From Jim Wilson:

“Who are we to judge God?? He works in mysterious ways that we limited humans could not possibly comprehend. Even when the things he does seem unjust there really is a greater justice behind it.”

This is something I am consistently told by believers, especially if questioning their faith or the teachings of their holy books. The assertion is that God is so mind-blowingly great and powerful and that we are so minuscule we are in no position to judge him (& it is most always “him”).

Unfortunately, believers leave me with little choice but to judge the God they believe in. They threaten me with eternal punishment if I do judge him, they continuously try to take over the government apparatus of my country, they neglect to give their children proper medical care because of their beliefs and frankly they are always judging me and the people I care about. Furthermore my mind insists I be curious. When I am frequently given a claim, I tend to want to look into it. So, in short I have little choice but to make some judgment about the Gods I’m told about, particularly the Christian one.

Ironically, Christians and other theists are also guilty of the thing they accuse me of. They also make judgments about the God they believe in. The only difference is they judge this being as extant, capable of giving reward and punishment, and above all infinitely good. They make this judgment, generally through their own experiences as well as what is written about this God in the bible.

However when I try to form a judgment on the same basis, Christians tell me I cannot use my human logic to understand or make conclusions about their god.

Fortunately, I am in a position to evaluate these god claims, and human logic and my own observations are the only means I have to make an evaluation. If any believers know of a means by which I can evaluate their God other than my own observations and my own ability to reason, please let me know what it is, for this would be most helpful.

Anyway, here is my verdict on the God claims I am most often given, specifically, the Christian God Claim.

1. The mysterious ways he supposedly works are completely indistinguishable from chance, making me question his existence.
2. The Grandiose miracles and blatant suspensions of the laws of physics that he is supposedly responsible for as depicted in the bible, have stopped occurring, ever since we have developed the technology needed to document them. Furthermore there is evidence that much in the bible is hearsay, reported decades or even centuries after the fact. Leading me to question why I should think such a god exists.
3. The claims about him make no sense. For example why would an all powerful, all knowing being need to sacrifice HIMself to HIMself, to act as a loophole in HIS own rules, to save other people from HIS own wrath? Couldn’t he just forgive people without this bloody act of theater? Why would he choose to send any individual to hell who questions the logic of such an assertion? Why would he allow an evil being to go about messing up his supposed plans? Why would he knowingly create people who he will send to hell. And don’t say they sent themselves to hell, he created hell and the criteria that determines who would go there, and further, he knowingly created all the chains of events leading to our every action.

Here’s another piece from Jim Wilson:

OK, here is an interesting thought experiment, and I would love to hear everyone’s take on it.  Let’s suspend our skepticism for a while and assume that the Christian God and a devil are both real. We can simply ignore all the logical inconsistencies associated with the existence of both. Anyway, assuming there is a God and devil, and they are fighting for souls of humanity, why doesn’t the devil simply make hell awesome, or God simply loosen his requirements for acceptance.

1.The Devil:
The devil really has a huge advantage in the soul collecting game.  He is the default captor of the soul of any recently deceased person, except apparently for that minority of the population that accepts Christianity.  Christians like to paint it as though he gets all the bad people and his punishing them is some form of cosmic justice.  The reality of it though is that there are plenty of horrible people who are Christians and a ton of absolutely awesome wonderful people who are non-chrisitians. In fact many of the greatest minds and talents of all times are possessed by non-Christians & I personally would rather be hanging out eternally with them than all the pious suck-ups and bigots of the world.  I would love to be able to chat it up with Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Katherine Hepburn, Richard Feynman, Douglass Adams, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Isaac Asimov, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin, just to name a handful of the people who are apparently in hell now.  A growing number of today’s greatest minds will one day join them.

Anyway, I figure if the Devil really wanted to attract more people he could maybe turn down the sulfur, exile Kim Jong Il and the minority of Crazies there and put in a beach.  Get the temperature to a nice level and let all us free thinkers party forever. I’m sure the band would be kicking.  I’m sure John Lennon, Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain would be happy to rock out there. Who knows, maybe John Bohnam or Keith Moon would have made it there too, and  would be willing to jam on the skins. I’d love to hear who Frank Zappa would be collaborating with.

I figure hell could be a pretty fun place, and it would be easy to recruit people  if the Devil would just be cool to his subjects. After-all, everyone knows how uptight the Christian god is, and from reading his holy book one can only conclude that he is a murderous, bigoted, insecure, man-child. Satan could really make a good case that God is really the bad guy and a lot of people would view his place to be the preferable alternative. If Satan took this strategy he would not need to be making back room deals and exchanging souls for blues playing ability on the Mississippi delta.  He could come straight out and advertise. In short, the Devil just needs to make hell awesome.

2.  God:
God could follow the same strategy. He could exile all the pedophile priests, Hitler, Jerry Falwell and all the other Creeps and Sycophants he has now, and embrace diversity. God has done nothing to lead any thoughtful intelligent person in this day and age to think he exists, so why not embrace diversity and let people with a wider range of beliefs in?  I mean even someone as vain as the Christian God would have to get sick of people praising him and telling him how great he is all the time. Maybe it would be nice to have people who practice some honest skepticism around. Rather for some reason we are to believe God wants to surround himself forever with prudes, cowards, kiss-ups, bigots and fundamentalists zealots.  I don’t see why the Christian concept of heaven would appeal to anyone.

Anyway, both God and Satan, if they really wanted to pump up their soul collection, should just make their presence known to humanity in a verifiable, objectively demonstrable manner and make the resting places they offer more suitable for thinking people.

This comes to us from Richard Johnson:

It is now widely accepted in the secular world that morality, the distinction between right and wrong conduct, is largely hard-wired in the brain – behavior that is “learned” through evolution. Thus, how we treat our fellows is antecedent to our survival as a human species. This just makes sense; evolution makes sense.  Obviously murder is contrary to survival. So is incestuous behavior. Over thousands of years, we have figured out how to be culturally fit.

Sin is a contrivance of religion – not all but many – certainly the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It sets up a separate – sometimes overlapping – but definitely a shadow system of morality. It sets forth rules that promote superstitious purpose. Religion takes advantage of fear and guilt – also human traits that are hard-wired by evolution.

Christianity is particularly severe because it sets up the individual to bear the responsibility of offending God – by the simple event of birth. Christians are told they are born sinners. Like water dripping on a stone, the relentless inculcation of sin-from-birth wears away the will. Many Christians actually believe (no wonder) that unless they submit to the will of supernatural (fictitious) agents, they will burn in hell.

Moral character is the product of years of honing that derives from discussions with parents, teachers, and sadly, clergy. While the bulkheads of who we are at our core, are set in place through our genes, the fine points – how we regard minorities, people of other races, our charity, the rules of our day to day interaction with others – result from deliberations carried out over the course of our lives. Clergy, steeped in doctrine thousands of years old, often deliver damaged goods. What good is scripture for anything but historical reference when it is so anachronistic to modern day situations? Human culture is evolving but weighted down by unyielding tracts held to be sacred.

The greatest impediments to our cultural advancement come from religion. Far right political candidates hawk their bigotry and bias by claiming that same-sex marriage is immoral – their reference: biblical sources. And they claim that abortion is murder – their rationale: God has placed a soul in the fertilized egg. Fiction!

Who talks with their shadow? Shadows at least exist. To allow less than a shadow to determine moral code is to shoot a hole in our struggle for survival. Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and author of Religion Explained traces our belief in the unseen to those ancient days when our survival literally depended on those noises in the brush being possibly a predator. The “unseen” can still deliver a fatal blow. It’s called faith.

Here’s another interesting insight from Jim Wilson:

I have had members of my own family repeat the nonsense that this country was founded upon Christian principles. Often these are referred to as “Judeo-Christian principles”. Many politicians (more often than not Republicans) speak of bringing us back to these principles. This nonsense needs to be put to rest. There is nothing in the bible that comes anywhere close to prescribing anything like our system of government.

In fact, the American revolution was largely inspired by enlightenment ideas that came about after rejecting the religious dogmatism that governed Europe for the preceding centuries. Many of the founding fathers were actually Deists. All of the tyrannies our founding fathers were fighting against were justified through appeals to Christianity. Furthermore, the founding fathers took multiple opportunities to dismiss the notion of this being a country founded on Christianity. The first Amendment of the Constitution specifically protects against a government imposition of religion and Article six explicitly states “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson made it clear he wanted a “wall of separation” between church and state. To quote Christopher Hitchens “Build up that wall Mr. Jefferson.” Furthermore, the Treaty of Tripoli (signed by John Adams) shortly after the country’s founding explicitly states: “ the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Still, the Christian nation mythology is a stubborn one and its crown jewel is the Ten Commandments. The mythology is often embodied by politicians erecting Ten Commandments monuments. Let’s walk through the commandments and see how many parallels to the American legal system are actually there.

The first four commandments:

1. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.”
2. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments. ”
3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain. ”
4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

These have nothing to do with our constitution and it would be wholly unconstitutional to force Americans to obey them. They are entirely about what a petty, jealous tyrant this God is.

Commandment 5:

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”

Is also not anywhere to be found in the constitution and cannot be enforced. Furthermore it is a horrible commandment. Honor should not be unconditional. One should not honor parents, for example that physically abuse them.

Commandments 6:

“You shall not murder.”

Applied strictly to the other Jews in the bible, and God often commanded the killing of non-jews. But, at last we do have a commandment that is enforced by our laws in this country. The only problem is that all civilized societies have some sort of prohibition against murder, including ones that pre-date the old testament. Frankly there is no reason to claim this commandment is the source of the prohibitions against murder in this country.

Commandment 7:

“You shall not commit adultery.”

This is not against the law in the country either, though it may be admitted as grounds for divorce.

Commandment 8:

“You shall not steal.”

My comments on 6 also apply here.

Commandment 9:

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

We have laws against this, but only in a highly limited context, and dishonesty in general is completely legal except in cases like libel, slander and fraud, where there is actual tangible damage.

Commandment 10:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

This a fundamentally dumb commandment, you really cannot control what you covet, and there is nothing wrong with coveting as long as this does not lead you to steal their possessions. Furthermore, coveting the wealth of those around you is part of what inspires us to work hard to get it ourselves. This is what many argue American capitalism is all about.

Also, keep in mind that in the bible the punishment for disobeying these and the rest of Old testament law was death by stoning. That is one area of Judeo-Christian tradition I am glad we abandoned. Also note that there is a whole different set of ten commandments given in Exodus 34:12-27, which includes instructions for sacrifices, and a commandment not to boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. So, the question, “which ten commandments” needs to be asked? Anyway, very little of this and the rest of The Law have anything to do with our current system of law and as brutal as much of what is in the Torah, I think we should all be happy about this.

Several days ago, I received an email with the following:

Vote for Obama, and here’s the reason you should …

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

This debt discussion is a symptom of what I like to call an ideological proxy war. Krugman himself has done an about face on the debt issue as described here:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/krugman-v-krugman.html

My point isn’t to say that Krugman was wrong in 2003 or that he’s wrong today. My point is that both sides discuss things like the national debt primarily in service to larger agendas that are uncomfortable for them to talk about directly.

In 2003, Krugman wanted the government to do less of what it was doing at the time – invading the middle east and lowering tax rates - so he criticized the debt. Obama criticized the debt too, and voted against raising the debt ceiling as a Senator. Today, Krugman wants the government to do more of what it is doing – spending on social programs and infrastructure projects - so now he defends the debt, and Obama and the Democrats are the ones creating it.

Prominent Republicans did the exact same thing only in reverse: According to the Republican establishment during the Bush years the debt was no problem, a temporary necessity caused by the war on terror, and Democrats who warned about the deficit were portrayed as chicken littles. But now that there’s a Democrat in the white house you’d think all the Republicans went to college and got a PhD in sustainable financial practices. What a crock of bull. You’ll see how quickly all this fiscal discipline goes right out the window if the Republicans get back control of both the legislative and executive branches.

This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is a failure to face reality issue. The national debt is just a symptom of political choices made about how much to tax and how much to spend. Those are the things people should be thinking about.

The size of our national debt reflects that as a society we are habitually addicted to having government do more than we are willing to tax ourselves to pay for. This isn’t a temporary situation caused by a war or a recession. It doesn’t reflect “special needs” or compassionate priorities or sound management of the economy. Instead, this is a chronic condition that has applied every year for decades upon decades, regardless of which party nominally controlled Washington. The only exception was a couple of years in the late ’90s when new technology caused the economy to grow so much faster than anticipated that it took the politicians a little while to figure out how to screw up the budget again.

This is exacerbated by the fact that people are deliberately led to think they won’t have to pay a dollar (either now -or- later) for every dollar of services the government provides. Taxes are usually sold to the public as falling pimarily on someone else: Tax the rich! Tax the 1%! Tax the corporations! These are appealing to most people simply because most people are not rich, not in the top 1% of income, and are not large shareholders in corporations. Whereas government services are pitched as being primarily for our own benefit or the benefit of “the needy”: Fix our health care! Fix our schools! Fix our roads! Fix our retirements! Fix the environment!

Such broad-based appeals run smack into the political reality few talk about: politicians on both sides of the aisle get the vast majority of their campaign contributions and lobbyist input from the people they purport to tax, and very little from the people that they purport to benefit. Expecting your mark on a ballot to send someone to Washington who actually represents your interests rather than his or her own interests is the same kind of wishful thinking that we criticize religious fanatics for.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, which is how it’s always been. And no, marking a ballot does not constitute paying the piper. So who gets the best return on their money from government? Those who contribute the most to the political campaigns and lobbyists for those who run the show – the “1%ers”. Everyone else is just a pawn in the giant political chess game, and is lucky to get ten cents on the dollar.

Lest you think this is just promoting another ideology, it’s not. Whether you or I think that real wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the needy in our society is irrelevant to the fact that in the current political system the government is pretty much incapable of doing so. Whether financing of spending is done by debt or by taxation, the primary beneficiaries are always at the top: the rich, powerful, and well connected. The only thing a major party shift in Washington changes about that is which elites benefit and which lose out.

Need a final example of willful ignorance surrounding this? Krugman says of the debt, “U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.” That’s true only if by ”ourselves” he refers mostly to the same rich 1% who primarily benefit from everything else the government does. Who collects the lion’s share of the interest on the debt? Not the poor and needy. Think about it.

Some recent comments require me to addres those who feel they or others have been “banned” in the comment forum of this blog:

(1) A comment held for moderation is not “banned” and does not usually indicate that the poster is “banned”. I approve the overwhelming majority of comments held for moderation. There is only one person (“RH” and his pseudonyms) for whom a significant number of posts have been not approved since I’ve been running the blog, and in that case it was for repetition and off-topic comments, not because of disagreement over ideas.

(2) The site’s moderation filter is very fickle and unpredictable. I can *add* things to the filter (usernames, specific words, etc.) that will result in comments being held, and a comment with “dirty” words or more than one hyperlink will reliably get held. But most of the time a comment is held for moderation, I have no good explanation for why the system held it and no apparent way to keep similar comments from being held in the future. Do not assume that if one of your comments is held for moderation, the next comment will also be held. Do not assume that if one of your comments is held for moderation, it is because I wanted it held.

(3) There is a separate filter for spam that I don’t even see nor approve comments out of. If something you’re posting is getting caught by the spam filter I think the page notifies you and drops the comment altogether. If that happens it’s probably because you used words commonly associated with spam. All I can suggest is try rewording your comment and resubmitting.

(4) In case it wasn’t clear from the above or from my past behavior: I am very reluctant to deliberately ban anyone and will do so only in extreme cases (if you were around when RH was completely free of moderation, you have some idea of what I mean by “extreme”). I’ll also comment publicly on the banning and the reasons for it. Unless you see a comment from me stating that you’re being deliberately banned/moderated, and why, then I didn’t ban you.

From Jim Wilson:

I recently came accross this piece:

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/18/new-study-finds-fewer-abortions-worldwide-many-remain-unsafe/?hpt=hp_t2

This is just another example of how misguided anti-choicers tend to be.  In this study we see that in much of the world there has been an increase in unsafe  abortion practices, while the total number of abortions level off. In other words, prohibition is doing what it always does and that is creating a black market for the thing that is prohibited.  If anti-choicers really cared about this issue they would seek to educate people on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies and promote access to cheap if not free contraception for everyone.  That many of them oppose this, and instead favor more prohibition tells me that much is wrong with their movement. If you are pro-life, tell me if you’ll change your views based on the information I presented.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

All events are at Duval Auditorium, 1501 North Campbell Avenue.

Parking is free in the visitor parking structure.

8-9:15 am – Cafe Inquiry. Open Forum. The hot topics of the day will be discussed.

Moderator, Gil Shapiro

10-Noon:– Lecture: Beyond Kumbaya: Culturally Relevant Humanism

by Sikivu Hutchinson

Despite media fantasies of post-racialism and post-feminism, the U.S. remains a deeply segregated, separate and unequal nation. The election of President Barack Obama brought heady claims of equality, yet anti-secularist, xenophobic Tea Party-style white nationalism is on the rise. So while the mainstream New Atheist movement battles over science and the separation of church and state, atheists, freethinkers, and humanists of color bring an entirely different set of priorities to the table. Author Sikivu Hutchinson discusses these challenges, providing a social justice lens for Humanism that goes beyond Kumbaya.

About the Speaker – Sikivu Hutchinson is a senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. She has published articles in Free Inquiry, American Atheist Magazine and Secular Nation. She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, founder of the Black Skeptics and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Upcoming FreeThought AZ events:

February 19 – 9am Annual FreeThought Membership Meeting

10am “Conservative Evangelicals in American Politics: Reflections from the Field” by Karen Seat. She is Associate Professor of Religious Studies Program U of A

Here’s the latest from Jim Wilson:

The ancient world is full of stories of Gods and hero figures whose conceptions took place in the absence of sexual intercourse. Among those to be conceived in such a manner are the Hindu deity Krishna, the warrior king Karna, the Buddha, Mithra, the Egyptian god Ra, and Alexander the great. The impossibility of such an occurrence and the mysteriousness of human sexuality held for ancient people must have given these myths great appeal.

It seems that in the case of Jesus the virgin birth doctrine also smuggles in some of the negative attitudes about sex that have been a hallmark of Christianity for centuries. There seems to be this attitude that sexuality is earthly and dirty and as such the perfect human should be born without such an act. Interestingly this attitude has been taken to a bizarre level in some Christian denominations, which still hold that Mary remained a perpetual virgin, despite references in Matthew’s gospel to Jesus’ siblings. It is strange that someone held in such high regard never enjoyed the reward of sexual pleasure. Many Christians view sex in such a negative light that they can’t cope with it being associated with their savior figure in any way. To me this demonization of sexuality and this glorification of virginity are one of many harmful aspects of religion.

Islam teaches many young men that paradise is an eternity with young women who have known no other men. In America, sex-negative attitudes like these have manifested themselves in promise rings, and unplanned pregnancies when young uniformed couples have discovered that fighting their own biology is not all that easy. Remember, people who don’t plan on having sex tend not to take the appropriate measures to prevent pregnancies. This is made worse when they are taught abstinence instead of medically accurate information on preventing pregnancy.

Many young Christians have an idealistic view that they will marry a virgin who will never engage in sex with anyone but them, and not until after marriage. This ideal is largely unrealistic, and it forces the unmarried to live with psychological impacts of spending years denying their sexuality. This has often manifested itself in sexual dysfunction after marriage as well as an encouragement for people to marry at a younger age.

Realistically, why does it matter if the person you are with had one or more sex partners before you? It does not change who they are, their affection for you, or their ability to find pleasure with you. In fact, I know some people who said they enjoy being with partners who are experienced sexually and “know what they are doing.” First time sex is known to be rather awkward, and I don’t see why one would have this ideal of saving this awkwardness for the night you pledge to be with that person forever. This is not to mention that it would seem unwise to pledge oneself to someone for the rest of their life when you have not really engaged in any kind of physical intimacy with them.

The virgin birth of Jesus is considered a fact by Christians and Muslims, but is rejected by nearly everyone else. The new testament has surprisingly little to say about this important piece of theology. The Pauline epistles which are arguably the earliest known writings on Jesus discuss his birth without mentioning his mother’s virginity. Of the four canonical gospels only two of them, Matthew and Luke, discuss the details of Jesus’ birth and conception and these present two vastly different narratives. Mark, the earliest known gospel and the one that Matthew and Luke are largely copied from (with the addition of at least one other shared source, referred to as Q) says nothing of it. John, the only canonical gospel written independently of Mark and Q fails to mention it.

It seems we are stuck with Matthew and Luke as the two sources for Mary’s virginity and they are unreliable. Both are undated, anonymous (they were assigned their names much later) pieces that are clearly not close to the source story and both rely heavily on older documents. Scholars date both of these as originating in this last few decades of the first century and I have heard compelling arguments for dating them even later, making them very far removed from the supposed events they describe.

Also, both contradict each other and contain wild stories found nowhere else. For example Matthew’s gospel places Jesus birth as during the reign of Herod (37–4 BCE) while Luke places his birth during the Reign of Quirinius (6-12 AD). At least one of these accounts has to be wrong. Furthermore, Matthew feels no need to justify the holy family being in Bethlehem, presumably they lived there at the time, while Luke invokes a worldwide census which requires people to travel to the land of their ancestors. There is no record the Romans ever required people to do such a thing. It would be unnecessary, impractical and probably cause a great deal of upheaval. It seems these gospel writers saw a need to reconcile Jesus being born in Bethlehem to a decedent of David with his being from Nazareth in Galilee.

Furthermore, Matthew’s gospel also records events that would have been recorded elsewhere had they actually happened, including zombies walking into Jerusalem (27:52), a hovering star, and Herod’s slaughter of all Bethlehem’s young male children. All of these should have been recorded by someone other than the author of Matthew, but there is no mention of them anywhere. Furthermore, the author of Matthew states plainly that much of the events described in his gospel were done to fulfill old testament prophecies. It reads as though the author tries to slip in as many details as possible that conform with any old testament passage he can find. The Virgin birth prophecy is a clear case of this, as I pointed out in my piece on prophecy, the passage Matthew seems to believe is being fulfilled is Isaiah 7:14-16, which says nothing to indicate it is a prophecy about events hundreds of years in the future, and also uses a Hebrew term for “young woman” rather than virgin. With all this it seems the virgin birth was a latter addition to the Jesus narrative, and not part of his actual life story. It really should not matter anyway. Jesus’ supposed words and deeds can be judged on their on merits.

The point I’m making here is that there is no reason why the virgin birth of Jesus or God or hero should be viewed as a historical fact, as they are all highly suspect. The religious idealization of virginity, not to mention other religiously motivated hang-ups regarding sexuality, is not a healthy view of human sexuality and is conducive to problems like sexual dysfunction, deprivation and unwanted pregnancies.

Here’s the latest from Richard Johnson:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, gathering at church – indeed at any “place of worship” – has never been primarily about practicing religion; rather such activity reflects our social nature.  We strive to be with others under all sorts of banners. Church happens to be a common gathering place because historically it is central to most communities. Our nature is to wonder about our existence but this is hardly the reason we congregate at church. Much more pressing is how our town or neighborhood is faring in, say, a time of economic depression or in a period of drought. We look forward not so much to hearing sermons as to being with our fellows when we celebrate the birth of a child and when we seek consolation in the death of a family member; we connect with our neighbors because we want to know how they are getting on. Religion is a sub-theme. If you are a churchgoer, really ask yourself: why do you want to be there?

Unfortunately, gathering under the banner of religion is a divisive practice that harkens back to our tribal origins. For thousands of years, humankind survived in part because groups banded together in solidarity according to birth heritage. Civilization has advanced rendering our existence less dependent on family and ethnicity. There are thirty-four thousand distinct flavors of Christianity (let alone the thousands of non-Christian beliefs).  The distinctions are often nothing more than a delineation of specific scriptural foundations.  In the current day, many fundamentalist sects cloister under endorsement of social prohibitions which would ban gay marriage and limit a woman’s reproductive rights. Think about it. Does it really make sense to find support in ancient texts (which condoned slavery and abuse of women) for condemnation of same sex relationships and denying women autonomy over their own bodies?  Isn’t it grasping at straws to justify bigoted and repressive views?

The notion that churches are the wellspring of charity is a myth. Charity is a human trait. Most of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, want to aid our fellows when they are in crisis. The charitable work of churches is to be commended but it is because of their humanity not divine commandment that it is so.

Religion is a distraction and distortion at church gatherings. A religious service is much like a commercial during television programming. Now a word from our sponsor, clergy seems to intone. And we suffer though some wrecking of our psyche by a minister or priest reminding us of our “sinful nature” and our absolute dependence on illusory agents.

We need to do better than this. Fire the sponsor and decommission the spokespeople for archaic fictional gods. Promote and enhance our humanity.