THE ARROGANCE of RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Information Kills Religion“..may they be oppressed unendingly…die in their misery without the pity of anyone”

“Religion poisons everything”

William A. Zingrone

The Arrogance of Religious Thought The thesis of this talk:1. There exists an invidious, pervasive, destructive,

unquestioned and wholly undeserved respect and free pass given to religious thinking and ideas.

2. We should continue to expose the absurdities and cruelties of religious thought and accelerate the loosening of religion’s grip on our daily lives.

INFORMATION KILLS RELIGION

Religious Arrogance

• Divisiveness• Misogyny and Homophobia• Moralizing• Xian Propaganda• Denial of Science• Child Indoctrination

Divisiveness

• NIU 2006 Atheists, Agnostics, Freethinkers• “You’re not a real Xian”• Any other discourse, NFW!

• Islamic and Xian Sectarian violence:Middle East bombings now,

No. Ireland:10,000 in 30 yrs. (1969-1998) 330/yr.

“Get Out….!”• “Reverend” Dennis Terry, LA Baptist church• http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2emBxDOY7g• Christianity is the “Religion of Love”???

“Nice Shot”

Back to NIU

• CRU: Crusade for Christ, rival to the XA’s on campus down here.

• Female member: dynamic, committed, intelligent, running for president and they all liked her and wanted her for president BUT

• 1 Timothy 2:11-12 “women not to teach, nor authority over a man, learn and be in silence”

Misogyny and Your DB of a neighbor

• “Hey, I wrote this letter to my cousin Timmy, Wanna read it?” “ Women cant’ be teachers, or supervisors, its against god’s law, and they shouldn’t talk much at all really, just listen in silence, oh yeah and like no jewelry either and keep their hair in a little 19th century bun and only prairie dresses, gotta have those sleeves you know, bare arms are really slutty…”• Would you call him a “Saint”?• But if “Saint” Paul said it (1Timothy:2) …Oh, well that’s

different, we will revere it for centuries, ponder it’s significance, perform nuanced hermeneutics on it

• …best part is, Paul didn’t write it. They have acknowledged that for decades, did anybody amend the Bible?

What if your neighbor…?• in the midst of conversation: 1. “you know condoms not only don’t prevent AIDS, but actually help spread it..”2. “yeah , so my coworker disagreed with me, whether there

were 3 completely separate ways to turn the presses on, or there was just 1 way with 3 variations,…

so I had him beheaded…”3. “ you know those Jews they shouldn’t be allowed to preach, and

rabbis oughta be executed if they do and we oughta burn their filthy evil slut synagogues to the ground….”4. “ oh, I almost forgot, homosexuals really should die for doing each

other… Fersure, such things are worthy of death”

Moralizing

• “Formulate universal principles and punish those who don’t conform…maintain purity and remove contamination of a divine essence”

Xian Propaganda: let’s just make stuff up (Theology)

• So your neighbor weighs in on some obscure region of the world, some really remote place that he sounds like he knows something about, after expounding about it for some minutes in great detail: terrain, climate, flora and fauna, inhabitants, etc., in a fascinating plausible, coherent narrative, you ask:

• Have you ever been there? “Nope”… Oh…So you’ve read a great deal about it? “A little”… Oh, from like explorers or anthropologists, biologists who have been there? “Nope”….

• So, from just someone who has visited there? “No, No-ones ever been there…” What?

• “Yeah, but a lot of people have thought about it a lot, and so have I, and I read some of their books and some Scripture about it so I wrote a whole book on it.”.

One Hell of a Story• WTF??? An Amazon search will get you over

30,000 titles on Hell alone!!! which may not include all the multitude of theological works that may also have weighed in on the subject over the centuries….tens of thousands more…

• ALL as utterly speculative as your neighbor’s musings…

• THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT

Rob Bell and Hell• FB exchange with former Baptist, liberal Xian over Rob Bell’s speculations on Hell• Evangelicals took him to task for skirting around

“universalism” i.e., everybody gets into heaven, nobody really burns cuz Bell’s God is such a nice guy….

• Bell’s book and 1,000’s on Hell, know no more about Hell than you or I!

• THERE IS NO DATA, no-ones ever been there and back, pure speculation. Absurd!!

The Denial of Science• “Science is always changing…”• “Science gets it wrong again…”• “Science can’t answer ultimate questions…”

Knowledge that isn’t going away• www.scaleoftheuniverse.com• The amount and complexity of the knowledge

we have earned in the last 350 years about the world we find ourselves in is at once staggering and breathtakingly inspiring.

• And 99.9999999..% of it isn’t “wrong” • Tree of Life: http://www.itol.embl.de/index.shtml

Two Big Books• The Bible:• 761 pages: (582 OT, 179 NT) 66 books, 31,000 verses.• Whole chapters of useless dietary and ritual laws, incorrect myths,

pages upon pages of animal sacrifice rules, fanciful genealogies and histories, conquests, slavery, misogyny, genocides; much that we have already discarded as untrue, cruel or both.

vs.

HBCP: 2,287 pages full of verified, replicated true data about the world that’s not going away, billions of facts, no myth, no propaganda. And that’s just 2 domains worth!

Science is Universal

• Sam Harris: “We all generate electricity the same.”• No group of chemists claim:

“We just don’t believe in electrons, we interpret chemical scripture differently.”

• No First Free Congregational Reformed Physicists with their own interpretations of Newton and Einstein:

No F = mb, E =mc3

One Science Fits All

• There is no: • Muslim Chemistry• Jewish Biology• Hindu Psychology• Christian Physics• Buddhist Mathematics• Jerry Coyne: Each religion doing physics comes to the

same data and conclusions, doing religion they come to different conclusions.

All science works for all humans on the planet.

Child Indoctrination• Ehrman, Barker, Loftus, DeWitt, countless others…• Youth ministry• Jesuits “Give me the boy, I’ll give you the…”• Cognitively immature, emotionally vulnerable• “Frontal lobes of a gerbil”• Buddhist monk at MSU• The madrass, monastery, VBS, catechism• Guilt, the “power of prayer”• Until Age 18-21: can’t vote, lease, rent, drink, smoke, contract,

medical treatment, drive, tattoos, military recruiting, consent, marry…

Information Kills Religion!• The dialogue is everywhere, daily!! Newspapers,

magazines, the Net, classrooms, secular groups, even religious groups, comedy…..

• 1960’s: Lenny Bruce • 1980’s: George Carlin

• 2010’s: Bill Maher, Louis CK, Ricky Gervais, Billy Connolloy, Jim Jeffries…

Unprecedented Information Access • Rights Revolution of the past 5 decades:• Electronics/Information revolution: “…TV, transistor radio,

cable, satellite, long-distance telephones, photocopiers, fax machines, cell phones, txt msg., the Internet, Web video.”

• Add social media, tweet, tumblr, reddit, blogging, etc.• Exponential Info transfer increase…and it’s accelerating!• Consciousness raising: Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, • Secular rights (FFRF, SCA, SSA, etc.).• African Amer. Pres. commemorates the ‘63 March on Wash.• Alan Turing chemically castrated in UK 1952 • Atheists? Madelyn Murray O’Hair, Kruschev, Mao….EVIL!

“Times they are a-changing…”• Look how far we have come in less than a decade:• Sam Harris’ End of Faith (2004)• 19% “Nones”• Ridicule of Republican gaffes• 1958-2012 Gallup Poll 18-54% Atheism OK for public office • Weed legalization• Gay marriage progress• Give us a decade or two, the religionists had a 2,000 year head

start• 2013 American Atheists Convention-” How can we help you?”…

In TEXAS!!!

The End of Religion, Cant happen?

• “An integral part of culture”

• “Built into our human nature”

• “One of man’s unchangeable needs”

• “We will never get rid of religion”

NOT SO

• Egyptian Religion, Egyptian Myth…. as integral a part of daily culture as devout

Islamism or Mormonism, ensconced in the Pyramid Texts and Egyptian Book of the Dead • Reigned for over 3,000 years!!! Nearly twice as

long as Xianity or Islam…!!!

AND IT IS GONE!!! (kaput, toast, meat, vapor, history, disappear-o)

• Slavery…GONE!

Unlikely Allies

• Even the Evangelicals are on the path!! • Rachel Held Evans blog and 8/13 CNN article:

“Why Millennials are Leaving the Church” 10,000 comments and counting!!!

• Francis Collins and his BioLogos website: Adam and Eve vs. modern genetics

• EVEN Orthodox Jewish women: Nili Phillip, rocks thrown at her: Eggs, bags of feces at little girls…at least it wasn’t acid…

D.O.N.E

• “Defenders of the New Enlightenment”• We need to reframe the discussion• The Xians are geniuses at marketing and have

branded us “The New Atheists” • "The New Enlightenment is a Movement. Its

goal is to change society into a more free and compassionate place. Its method is to empower people to use reason for their own good."

Unbelieving Scum• What unites us all:• Reason and Tolerance• Atheists, agnostics, non-theists, pagans, deists,

freethinkers: non-believers of all stripes rally ‘round knowledge, verifiable data and theory, and tolerance of others: embracing normal human inquiry and empathy…this we all share and is our starting point!

We are more united than we think

• Thnx! Jerry DeWitt:“Skepticism is my nature, Freethought is my method,Agnosticism is my conclusion,Atheism is my opinion,And Humanism is my motivation” .

That’s Us!

Son of D.O.N.E.!

stridere – “to make a harsh noise” “an insistent and discordant noise”

“command attention by loud or obtrusive quality”• We should be loud, angry, outraged!!!• Make a louder noise and more often, turn up

the volume and the heat!!!• Defend the New Enlightenment by going on

offense

Dispatches from the New Enlightenment

• wearedone.org• a blog dedicated to exposing the daily absurdities of

religion worldwide and to the advance of science and secularism to improve the well being of all humans.

• Defenders of the New Enlightenment strive to live their lives by reason and tolerance informed by data and theory driven knowledge.

• “there can be no contentment but in proceeding”-Albert Camus

References

• Barker, D. (2008). Godless. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press.• Bell, R. (2011). Love Wins. New York: Harper Collins.• Brunsman, A. (2005, December 5).Retrieved from http://www.secular students.org• DeWitt, J. (2013). Hope after faith. Boston, MA: De Capo Press.• Ehrman, B (2007). Misquoting Jesus. New York, NY: Harper One. • Evans, R.H. (2010). Evolving in monkey town, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.• Faircloth, S. (2012). Attack of the theocrats. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone

Publishing.• Ferris, T. (2010). The science of liberty. New York, NY: Harper Collins.• Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith. • Luther, M. (1543). On the Jews and their lies• Muscato, D. (2013, 3rd quarter). Fifty years of reason: Celebrated in Austin Texas.

American Atheist, 51(3), 5.• Niose, D. (2012). Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans. New York, NY:

Palgrave MacMillan. • rachelheldevans.com• They are Orthodox, hear them roar, New Republic 8/19/2013• Zuckerman, P. (2010). Society without god. New York, NY: NYU Press.

INFORMATION KILLS RELIGION

“One Species, One Tribe” end religion now