Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people’s behaviors come to be.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

[Read more at CNN]

From The News Tribune:

As debate club president and a top student, Arlington High School senior Justin Surber has studied the constitutional rights of free speech.

Surber, 18, recently took a stand that will keep him from appearing in his club’s yearbook photo.

Once a week, Surber wears a black T-shirt featuring the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on religion. In block letters, the shirt reads “GOD IS DEAD.”

Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook.

Now Surber believes his T-shirt prompted the school’s yearbook adviser to ask for a retake of the photo, without the T-shirt.

“I feel I am a victim of censorship,” Surber said.

When a student yearbook staff member came to take a second photo of the debate club a few weeks ago, Surber’s friend Reed Summerlin asked for an explanation.

The yearbook staffer indicated she had been asked by the yearbook adviser not to tell Surber the reason for the retake, Summerlin said. “She said it was about Justin’s shirt.”

In protest, Surber and Summerlin chose not to be in the second photo.

[Read more at The News Tribune]

Debates over faith often leave non-believers holding the bag: look like a jerk or leave the debate unfinished and apparently concede defeat.

In conversations between atheists and believers, is there any way atheists can win?

I’ve been in a lot of discussions and debates with religious believers in the last few years, and I’m beginning to notice a pattern. Believers put atheists in no-win situations, so that no matter what atheists do, we’ll be seen as either acting like jerks or conceding defeat.

Like so many rhetorical gambits aimed at atheists, these “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” tactics aren’t really valid criticisms of atheism. They really only serve to deflect valid questions and criticisms about religion. But they come up often enough that I want to spend a little time pointing them out. I want to spell out the exact ways that these “no-win” situations are both unfair and inaccurate. And I want to point out the general nature of this no-win pattern—in hopes that in future debates with atheists, believers will be more aware of them, and will play a little more fairly.

When atheists focus our critiques on conservative or extremist religions, we get accused of ignoring the tolerant progressive ones and lumping all religions together. But when we do criticize progressive or moderate religions, we’re accused of mean-spirited overkill, of alienating people who could be our allies.

Why this is untrue and unfair: It doesn’t make much sense to assume that the atheist critique of religion you’re reading that moment is the only atheist critique of religion this writer has ever come up with. Most atheist writers who criticize religion do so many times, and from many angles. We critique extremist fundamentalism, and moderate ecumenicalism. We critique specific religious beliefs and practices, and the general belief in the supernatural. It’s not “lumping all religions together” to point out the flaws and hypocrisies and evils committed by one in particular.

[Read more at Alternet]

What is an appropriate atheist philosophy of death?

And how should atheists be talking about death with believers?

As regular readers know, I’ve been doing a project on Facebook: the Atheist Meme of the Day, in which I write pithy, Facebook-ready memes explaining one aspect of atheism or exploding one myth about it, and asking people to pass the memes on if they like. (BTW, if you’re on Facebook, friend me!)

Some of my Memes of the Day have generated disagreement from some atheists. Which is fine, of course. I don’t expect or want all atheists to agree about everything. Quite the contrary: one of the great things about atheism is that we have no central dogma that we all have to agree on, and no central authority that we all have to obey.

But the memes that have generated the most vocal and vigorous pushback have surprised me. They have consistently been the ones about death: the ones trying to show that a godless view of death can offer some degree of solace and meaning; the ones that begin, “Atheism does have comfort to offer in the face of death.” Whenever I write one of these, I can almost guarantee that within a few hours — usually within a few minutes — someone will be complaining that the comforting philosophy I’m presenting isn’t comforting at all. Or even that atheism can’t possibly present a philosophy of death that could compete with the comfort offered by religion… with the apparent implication that it’s either deceptive or deluded to pretend that this is possible, and that we shouldn’t even try.

Read More of Greta Christina’s article on Alternet

The media-labeled “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have put forward what they regard as the answer to religion: grow up, human race, and abandon your myths!

Most Americans, and maybe even most people around the world, have another answer to the extremes of religion that infect people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who (allegedly) tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit: hunt down and kill the extremists.

I think just about everyone has missed the real point: religion won’t go away because — like it or not — people are spiritual beings.

Telling religious people to be moderate is not going to solve anything once they are convinced everyone not like them is the enemy of “truth.” Killing more people just makes martyrs. That being the case, the way to confront religious poison is to change religion, not try to win by eliminating it. And that change means we have to try and get to the next generation before the fundamentalists do.

The only real solution to religious extremism is to change the conversation about religion altogether.

We urgently need to make that conversation center on embracing paradox rather than seeking — then trying to impose by force and or “reason” — our pet certainties on others.

How do we change the conversation about religion, roll back the violence done in the name of God (be that by gay-hating American “Christian” fundamentalists or world-fearing “Islamic” radicals — and while we’re at it end the culture war here at home that divides us on everything from the existence of God to abortion and gay rights?

How do we live together in a world where some people fervently believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that gay men and women choose to be gay and can “change” if they want to, that Jesus will soon return (and thus that war in the Middle East is a good thing because it is a “sign” of the much-hoped-for “End Times”) while other people just as fervently believe that people who hold such views are dumb, evil and dangerous?

Do the New Atheists really believe that “Reason” (whatever that is) will win the day after people are indoctrinated? Good luck with that! …

[continues in the Huffington Post]

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Russ Kick writes: H. G. Wells is best-remembered as a late-Victorian pioneer of science fiction, mainly due to his 1890s novels The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. He cranked out dozens of books in numerous genres of fiction and nonfiction, and 1945—the year before his death—saw the publication of his last two books to come out during his lifetime: The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life and Mind at the End of Its Tether.

The Happy Turning is a slim, strange work that gets even stranger as it continues. Wells sets it up by claiming that sometimes he dreams about taking his daily walk and coming across a pathway he’s never noticed in real life. Taking this turn (the “Happy Turning”) leads him to the utopian Dreamland (a/k/a the Beyond), where his body is perfectly fit, where society knows no war, poverty, or inequality, and where his “subliminal self” lets loose with a flood of “cryptic and oracular” symbols.

Wells then steps back in time to relate some dreams he had when he was young, including the one that “made me an atheist.” Having read about “a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire,” the preteen Wells had a nightmare. “By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture.” Upon awakening, he felt that he had two alternatives: go insane or stop believing in God. “God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.”

The following is Wells’ Dreamland chat with Jesus, which takes up two of the longest chapters. The excerpt below is
approximately the first thousand words of this encounter:

THE COMPANION I FIND most congenial in the Beyond is Jesus of Nazareth. Like everything in Dreamland he fluctuates, but beyond the Happy Turning his personality is at least as distinct as my own. His scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary. He was, I believe, the putative son of a certain carpenter, Joseph, but Josephus says his actual father was a Roman soldier named Pantherus. If so, Jesus did not know it.

He began his career as a good illiterate patriotic Jew in indignant revolt against the Roman rule and the Quisling priests who cringed to it. He took up his self-appointed mission under the influence of John the Baptist, who was making trouble for both the Tetrarch in Galilee and the Roman Procurator in Jerusalem. John was an uncompromising Puritan, and the first thing his disciples had to do, was to get soundly baptised in Jordan. Then he seemed to run out of ideas.

After their first encounter John and Jesus went their different ways. There was little discipleship in Jesus. He played an inconspicuous role in the Salome affair, and he assures me he never baptized anybody. But he was brooding on the Jewish situation, which he felt needed more than moral denunciation and water. He decided to get together a band of followers and march on Jerusalem. Where, as the Gospel witnesses tell very convincingly, with such contradictions as are natural to men writing about it all many years later, the sacred Jewish priests did their best to obliterate him. He learnt much as he went on. He seems to have said some good things and had others imputed to him. He became a sort of Essene Joe Miller. He learnt and changed as he went on.

Gods! how he hated priests, and how he hates them now! And Paul! “Fathering all this nonsense about being ‘The Christ’ on me of all people! Christian! He started that at Antioch. I never had the chance of a straight talk to him. I wish I could come upon him some time. But he never seems to be here…. There are a few things I could say to him,” said Jesus reflectively, and added, “Plain things….”

I regretted Paul’s absence.

“One must draw the line somewhere,” I said.

[“]In this happy place, Paul’s in the discard.”

“Yes,” reflected Jesus, dismissing Paul; “there were such a lot of things I didn’t know, and such a lot of snares for the feet of a man who feels more strongly than he understands. I see so plainly now how incompetently I set about it.”

He surveyed his shapely feet cooling in the refreshing greensward of Happyland. The stigmata were in evidence, but not obtrusively so. They were not eyesores. They have since been disgustingly irritated and made much of by the sedulous uncleanness of the saints.

“Never have disciples,” said Jesus of Nazareth. ‘’It was my greatest mistake. I imitated the tradition of having such divisional commanders to marshal the rabble I led to Jerusalem. It has been the common mistake of all world-menders, and I fell into it in my turn as a matter of course. I had no idea what a real revolution had to be; how it had to go on from and to and fro between man and man, each one making his contribution. I was just another young man in a hurry. I thought I could carry the whole load, and I picked my dozen almost haphazard.

“What a crew they were! I am told that even these Gospels you talk about, are unflattering in their account of them.

“There is nothing flattering to be told about them. What a crew to start upon saving the world! From the first they began badgering me about their relative importance….

“And their stupidity! They would misunderstand the simplest metaphors. I would say, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like so-and-so and so-andso’…. In the simplest terms….

“They always got it wrong.

“After a time I realised I could never open my mouth and think aloud without being misunderstood. I remember trying to make our breach with all orthodox and ceremonial limitations clear beyond any chance of relapse. I made up a parable about a Good Samaritan. Not half a bad story.”

“We have the story,” I said.

“I was sloughing off my patriotism at a great rate. I was realising the Kingdom of Heaven had to be a universal thing. Or nothing. Does your version go like that?”

“It goes like that.”

“But it never altered their belief that they had come into the business on the ground floor.”

“You told another good story about some Labourers in the Vineyard.”

“From the same point of view?”

“From the same point of view.”

“Did it alter their ideas in the least?”

“Nothing seemed to alter their ideas in the least.”

“It was a dismal time when our great March on Jerusalem petered out. You know when they got us in the Garden of Gethsemane I went to pieces completely…. The disciples, when they realised public opinion was against them, just dropped their weapons and dispersed. No guts in them. Simon Peter slashed off a man’s ear and then threw away his sword and pretended not to know me…

“I wanted to kick myself. I derided myself. I saw all the mistakes I had made in my haste. I spoke in the bitterest irony. Nothing for it now but to know one had had good intentions. ‘My peace,’ I said, ‘I give unto you.’

“The actual crucifixion was a small matter in comparison. I was worn out and glad to be dying [...] But being crucified upon the irreparable things that one has done, realising that one has failed, that you have let yourself down and your poor silly disciples down and mankind down, that the God in you has deserted you—that was the ultimate torment.”

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Read this article and many others in the Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

About The Author: H. G. Wells (1866–1946) is best-remembered as a late-Victorian pioneer of science fiction, mainly due to his 1890s novels The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. These are just a sliver of the approximately 180 books he wrote, covering topics such as politics, science, history, and the future.

Do atheists hate diversity?

Is the very act of atheist activism (trying to persuade people that atheism is correct and working to change the world into one without religion) an act of attempted conformity? Are atheists trying to create a drab, gray, uniform world, where everyone else is just like them?

It’s probably pretty obvious that I think the answer is a big fat “No!” (Probably said in the Ted Stevens voice.) But it certainly is the case that many atheist activists, myself among them, are working very hard to persuade religious believers out of their beliefs. Not all atheists do this, of course; many have the more modest goals of separation of church and state and religious tolerance, including tolerance of atheists and recognition of us as equal citizens. But a good number of atheists are, in fact, trying to convince religious believers to become atheists. I’m one of them.

And since many believers see this as an intolerant attempt to enforce conformity — particularly believers of the progressive, ecumenical, “all religions perceive God in their own way and we have to respect them all” stripe — I want to take a moment to address it.

The Intolerant Bigotry of the Germ Theory

If there’s one single idea I’d most like to get across to religious believers, it would not be, “There is no God.” Or even, “There is probably no God.” I want believers to reach that conclusion on their own. Preferably upon being awestruck by my brilliant arguments, of course, but ultimately on their own, after thinking it through, after looking at the reasons for belief and the reasons for atheism, and concluding that atheism makes more sense and is more consistent with what we know about the world. I don’t want people to stop believing in God just because I say so.

[Read more at Alternet]

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Religion is an extremely touchy topic. Church members often become angry if anyone questions their supernatural dogmas. (Bertrand Russell said this is because they subconsciously sense that their beliefs are irrational.) So I try to avoid confrontations that can hurt feelings. Nearly everyone wants to be courteous.

But sometimes disputes can’t be avoided. If you think the spirit realm is imaginary, and if honesty makes you say so, you may find yourself under attack. It has happened to many doubters: Thomas Jefferson was called a “howling atheist.” Leo Tolstoy was labeled an “impious infidel.”

Well, if you wind up in a debate, my advice is: Try to be polite. Don’t let tempers flare, if you can help it. Appeal to your accuser’s intelligence.

I’ve hatched some questions you may find useful. They’re designed to show that church members, even the most ardent worshipers, are skeptics, too — because they doubt every magical system except their own. If a churchman berates you, perhaps you could reply like this:

You’re an unbeliever, just like me. You doubt many sacred dogmas. Let me show you:

• Millions of Hindus pray over statues of Shiva’s penis. Do you think there’s an invisible Shiva who wants his penis prayed over — or are you a skeptic?

• Mormons say that Jesus came to America after his resurrection. Do you agree — or are you a doubter?

• Santería worshipers sacrifice dogs, goats, chickens, etc., and toss their bodies into waterways. Do you think Santería gods want animals killed — or are you skeptical?

• Muslim suicide bombers who blow themselves up are taught that “martyrs” instantly go to a paradise full of lovely female houri nymphs. Do you think the bombers now are in heaven with houri — or are you a doubter?

• Unification Church members think that Jesus visited Rev. Sun Myung Moon and told him to convert all people as “Moonies.” Do you believe this sacred tenet of the Unification Church?

• Jehovah’s Witnesses say that, any day now, exactly 144,000 of them will be physically lifted to heaven, where they will reign with Jesus Christ. Do you believe this solemn teaching of their church?

• Aztecs skinned maidens and cut out human hearts for a feathered serpent-god. What’s your stand on invisible, feathered serpents? Aha! — just as I suspected, you don’t believe.

• Catholics are taught that the Communion wafer and wine magically become the actual, literal body and blood of Jesus during chants and bell-ringing. Do you believe in the “real presence” — or are you a disbeliever?

• Faith-healer Ernest Angley says he has the power, described in the Bible, to “discern spirits,” which enables him to see demons inside sick people and to see angels hovering at his revivals. Do you believe this religious assertion?

• The Bible says that people who work on the Sabbath must be killed: “Whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 31:15). Should we execute Sunday-workers — or do you doubt this scripture?

• At a golden temple in West Virginia, saffron-robed worshipers think they’ll become one with Lord Krishna if they chant “Hare Krishna” enough. Do you agree — or do you doubt it?

• Members of the Heaven’s Gate commune said they could “shed their containers” (i.e., their bodies) and be transported to a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Do you think they’re now on that UFO — or are you a skeptic?

• During the witch hunts, inquisitor priests tortured thousands of women into confessing that they blighted crops, had sex with Satan, etc. — then executed them for it. Do you think the Church was right to enforce the Bible’s command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) — or do you doubt this scripture?

• Members of Spiritualist churches say they talk with the dead during their worship services. Do you think they actually communicate with spirits of deceased people?

• Millions of American Pentecostals spout “the unknown tongue,” a spontaneous outpouring of sounds. They say it’s the Holy Ghost, the third part of the Trinity, speaking through them. Do you believe this sacred tenet of many Americans?

• Scientologists say each human has something akin to a soul, which is a “Thetan” that came from another planet. Do you believe their doctrine — or doubt it?

• Ancient Greeks thought a multitude of gods lived on Mt. Olympus — and some of today’s New Agers think invisible Lemurians live inside Mt. Shasta. What’s your position on mountain gods — belief or disbelief?

• In the mountains of West Virginia, some people obey Christ’s farewell command that true believers “shall take up serpents” (Mark 16:18). They pick up rattlesnakes at church services. Do you believe this scripture, or not?

• India’s Thugs thought the many-armed goddess Kali wanted them to strangle human sacrifices. Do you think there’s an invisible goddess who wants people strangled — or are you a disbeliever?

• Tibet’s Buddhists say that when an old Lama dies, his spirit enters a baby boy who’s just being born somewhere. So they remain leaderless for a dozen years or more, then they find a boy who seems to have knowledge of the old Lama’s private life, and they anoint the boy as the new Lama (actually the old Lama in a new body). Do you think that dying Lamas fly into new babies, or not?

• In China in the mid-1800s, a Christian convert said God appeared to him, told him he was Jesus’ younger brother, and commanded him to “destroy demons.” He raised an army of believers who waged the Taiping Rebellion that killed as many as 20 million people. Do you think he was Christ’s brother — or do you doubt it?

Etc., etc. You get the picture.

I’ll bet there isn’t a church member anywhere who doesn’t think that all those supernatural beliefs are goofy — except for the one he believes.

You see, by going through a laundry list of theologies, I think you can establish that the average Christian doubts 99 percent of the world’s holy dogmas. But the 1 percent he believes is really no different than the rest. It’s a system of miraculous claims without any reliable evidence to support it.

So, if we can show people that some sacred “truths” are nutty, maybe subconscious logic will seep through, and they’ll realize that if some magical beliefs are irrational, all may be.

This progression is rather like a scene in the poignant Peter de Vries novel The Blood of the Lamb. A gushy woman compliments a Jew because “your people” reduced the many gods of polytheism to just one god. The man dourly replies: “Which is just a step from the truth.”

Meanwhile, it’s encouraging to realize that almost everyone in the world is a skeptic — at least about other people’s religion.

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Read this article and many others in the Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

About The Author — James A. Haught, in his own words: “I’m an old newspaper editor who has spent half a century chronicling social struggles and cultural tides. Personally, I’ve waged a long crusade for rational, scientific thinking as an antidote for harmful supernaturalism. I’ve written five books and many magazine articles against religion, astrology, mysticism, psychic claims, cults, ‘New Agery,’ fundamentalism, and other magical beliefs.”

Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government – but he doesn’t believe in God. His political opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they’ve got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.

Bothwell’s detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state’s antiquated requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Consititution.

“The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me and it’s certainly not relevant to public office,” the recently elected 59-year-old said.

Bothwell ran this fall on a platform that also included limiting the height of downtown buildings and saving trees in the city’s core, views that appealed to voters in the liberal-leaning community at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. When Bothwell was sworn into office on Monday, he used an alternative oath that doesn’t require officials to swear on a Bible or reference “Almighty God.”

[Read more at CBS News]

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Irving Berlin (1888–1989)

How many patriotic Americans know that “God Bless America” was written by a man who did not believe in God? Or that it was intended as an anti-war anthem?

Irving Berlin is by any measure the greatest composer of popular American music, with hundreds of enduring hits, such as “White Christmas,” “Anything You Can Do,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “I Love a Piano,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Marie,” “Play a Simple Melody,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and “Easter Parade.”

Born in 1888 into a Russian-Jewish family who came to New York City in 1893 to escape religious persecution, he quickly shed his religious roots and fell in love with America. “Patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” notes biographer Laurence Bergreen.

“Though he is not a religious person,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett writes in her family memoir, “doesn’t even keep up appearances of being an observant Jew, he does not forget who his people are.” Irving and his nominally Catholic wife, Ellin, were married in an unannounced secular ceremony at the Municipal Building, not a church or synagogue. They had three daughters. Mary Ellin recalls:

Both our parents would pass down to their children the moral and ethical values common to all great religions; give us a sense of what was right and what was wrong; raise us not to be good Jews or good Catholics or good whatever else you might care to cite, but to be good (or try to be) human beings…. When we grew up, she [my mother] said, we would be free to choose—if we knew what was best for us, the religion of our husband…. It wouldn’t quite work out, when we “grew up,” as my mother hoped. All three of us would share our father’s agnosticism and sidestep our husbands’ faiths.

The man who wrote “White Christmas” actually hated Christmas. “Many years later,” Mary Ellin writes, “when Christmas was celebrated irregularly in my parents’ house, if at all, my mother said, almost casually, ‘Oh, you know, I hated Christmas, we both hated Christmas. We only did it for you children.’” (This also had something to do with the fact that they had lost a baby boy on December 25.)

Why did an agnostic humanist who loathed Christmas write the song “White Christmas”? Because he needed a number for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, which called for a song for each major holiday celebrated in the US. “White Christmas” is not religious; it is not about the birth of a savior-god. It’s about winter, the real reason for the season.

“God Bless America” was originally written in 1918 for Yip, Yip, Yaphank, a WWI show about the US Army. As he was finishing the musical, Berlin added a patriotic melody that he imagined the soldier characters would sing. Bergreen writes:

But even as he dictated it to [his pianist Harry] Ruby, Berlin became insecure about its originality. “There were so many patriotic songs coming out everywhere at the time,” Ruby recalled. As he wrote down the melody, Ruby said to Berlin, “Geez, another one?” Deciding that Ruby was right, that the song was too solemn to ring true for the acerbic doughboys, Berlin cut it from the score and placed it in his trunk. “Just a little sticky” was the way he described the song. “I couldn’t visualize soldiers marching to it. So I laid it aside and tried other things.”

The song was forgotten for two decades. During those years, Berlin’s attitude toward war evolved.

In 1938, while the United States was resisting joining the new European conflict, Kate Smith was looking for a “song of peace” for her Armistice Day broadcast. Irving Berlin tried writing a couple of songs, but they were “too much like making a speech to music,” he said. It then occurred to him to dig up that discarded composition from 1918.

“I had to make one or two changes in the lyrics,” Berlin said in an interview,

and they in turn led me to a slight change and, I think, an improvement in the melody…. One line in particular; the original line ran: “Stand beside her and guide her to the right with a light from above.” In 1918 the phrase “to the right” had no political significance, as it has now. So for obvious reasons I changed the phrase to “Through the night with a light from above,” and I think that’s better.

Just as “White Christmas” is not about Christ, “God Bless America” is not about God. It is about love for America. “‘God Bless America’ revealed that patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” Bergreen writes. “It evoked the same emotional response in him that conventional religious belief summoned in others; it was his rock.” His choice of “God bless” was his picking up an American idiom, not expressing a personal belief.

Irving Berlin sometimes poked fun at faith. In 1922, confronting censors, he wrote “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil in Hades” for his Music Box Revue. During the show, a comedienne in a red devil suit dispatched jazz musicians to hell, singing, “They’ve got a couple of old reformers in Heaven, making them go to bed at eleven. Pack up your sins and go to the devil, and you’ll never have to go to bed at all.” The song is the perfect antidote to “God Bless America.”

Irving Berlin died quietly at home at the age of 101. He did not believe in an afterlife, but maybe he did jokingly wish for a hell, because “all the nice people are there,” his lyrics report.

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Read the entire article in the Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

About The Author: Dan Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (ffrf.org) and author of Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (FFRF, Inc., 1992). He is also a professional jazz musician and songwriter living in Madison, Wisconsin. He has produced two freethought musical CDs for FFRF: Friendly, Neighborhood Atheist and Beware of Dogma.

Don’t believe in God, but want to celebrate Christmas anyway? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here are 13 suitable gifts for the heretic.

It’s not unreasonable to want to enjoy Christmas despite not believing in all the stuff about virgin birth and angels. A lack of faith doesn’t get in the way of enjoying family, togetherness and generosity, not to mention presents, mulled wine and good food.

So in the spirit of the season, here is a list of 13 suitable presents for the godless in your life.

Please note: The Daily Telegraph accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to your immortal soul through the purchase of these gifts.

On the first day of Christmas, an atheist gave to me: a Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People DVD

Robin Ince, a comedian, atheist and sceptic, first organised this cheery variety-show celebration of atheist Christmas last year. This DVD of the Hammersmith Apollo performance features comedians including Dara O’Briain and Tim Minchin, scientists like Richard Dawkins and Ben Goldacre, and music from Jarvis Cocker among others. If you’re really quick, there are still tickets for this year’s follow-up show on 20 December.

[Read more at The Telegraph]

Is Richard Dawkins getting soft? It’s hard to believe that the leading exponent of a brash new school of pugnacious atheism would somehow, miraculously, transform into the soul of charity. But consider the evidence:

Dawkins says, for one thing, that he is tired of rehashing the forceful — many would say withering — arguments against religion he made in his bestselling book, The God Delusion, and he objects to his frequent portrayal as a gratuitous provocateur.

“I’m not really that at all,” he told me during a recent stopover in New York to promote his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Dawkins almost sounds hurt by the criticism. “That’s propaganda made up by religious opponents, I’m afraid. They love this word ’strident.’ They always call me ’strident and shrill.’ I’m not the least bit strident or shrill.”

Read More: Politics Daily

This year was the first year that an American president has omitted a direct reference to God in the Thanksgiving proclamation:

The beneficence shown by God to America is a theme that traditionally defines the Thanksgiving holiday, and this theme is strongly emphasized in the original Thanksgiving Day proclamations and consistently acknowledged even by modern presidents.

Obama’s unprecedented proclamation, however, only makes indirect mention of God by quoting George Washington, stating: “Today, we recall President George Washington, who proclaimed our first national day of public thanksgiving to be observed ‘by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.’”

The proclamation goes on to call Thanksgiving Day “a unique national tradition we all share” that unites people as “thankful for our common blessings.”

“This is a time for us to renew our bonds with one another, and we can fulfill that commitment by serving our communities and our Nation throughout the year,” it continues.

All other presidential Thanksgiving proclamations directly refer to “God,” “Providence,” or another appellation for the divine being.

But Obama’s historic decision to avoid directly mentioning God in the Thanksgiving proclamation doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Earlier this year Obama similarly made history on Inaguration Day by explicitly referencing “non-believers” in his speech, which, according to USA Today, was the first time in history that a President had done so. Obama has also said on more than one occasion that the United States is “not a Christian nation.”

The Washington quote makes this claim a bit inaccurate — that is a direct reference to God, even though it is in a quote — but there is a difference between the reference being in a quote than in Obama’s own words. Regardless, Obama seems to be making some progress including us “non-believers” in our own country for once.

In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

[Read more at New York Times]

In today’s polarized world, the conflict between atheism and religion is shaping up to be the fight of the century. In this corner, the new atheists, flexing their muscles with books such as God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In that corner, the religious fundamentalists, who are responsible for 9/11, the Christian takeover of America, polluting the minds of their children, and numberless other atrocities. It’s science and reason against dogmatism and blind faith, making it obvious who the enlightened liberal should root for.

Well, not quite. The truly enlightened liberal should experience a twinge of doubt about the very blackness and whiteness of it. Let me show you how a bit of evolutionary thinking can paint a more interesting picture in shades of gray.

The new atheists hate religion for causing between-group conflict and especially for its wanton disregard of the canons of rational thought. Yet, both of these problems extend far more widely than religion. Between-group conflict pervades the animal world. Ant colonies, lion prides, and chimp troops don’t have religion, but they do have between-group conflict. As for the canons of rational thought, to the extent that brains evolved by natural selection, their main purpose is to cause organisms to behave adaptively in the real world–not to directly represent the real world.

This leads to a crucial distinction between what I call factual and practical realism. Consider Hans and Igor, who are mortal enemies. Hans understands that Igor is much like himself, even to the point of competing for the same square of ground. Igor regards Hans as an inhuman monster, completely unlike himself. If Igor’s belief makes him fight with greater determination, then it counts as practically realistic, even if it is factually incorrect. Now imagine similar contests among beliefs–and the brains that create beliefs–taking place over thousands of generations of genetic and cultural evolution. Voila! We arrive at a conception of human mentality that is far more nuanced and interesting than the black-and-white cartoon of atheism vs. religion.

[Read more at ScienceBlogs]

British scientist Richard Dawkins, author of the new book

CAPTION

By Reuters

Forget God, let’s talk about arrogance.

That’s not exactly the way Rice University humanities professor Anthony Pinn, in an article for the online magazine Religion Dispatches, describes the monotone of mockery at the Atheist Alliance International convention, but it gets you to Pinn’s key points pretty quickly.

The convention, starring the atheist band’s Mick Jagger, Richard Dawkins, promoting his book on evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth, and some backup singers like TV host Bill Maher, was held in Burbank, Calif., earlier this month.

Pinn found the main idea at the event, is that religion is

… the single most dangerous human creation.

The welfare of humanity, it was argued, depends on the dismantling of religion and all of its delusions. The possibility of collaboration, of compromise, of any shared ethical commitments between theists and non-theists, was not on the table.

Pinn, who calls himself a humanist, zeroes in on the common trait that atheists share with fundamentalists of any religion — “their inability for critical self-reflection and critique.”

They have formed, in effect, the religion of “not,” defined by what they refuse and rebuke…

[continues in USA Today]

Some New Yorkers may want to reconsider exclaiming “Thank God” when arriving at their destination subway station beginning Monday.

Or at least that’s what a coalition of eight atheist organizations are hoping, having purchased a month-long campaign that will place their posters in a dozen busy subway stations throughout Manhattan.

The advertisements ask the question, written simply over an image of a blue sky with wispy white clouds: “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”

On October 26, a dozen bustling New York City subway stations will be adorned with the ads as “part of a coordinated multi-organizational advertising campaign designed to raise awareness about people who don’t believe in a god”, according to a statement from the group, the Big Apple Coalition of Reason.