regularity. (Which is a non sequitur. Saying that God caused the regularity is only another explanatory hypothesis; replacing an alleged assumption of science with a theological proposition neither damages the work of science nor supports the hypothesis of God. And what do you mean by “God” anyway?) Beauty and love demonstrate our experience of unfulfilled desires, which means the object of that desire must exist. (No, it just means we have the ability to rationalize our inner drives into categorized goals.) The hypothesis that natural selection could cause organisms to have false beliefs about the world that cause them to have more descendants than organisms with true beliefs means that evolution by natural selection is not guaranteed to result in organisms that can know the truth about the world, so proponents of evolution by natural selection are just as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. (What a magnificent, stupendous failure to understand the scientific method! The hypothesis about false beliefs relates to untested beliefs, while scientific investigation is specifically designed to ferret out those false beliefs. Evolution by natural selection is continually tested and re-examined, which means it is not a “belief,” but a theory—one with enough verification to be called a fact, just like gravity.)

And then Keller whips out what he thinks is the best argument of them all: If you sense any kind of moral obligation—surprise!—you already believe in God. Because, you know, unless God exists, nobody would believe there should be any standards for behavior and it would just be chaos in the streets.

After a mere three paragraphs occupying a little more than a single page of his book, Keller declares that he has demolished all naturalistic attempts to explain morality, finishing up with this pat conclusion: “Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.” (And he completely misses the difference between cultural relativism, which is an anthropological method whereby investigators of other cultures try not to judge them by the standards of their own culture, and moral relativism, which he appears to think is the view that nobody has any authority to tell anybody else what to do—also known as anarchism.)

Look. People rely on each other for the basic necessities of life. I would not be sitting here in a climate-controlled suburban house, typing out a blog post on a laptop computer connected to the internet, with a stomach full of food that was prepared by strangers, looking out my window at a calm street scene devoid of chaos or mayhem if it were false that people rely on each other for the basic necessities of life. It’s not a matter of altruism: almost all of the people who made this moment in my life possible don’t care about me—they don’t even know who I am, and they weren’t thinking of me when they, say, built my house, prepared my food, or worked to maintain the energy infrastructure that powers everything artificial around me. They were working for themselves. We have a complex economy. We need each other. So it makes perfect sense that a social species like ours would evolve to have a feeling that reputation matters and someone is watching, that we would have a strong sense of reciprocity of norms, that we would expect others to conform to basic rules of conduct that maintain the stability of the community, and that we would judge them harshly when they deviate. (Or, more accurately, relying on each other as a social species conferred a lot more benefits on us than we would have had if we were just a bunch of self-sufficient anarchists with only the work of our own two hands to keep us going. The moral sense would be a necessary component of our social nature.)

Almost everybody everywhere feels some kind of moral obligation. We even have names for the people who don’t: we call them psychopaths and sociopaths. But a universal sense or moral obligation does not mean that every human community will develop the same conventions for how to maintain itself. That’s cultural relativism. That there appear to be certain “universals” in human culture is not evidence of God: more reasonably, they are evidence of certain baseline rules that no human society would function well (or for long) without. So it would make sense that we don’t see societies that lack those rules—they would dissolve or destroy themselves.

For some reason, Keller only addresses the existence of God in chapters 8 and 9 of his book. But if those chapters don’t convince you that God exists, or might possibly exist, then none of the other chapters have anything worthwhile to say. Most of them are based on alleged historical evidence (all of it within the Christian tradition, of course), none of which is reliable or convincing unless you have no idea what reliable or convincing evidence is supposed to look like. (For example, he claims in chapter 7 that since the four canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—were “written at the very most forty to sixty years after Jesus’s death,” “the Biblical accounts of Jesus’s life were circulating within the lifetimes of hundreds who had been present at the events of his ministry.” Really? When average life expectancy was almost certainly less than “forty to sixty years,” in a society far less mobile or connected as ours, where people did not have the ability to verify the facts of stories they were told?)

At any rate, The Reason for God by Timothy Keller will go on my shelf next to the similarly dismal The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel (and the more sophisticated, but equally unconvincing Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI). These books are tiresome. I don’t know why I keep telling people I will read them. None of them ever say anything interesting.

Here’s a question from one of the letters published in The Fresno Bee today:

How have we gotten to this point that a prayer mentioning Christ is unconstitutional?

The question was prompted by a recent challenge to the Fresno City Council’s practice of opening its meetings with a Christian prayer. But whatever you think about the usefulness or propriety of the challenge, the question above, which represents a view I have heard often, frames the issue only incompletely. And that makes it at least misleading or even dishonest.

Prayers “mentioning Christ” are not unconstitutional.

Since the matter is important and the point is frequently misunderstood, it bears repeating: prayers “mentioning Christ” are not unconstitutional. No court has interpreted the First Amendment of our Constitution to mean that people cannot pray by “mentioning Christ” or any other deity, saint, prophet, ancestor, icon, totem, charm, or toaster oven.

In simple terms, the United States Constitution does one thing: it constitutes our government. That constitution is achieved in the document by:

1. identifying the source of the government’s sovereignty,
2. stating the purposes of the government,
3. establishing our governmental structure,
4. investing government agents with authority to act, and
5. limiting those actions against certain, safeguarded individual rights.

Our constitutional document is about power, structure, and limits of our government. No matter your personal beliefs, prayers that “mention Christ” do not affect the power, structure, or limits of our government, and no authoritative court, not even the Supreme Court, has ever said otherwise. You are entitled to believe that petitioning God while “mentioning Christ” will cause a particular outcome in the functioning of government, but your belief is not cognizable to judges or anyone else with the power to compel your conduct. By all means, continue believing whatever you like. And I will continue thinking that your belief in the power of intercessory prayer directed to altering the conduct of government officials is both philosophically misplaced and practically ineffective.

One of the individual rights safeguarded by the United States Constitution is your right to free exercise of religion. That means only that the government cannot use its authority to prevent you from ever offering prayers “mentioning Christ” or anything else. In other words, our nation cannot abide laws that would wholly prohibit or criminalize your religious beliefs or their manifestation in your daily life. It does not mean, however, that you are entitled, always and everywhere, in whatever manner, without any interference from the government, to engage in speech or conduct that amounts to a “prayer mentioning Christ,” or that could conceivably be called religious exercise.  For example, the government has plenty of authority to prevent you from using your alleged “free exercise” to obstruct its agents in the lawful discharge of their duties: If you were about to be arrested by a police officer, but insisted on taking a detour to your local place of worship to offer a last prayer, I doubt a free exercise claim would overcome a charge of resisting arrest.

In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), two people were denied unemployment compensation on the grounds they were “discharged for work-related ‘misconduct’” after they “were fired from their jobs with a private drug rehabilitation organization because they ingested peyote for sacramental purposes at a ceremony of the Native American Church, of which both [were] members.” Writing for the Court, Justice Scalia observed:

[W]e have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.

And:

The government’s ability to enforce generally applicable prohibitions of socially harmful conduct, like its ability to carry out other aspects of public policy, cannot depend on measuring the effects of a governmental action on a religious objector’s spiritual development. To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the States interest is compelling—permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, to become a law unto himself—contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.

In other words, your right to free exercise of your religious beliefs (including your right to offer prayers “mentioning Christ”) is not a ticket to completely unlimited conduct if you can figure out a way to say that your religious beliefs compel it. The government can limit what you do, so long as it’s limiting socially harmful conduct, it limits everyone else in the same way, and it otherwise acts within the constitutional scope of its powers.

Justice Scalia suggests that the alternative would contradict common sense, and I agree. My common sense tells me that if you are not allowed to practice your religion by violating a neutral law (one that does not specifically target your practice) that is generally applicable (everyone else must follow it, too), then you are allowed to practice your religion by not violating neutral laws of general applicability. (As Justice Souter observed in a case brought under the Establishment Clause, “Religious students cannot complain that omitting prayers from their graduation ceremony would, in any realistic sense, ‘burden’ their spiritual callings. To be sure, many of them invest this rite of passage with spiritual significance, but they may express their religious feelings about it before and after the ceremony.” Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992), concurring. In other words, omitting prayers from a graduation ceremony does not amount to removing the students’ religious beliefs and practices altogether. Life—and religion—goes on.)

There may be a problem when we consider religions whose ordinary operations, manifested in the “free exercise” of their practitioners, simply cannot abide the parameters of our laws in general (if such a generalization is possible). In other words, if we define the outer limit of social norms through the legal system, by legislation or judicial opinions, then religious groups can only require conduct that falls within those limits, whether the scope of required conduct is narrower than the legally defined field, or coextensive with it. Maybe that is a problem for “free exercise”; maybe “free exercise” means religious groups are allowed to require any conduct they want, no matter whether it overruns the parameters defined by our legal system, and their members can only be stopped by the government when it has a really, really good reason to stop them—what lawyers and judges would call a “compelling interest.” In my view, this “maybe” is the essence of what some people call the “culture wars”: Who gets to define the outer limit of conduct? A government whose sovereignty is derived from all citizens? Or religious groups, each of which includes less than all citizens?

And here we meet the Establishment Clause. “[I]f citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people,” said Justice Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court in Lee v. Weisman. And in his concurrence to that opinion, Justice Blackmun wrote, “The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free government, even if no one is forced to participate. When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

Those remarks are pretty high-flown, and they don’t provide any real guidance to people who are trying to predict whether a particular government action violates the Establishment Clause. But they express an underlying sense, perhaps, of why we value (or should value) the separation of religion and government. If we are going to have a government of laws, if we are going to operate under the principle that social norms and rules of conduct should be determined by a body whose participants may include all citizens, no matter their religious beliefs, then acting as though some of those citizens’ views are more important than others—or worse, actually giving them more weight—simply because they are members of a particular religious group, defeats the ideal of fairness, which is one of the fundamental purposes of rule by law.

(Some of the justices that dissented in the Smith case argued that leaving the accommodation of specific religious practices to the legislative process would privilege the majority religions in that process. They suggested that members of those majority religions could dominate the legislature to prevent the accommodation of minority religions. But that seems to me like little more than a cynical admission that the majority religion—which could only be Christianity so far in our history—is already privileged. Which is all the more reason, in my view, to keep religion out of politics. Vote for people who are well-equipped to address the problems at hand, not for people whose religious views match yours.)

Now I’m better equipped to explain what I meant when I said that the question above (“How have we gotten to this point that a prayer mentioning Christ is unconstitutional?”) frames the issue inaccurately. If “prayer mentioning Christ” is not unconstitutional, then what exactly is the constitutional problem with the Fresno City Council, or any other government, having Christian prayers (the kind that “mention Christ”) to open its sessions? In other words, the problem is not just “prayer mentioning Christ,” but the fact that “prayer mentioning Christ” is an official (or de facto official) part of a governing activity.

When Christian prayers are made at the beginning of Fresno City Council sessions, they are not just ordinary prayers by people who are freely exercising their right to hold and express religious beliefs. Those prayers occur in a specific context, with a specific purpose, which is both governmental and religious. The governmental purpose is to bring the actions of the City Council under the auspices of a particular religious concept of the universe—the Christian one—and the religious purpose is to put the imprimatur of the Christian God on the actions of the City Council. All of which sends a clear message: the Fresno City Council acts under the authority of Jesus Christ, and not under the authority of the citizens of Fresno, unless by happy coincidence those citizens are also Christians. This implicates the problem I suggested above: Who should be allowed to legislate conduct? A government that includes everyone, or a religion that includes less than everyone?

The City of Fresno is not a sovereign state (its powers are derived from the State of California), but it does make rules that apply to everyone in the city, whether they are Christians or not—and lots of them are not. If the rules are in fact determined by a system of law, and not by religious principles—and in general the City of Fresno appears to be ruled by law (barring the corrupting effects of money and politics, which unfortunately will never go away)—then why should the governing body of the city act as though religious principles are the source of its rules? Non-Christian citizens can address and serve on the City Council, but what does the practice of opening sessions with Christian prayer say to those non-Christian citizens? I can tell you, as one of them, that the message is quite clear: “If you are known to be a Christian, if you express your ideas in Christian terms, if you make your contributions overtly Christian in nature, then we will take you more seriously than otherwise.” In reality, I doubt that is frequently the case on matters of real importance to the community. But even so, if members of the Council are not favoring Christians or Christianity, then why do they bother having Christian prayers to open each session? Are they hoping to eventually wear down the enthusiasm of non-Christian citizens for civic participation, and find themselves with de facto rule by Christianity?

The constitutional problem is not that someone, somewhere is offering a “prayer mentioning Christ.” The constitutional problem is that a governing body is pretending to act under the auspices not of its constituents, or of rule by law, but under the Christian God, devotion to which is certainly not universal, even in the relatively small City of Fresno.

Personally, I doubt that a change in policy to include “prayers” from people of diverse beliefs will make any real difference to anyone. People who want to believe that our laws are derived from God, rather than popular sovereignty, as our Constitution says, will not be convinced by argument or history. Their stiff-necked opposition to reality is a product of their own inner drives, which probably “find” it convenient to nurse a counterfactual belief, to serve psychological needs that exceed my knowing. Others disagree and argue that changing the words we use and the way we use them will, over time, preclude the possibility of such opposition. I doubt it. Humans have proven relentlessly inventive in their ability to coin new expressions in service of their prejudices.

And, finally, the matter of “prayer.”

Some people see the opposition to “sectarian prayer” or “prayer mentioning Christ” as opposition to “prayer” in general. And I do not doubt that some opponents of legislative prayer would rather we strip our governmental processes of anything that does not bear directly on matters at hand: budgets, expenditures, hiring, firing, rules of conduct, etc. But I say their view of the world is unnecessarily drab and utilitarian, and a tacit denial of how people actually experience the universe.

We live in a transactional world, where labor and resources are shifted around by lawful exchange in hopes of increasing the overall “value” of our economy and the aggregate happiness of our citizens. This takes a lot of work, so there is always a lot of business to do, and I can see why some people would prefer a governmental process that is just a utilitarian device for getting things done. But the transactional quality of life does not overcome the transcendental quality of experience. And by that I mean not that there are supernatural forces at work in our world, but that the universe is far more complicated that our little brains can comprehend: we should not be surprised by transcendental experience, or the sense that our lives and activities are important, not to be abandoned or taken lightly, that powers beyond our comprehension are always on the verge of interfering in our lives.

Emptying the universe of supernatural forces and adopting a scientific outlook does not leave us with a world where everything is explained or even explainable. There are still mysteries everywhere, including the problems of understanding ourselves and our society—like why are some people so intent on believing in things that are both unobserved and nonsensical? Paying heed to those mysteries by ceremonial remarks that might be construed as “prayers”—whether they “mention Christ” or not—can still be, and in my opinion should be, a good way to remind ourselves, especially in the task of governing, that the quantity of the unknown far exceeds what is known.

There are different ways to “pray,” and not all of them involve petitions for knowledge or guidance or any other tangible benefits from an intangible deity. “Prayer” can also include acknowledgements that we wrestle with our lack of knowledge, the absence of guidance, and the ever-present desire for tangible benefits that we still manage to do without. So if the Fresno City Council—or any other governing body—wanted to open each of its sessions with the admission that none of its members will ever know enough to make the best decisions, I would be happy.

And if you thought the vile comments from Christians that I reproduced in my last two posts (“A Gallery of Local Hatred and Unreasoned Animosity” and “Unreason Veiled in Sentimentality is No Improvement“) weren’t offensive enough, my brother unfortunately managed to elicit another one.

First, Jess King of somewhere near Lindsey, California said this:

Atheists don’t believe in God. By default they believe in evolution and life just being an ”accident.” So, since they are just basically the same as any other animal (by their own belief system) why should anyone take what they say seriously? Just throw them a banana and tell them be quiet.

Then, when my brother (who goes by the nickname “oneoftheguys”) tried to call him out on his astounding idiocy, Jess King responded:

Atheists have “dehumanized” themselves. I am just acknowledging this simple fact.Yes, civility IS more than not using bad words but atheists, by nature, are not civil nor can they be. They reject God. As it is written, Roman 1:22,23; “Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.” rsv Just as idol worshippers renounced God, pseudo-Scientists (atheists) end up worshiping the creation rather than the Creator. Oneoftheguys, re-humanize yourself and get back to God!

(Emphasis added.)

If you are a Christian and you know Jess King, or if Jess King attends your church, and you fail to do anything about his disgusting dehumanization of other people in his community, simply because they fail to believe in his god, then you are equally despicable. Choosing your religion is fine; using that religion to blatantly and offensively dehumanize others is unacceptable. I am tired of other Christians failing to put these idiots in their place. Telling me that people like Jess King are not “true Christians” does not cut it. They’re reading your Bible; they’re your responsibility.

The same article I referred to in my last post—about unconstitutional prayers at Fresno City Council meetings—has also engendered a different kind of response. This one is not so obviously vicious, but it is equally unreasoned and just as disquieting.

From “markos13“:

I can’t help but feel sorry for these athiests, and those that defend them. I cannot imagine how it would be to have no beliefs. To be so empty that the only way to feel worthy is to attack those that believe in God and are spiritual. The hate in the posts from some on here is chilling…I feel so sorry for your children…ugh…to be taught that this is the only life you will have, and there is nothing after this. Very sad.

Which was followed by:

Ummm…no…I have never considered that I might be wrong…simply because I am not

This person is not as overtly vicious as the others, but the failure—and refusal—to understand life without belief in God, coupled with condescending pity has a similar effect. You have no reason to “feel sorry” for people who don’t share your beliefs, especially when you cannot even understand that their lives are not “empty” and that advocating a religiously neutral government is not an “attack [on] those that believe in God and are spiritual.”

Maybe the people who express views like the one above really believe they are taking a gentler approach. But when someone claims to pity you, the message is clear—and hardly gentle: the pitier is superior and you, the pitied, are inferior. Sometimes there are good reasons to pity others. But a profound misunderstanding of the pitied position by the pitier precludes the possibility of justified pity.

The message from people who say things like the comment reproduced above is simple: “I do not care what you think, I refuse to understand or learn about you, but even so I believe you are inferior.” There is nothing gentle, or even genteel, about that message. Cloaking it in noble sentimentality does not improve it.

The Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics recently prompted the Freedom From Religion Foundation to send a warning letter to Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin about unconstitutional prayers at City Council meetings. I am not a member of CVAAS, but I am familiar with several of its people. And while I agree with the position stated in the FFRF letter, I did not participate in anything that led to its drafting.

This morning, the Fresno Bee reported on the issue. Some of the online comments are among the most depressing I have read in a while. I have reproduced several below.

From “jessking,” atheists are animals who should not be treated like members of human society:

Atheists don’t believe in God. By default they believe in evolution and life just being an ”accident.” So, since they are just basically the same as any other animal (by their own belief system) why should anyone take what they say seriously? Just throw them a banana and tell them be quiet.

From “hikerdude1965,” atheists are outnumbered and should therefore disappear:

There are millions more Christians in this world than atheists, I think it is about time we told them to take a hike. I’d say tell them to go to hell but they wouldn’t believe it exists.

From “gramavegas,” atheists are sniveling, crying babies who should leave the United States, which “was founded on Christian beliefs”:

First of all we live in a Republic. Second of all, our country was founded on Christian beliefs. If you do not like that I suggest you move to a country that was founded on your belief system, IF you can find one. And that goes for the rest of you that feel the same way. No one is forcing you to live in this Christian faith based country. The borders allow you to leave. Try Australia. Oh no, that won’t work because they TELL YOU to leave if you don’t like a Christian faith based country. And I don’t even go to a traditional Christ based church. I am not a Christian radical. I am not a reborn Christian. I just believe in the FACT that our country was built on Christian values and I respect that. I have the same rights you have…. If I don’t like it I can leave. So stop your sniveling, cry baby!

From “SKWEEKIE,” atheists are bored, nose-picking, butt-scratching attention-seekers “who have the blackest of hearts and car oil for blood,” and who should be eradicated from society:

These atheist groups are not the majority in this country, thank God. They are bored, and have nothing else to do but to pick their nostrils, scratch their butts, and get into other people’s business instead of trying to co-exist with other faiths…seems they have to assert their non-christian opinion and unsolicited advice to wherever there is prayer to Jesus Christ. I think these atheists are attention-seeking, party-poopers and i’m real sick of them asserting themselves in our society as well. How long are they to be tolerated? I hope that before my lifetime is over, they have been irradicated from society altogether. They are merely a handful of skeptics who have the blackest of hearts and car oil for blood.

From “joelprado49” (quoting Saul Alinsky), the best way to deal with atheists is just to ridicule them:

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.”

Perhaps later I will comment on the issue at hand—unconstitutional prayers at City Council meetings—but for now I just wanted to put these people, most of whom are largely anonymous, and their vicious remarks on display.

It is difficult and depressing to know that others who share my city would think that I am no better than an animal, that I may be a sniveling, crying baby because I do not believe in God and dare to say something about it, that I should disappear (or worse, be eradicated, like vermin), and that the best response to me is ridicule. These are not the hallmarks of a civil society, but the symptoms of deep and cowardly loathing. I certainly do not want to prevent these people from the free exercise of their own religion, on their own time, when they are not acting in a governmental capacity, and I doubt that anyone from CVAAS or FFRF wants to do so either. What so drives their disgust, that they can make the remarks reproduced above without seeing their savage hypocrisy?

Welcome to my Sunday morning sermon. If you start to feel uncomfortable, just stay with me to the end; you may be pleasantly surprised.

This is staggeringly ridiculous, and far more terrifying than foreign terrorists:

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country’s few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder’s passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a “piece of dirt” unable to express the reasons for such acts in court.

(Emphasis added.) The anonymous “piece of dirt” commenter may be shocking, but the words of Donald Spitz—who should never be addressed as “Reverend”—are even more chilling:

The Rev. Donald Spitz, of Chesapeake, Va., who runs the Army of God Web site supporting violence against abortion providers, said the rejection of that argument has upset those who view Roeder as a hero.

. . .

Spitz was the spiritual adviser to Paul Hill and was with him at his 2003 execution for the killing of a Florida abortion provider and a clinic escort in 1994, an event that led to a lull in violence at abortion clinics. While saying he knows nothing of impending plans by others against abortion doctors, Spitz scoffed at suggestions that Roeder’s conviction will have a similar effect.

“Times change,” Spitz said. “People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”

Really? This person who claims to represent “God”—that’s the God of the Christian Bible, for those keeping score, not the God of some other religion—thinks that Scott Roeder, who testified in court that he committed all of the acts necessary to convict him of first degree murder, is a hero. Sure, maybe he is interpreting the Christian Bible “incorrectly.” That’s fine; I’ll give you that (and address it more fully below). But this lunatic and his friends Paul Hill and Scott Roeder are demonstrative proof that believing in God and Jesus Christ and reading the Bible are not magical tonics that prevent people from supporting or committing terrible acts of violence.

Surely my more reasonable religious friends will claim or observe or otherwise argue that “true” Christians, or at least the ones they would dare to associate with openly, are the ones who actually participate, who live within the “community” of believers, both past and present. And that is a perfectly decent thing to say—except for two points you need to consider.

First, even the official or “true” church—whether it’s one with an institutional history that it claims stretches continuously back through nearly two millennia to Jesus himself, or a more diffuse idea of some invisible community of true believers—has failed to prevent its members from committing terrible acts of violence. If we can look back through history and find anyone within your definition of the “true” church who would get along with Spitz, Hill, and Roeder, then you have a problem. (And just defining “true” church from the outset to automatically exclude those people doesn’t solve your problem; you still need to explain why that qualification is necessary.) When you claim that the central message or teaching of your religious group is contrary to these kinds of acts, and when you claim both that your group stands (or should stand) as the ultimate moral authority in human history, and further that those of us outside your group—especially those of us who disclaim any affinity with the idea that rules or guidelines for human behavior must come from a supernatural source—are the ones with a crippled ethical sense, then you must explain how that message, despite its alleged enormous power, and despite your claim that it’s backed by God Himself, failed to keep the violence and lunacy in check. (If your answer is simply that people are weak and sinful, then what good is a religion that amounts to little more than a support group where people can go every week, admit that they are weak and sinful, but keep on acting like jerks and idiots and worse? Why not just close up shop and let people go on being weak and sinful, but without the pretense that admitting it does the rest of us any good?)

Which leads to my second point: If there is any possibility that people have the capacity to be “good” without God—and I present myself as evidence—then you must admit that your “ultimate” moral authority does not require membership, participation, or affiliation with your church, your God, or anything else you claim to offer to humanity. The substantial probability remains that “good” and acceptable conduct that is not socially or psychologically destructive may be governed and defined by the fundamental natural limitations presented by the circumstance of people living together and dependent on each other for their continued existence and well-being. And if that is the source of the limitations giving rise to behavior we call “good” and “moral” and “ethical,” then while you are perfectly free to desire, enjoy, and even benefit from your membership in the church, “true” or not, you have no good reason to demand or even expect that the rest of us should need or want to join you.

And I am not talking about some kind of Dante-esque “First Circle” of hell, for those who “did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, / that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism, / the portal of the faith that you embrace.” (Inferno, IV.) I’m not arguing that you who consider yourselves “true” members of the community of faith according to Jesus Christ should look upon the rest of us decent people with sad but benign approval; I’m saying that if you are “good” or “moral” or “ethical,” too, then it’s for the same reasons that I am—except you obscure those reasons with vestments of theology. If the good and virtuous are defined not by dictates handed down from heaven to people who could otherwise choose to behave and organize themselves by any other principles (go ahead: make lying, theft, and murder the norm!), but by the limitations necessitated by the simple fact that humans live together, in societies, to reap the enormous benefits of interdependence, then saying otherwise, while it may produce an inspiring narrative, does not change reality. Either virtue was arbitrarily defined by God, who could have defined it otherwise, or virtue arises organically from our human experience and God was limited to requiring only those virtues that fit our actual needs.

Maybe God did appear to people long ago and advise them well about their conduct with each other. But even if he did, the simple fact that people have certain ideas about how to behave is not proof that morality is the result of divine revelation, or disproof that morality is the product of the natural exigencies affecting us all, whether we believe in God or not. It’s just an appealing story.

Christianity failed to stop Paul Hill and Scott Roeder, and so far it has failed to stop Donald Spitz from cheering them on. And here I rejoin the views of my more reasonable religious friends—with a qualification. What might have stopped Hill and Roeder, and what still may stop Spitz (though he might be too far gone), is a recognition and understanding of those natural exigencies, the fundamental limits on behavior without which human society would fail to exist. Some of you within your church, “true” or not, may indeed recognize and understand those factors in morality, and being embedded in a past and present community of fellow believers may assist your commitment to behaving well and virtuously. But if that is true, then you are obviously engaged with your world—our world—the immanent one, called “here and now,” and you have not been distracted from the natural exigencies of today by inspired dreams of another world. That is what makes mainstream Christianity, in all its various forms, so inoffensive to the rest of us. Why should it bother me that you believe in God, follow a liturgical calendar, read the Bible, or pray every day, so long as you are not forgetting the people around you, treating them well, paying your taxes, and otherwise participating in society? You can even claim to believe that you are only behaving well because of the content of your religious beliefs: I am still confident that if someone managed to prove that God does not exist, and never existed—even though no one will ever prove that—you would continue to behave in pretty much the same way. Without your reliance on God to tell you how to behave, you would soon, perhaps immediately, discover that there are many, many good reasons apart from divine revelation to behave well.

But if you are one of those more reasonable religious friends, you have the same responsibility as I have to combat the evils arising from the supernaturalist distractions of people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz. We can disagree about abortion—because there is ample room for disagreement—but there is no room to disagree with the view that people should not be murdering each other because they disagree about abortion. Your responsibility as someone who is engaged with human society, and the natural exigencies and fundamental limitations it presents, even if you maintain religious practice, is to ensure that your practice of religion provides no comfort to those who would allow their dreams of another world to ruin this one. Some of that is built right into Christianity: Jesus told his followers to treat others well, for example. You even have the central story of the incarnation, that the full revelation of your God was completed by the divine experience of becoming human. Those stories fail to explain why people should treat each other well—they only dictate certain behavior—but that doesn’t mean you should fail to provide that explanation.

You Christians, even the more reasonable ones, too easily let your supernatural beliefs slip into a position of primacy such that the dreamers’ distractions—I should say the sleepers’ distractions—and their acts of violence are aided by your failure to address the fact that, even if the contents of your narratives are true, they do not exclude the substantial probability that virtuous behavior is rooted in the natural world, and not the supernatural one. So long as people are allowed to drift away in religious beliefs, unmoored from present circumstances, people will continue to commit violence in the name of your religion. If you want to stop them, then you should be working much harder at adjusting your practice to provide clear and practical explanations for good behavior and the transcendental experience that many people crave. If all you’re doing is saying that people should behave well because God told them to, then you leave the door wide open for the “false” practitioners—the ones you claim to reject—to elaborate their own dispensation of morality from God. Your limp replies that they are misinterpreting scripture will never succeed against those lunatics because your scriptures are so heterogenous and diverse that no one will ever agree on the exact, perfect, and unambiguous interpretation of what they say. You must do something more if you want to prevent people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz from carrying on their dangerous and destructive activities in the name of your religion and your scriptures and your God.

If you have made it this far, you should have noticed a few things. First, I am not advocating the destruction of religion (only that reasonable religious people pull their heads out of the sand about the effects of their laziness). Second, I am not claiming that religion is the source of evil in the world (just that it has perennially failed to prevent evil). Third, if you prefer to maintain your practice, then I am quite certain that the suggestions I offer fall squarely within the mainstream of your tradition: is there anything in your scriptures that prohibits you from examining the world and striving to understand why people ought to behave well?

Believe what you need to believe, but don’t let religious beliefs become excuses for failures of virtue.

The comments below serve as an open thread, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, on general topics that encompass religion, morality, ethics, secularism, and whatever is reasonably related. Here are the rules of conduct, which I will enforce as needed, as fairly as I can:

1. Do not make personal attacks.
2. Having an opposing opinion is fine. Being unreasonable or grossly and unnecessarily intemperate in expressing your opinion is not.

Anyone who can follow those simple rules is welcome to participate. If you have never commented here before, your comment will probably have to be approved before it will be posted. I’ll try to do that as fast as I can.

Finally, let me also suggest a few guidelines for the substance of discussion:

• If you state opinions, be prepared to support them with facts, reasoning, or both.
• Recognize the difference between facts and opinions: facts are potentially true for everyone, opinions are not.
• Even if you think you have supported your opinions with facts and reasons, remember that different people are convinced by different things. If someone is not convincing you, give them a hint as to what it might take. If you know that no one will ever convince you that you’re wrong, then you should probably take your discussion elsewhere.
• No matter how persuasive you think you are, you cannot force others to agree with you.
• Punctuation, correct spelling, complete sentences, and coherent paragraphs are not required, but they sure make other people more likely to pay attention to what you say.

You can disagree with the guidelines. You still have to follow the rules.

Once again, the letters page of The Fresno Bee was filled with foolishness this morning. So I decided to go online and push back. And then, on one letter, this comment appeared, from someone using the alias “All_American“:

Sarah [Palin] is a scholar bar none when put up against any liberal. She knows what being an America is supposed to look like. She actually loves the constitution. What a novel idea! What liberal even likes the constitution? I have never seen or heard of one.

Liberals have and will always mock a true American because they in their hearts want us destroyed. I believe that with all that is within me. They want to put the constitution in the shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule. Profound freedom haters!

Mock on you low life liberals. Public opinion is looking at you with disgust. You will soon be back in your closet too afraid to face the country you have tried to destroy.

Just let that sink in. Sarah Palin is a scholar who loves the constitution. Liberals—all of them, whoever they are—belong in a closet, “want to put the constitution in a shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule,” and are “freedom haters.” “Public opinion” is a person: it looks upon “liberals” with disgust.

Despite what others may think, I would not call myself “liberal” or “conservative.” I see no value in ideological assertions, as a matter of principle, that individual freedom is always good or that traditional methods of social organization should always be favored. We should think critically about how our predecessors organized their society and be willing to stomach a reasonable amount of risk that discontinuity, or changes in the ways we do things, will upset our stability—based on our thoughtful and educated risk that we have a greater likelihood of increasing our stability. And if thousands of years of contemplation by people all over the world struggling with the relationships between free will, determinism, and happiness have taught us anything, it should be that limitless freedom is a recipe for disaster: when we consider the tension between individual and society, we cannot forget the benefits of society for individuals, and the reasonable costs to individuals of maintaining that society.

There are ideologues on both ends of the spectrum, people who’ve decided to promote an idea no matter what facts may block the path to ideological purity. But there is a reasoned middle ground, where facts about our immeasurably complex world should make us question the viability of every ideology. We need social welfare programs and tough law enforcement. Serious problems like crime and poverty need to be addressed at both ends of their occurrence, including strong measures of prevention and real consequences when prevention fails. We need a strong sense of freedom, so people will recognize their ability to contribute and innovate, to everyone’s benefit, but freedom needs to be tempered by the inherent limitations on individuals when they choose to reap the benefits of social organization.

In the middle of all that, the Constitution has surprisingly little to say. And most reasonable people can find ways to disagree about what it does say. Did the Constitution set us off in one direction, setting only the limits of our innovation going forward? Or is the Constitution our guiding star, the fixed destination for our national journey? Either way, the Constitution provides a central—though increasingly indeterminate—text that maintains the center of our national conversation. It seems likely that we will one day set that document aside and draft another, which will precipitate another progression into indeterminacy. The meaning of any document will never last forever. And as someone who does a good amount of writing, I can attest to the possibility that even a text written by a single author can have meanings that the author never imagined or intended. But I have never any American, liberal or conservative, seriously suggest that we should put our Constitution, or any constitution, into either a literal or a metaphorical shredder.

We can deal with conflicting ideas, if the conversation continues, if our constitutional center—whatever it means—will hold. But there is a real world, with real people, whose lives can be thrown into terrible disarray without any good reason when ideas lose contact with facts and ideology takes hold at the seat of power. And those people who disconnect their ideas from facts pose a greater danger to the livability and longevity of our society than people who commit atrocious acts of intentionally disruptive violence. When the national discourse takes leave of reality, we will quickly find ourselves susceptible to all forms of manipulation, unmoored from anything that would prevent us from destroying ourselves. Without facts, without curiosity, without the drive to learn about our world and each other, our society—and all of the benefits it gives us—will quickly crumble under the weight of our stupidity.

People like “All_American” are getting louder, and they want to take over. They believe that “liberals” (whoever they are) want to destroy our society, but their refusal to temper their ideological views with facts makes their movement ignorant, shrill—and powerful. It’s much easier just to claim that “liberals” hate freedom, or that they want to take your money, than it is to engage reality with facts and reasoned discourse. But we will pay a steep price if they win—not in taxes, but in the loss of our freedom, our intelligence, our happiness, our economic strength, and our moral authority. I would rather pay taxes and struggle against the forces of ignorance that will always threaten to overtake our political system.

And here is how we struggle: by promoting education and reasoned collaboration among citizens, by finding people like “All_American” and pushing them to engage their minds with us and the rest of the world, by thinking critically and skeptically and teaching our children and young people to do the same, by pursuing knowledge without limitations but using it only with caution. The forces of gleeful ignorance and dangerous selfishness threaten to ruin the great society we have built, but we cannot let them succeed.

Professor Myers has it right:

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper.

Right? Understand? Seems uncontroversial? But he continues with a razor sharp observation that should spur some critical thought among its targets:

They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

Read his post at the link above to see the ridiculous context in which his remarks arise.