Amazing these guys can keep producing after all this time — they’ve been together for 31 years and this will be their 15th album. Impressive.

You can pre-order the album on Amazon as an Audio CD or Vinyl.

About a year ago, I was involved in my first ever “crash-call”. A crash-call in a hospital setting basically means that a patient who you are not expecting to die has a cardiac arrest, and every medical professional within the sound of an emergency alarm goes into action to try to save their life. To a layperson it probably seems like all hell has broken loose, but when you know what’s going on it’s actually very impressive to see it done well (in hindsight, anyway: at the time your adrenaline is so ramped that you physically shake and it’s the fact that you are trained and drilled in this stuff until it’s second nature that keeps you doing the right things). One person runs the whole thing; contrary to what Scrubs teaches you, that is not usually a doctor (because there often isn’t a doctor around at that point) – it’s usually whichever qualified nurse gets there first or the most senior nurse present; the whole thing gets taken over by the crash team when they arrive, but that can be up to fifteen minutes, or even longer if it’s the middle of the night and there’s another crash going on, or if you’re in a small hospital with no permanent doctor cover and have to wait for paramedics (fun fact: You’re more likely to survive a heart attack if you’re in a shopping mall than if you’re in a hospital – this is absolutely true).

I’ll take time at this point to big-up the crash-teams; those dudes are some seriously under-appreciated folks, and odds on one day they’ll save the life of you or somebody you know. Remember that next time you see a sleep-deprived looking junior doctor sprinting down a hospital corridor, and get the hell out of their way!

Anyway, on the day in question I walked past a patient’s room in time to see my ward manager pull the emergency alarm for a patient who I’d been nursing for about six weeks. We collapsed his bed back and I dialled the number for the crash team. Even this is a standardised, drilled, rehearsed procedure: The number is the same for every UK hospital that has a crash team (I’m not going to tell you what it is – the world is full of sick people who think prank calls are funny). You dial the number, it gets answered immediately and you say:

“Hello. Cardiac arrest, Ward [insert name of ward]”

Then the infuriatingly calm lady on the other end of the phone says:

“Cardiac arrest, Ward [insert name of ward], thank you.”

Then you thank her back and you both hang up. I can absolutely promise you that that is the shortest, most frightening ‘phone call you will make in your entire life.

By this point, there will be two or three other staff in the room, one doing chest compressions, another with a bag and mask, ventilating the patient (though I understand that in non-hospital emergency life support in the US they don’t do rescue breaths anymore, just chest compressions). A third nurse will be preparing the crash trolley or sticking defibrillator pads on the patient (they’re not like the ones you see on ER; the new ones are all singing, all dancing – and they tell you what to do. You just stick the pads in the right place and do what you’re told). The rest of the staff will be staying the hell out of the way. There might be a fourth ready to take over chest-compressions (which are bloody hard work after twenty minutes or so, let me tell you) when the first gets tired, but that’s it.

We didn’t save the patient that day.

My abiding memory of the experience is this: Watching my patient’s body and face go from taught and alert to slack and dead in under half a second. I watched the moment of his death, and I’m sure I will remember his name and his face for the rest of my life.

I didn’t know how to react after it was all over; I just worked non-stop until the end of the shift and then went and ‘phoned my mother to talk about it. Mums are awesome like that. The hard part for me was grasping that sudden transition from something to nothing happening right there in front of me.

Recently, this was brought home to me even harder by the sudden death of one of my best friends; he took an accidental overdose of insulin and fell asleep before the symptoms of hypoglycaemia set in. He subsequently fell into a coma and died, to be found by his partner the following morning. I cannot even imagine her pain at having to do CPR on his cold, dead body until the ambulance crew arrived.

What struck me from that experience was the incredible sense of disbelief that I felt; last time I saw my friend, we were sitting in the sunshine watching cricket and drinking beer. He had a very secular funeral, where we listened to his favourite rock music at the crematorium and said our goodbyes.

I find myself wanting to talk to him a couple of times a week, to the point where I drunkenly texted his ‘phone one evening to berate him for dying. Me. A staunch atheist. Weird.

And then I thought about it:

I have no framework for grieving. Different religions and cultures provide for different routines in grieving – ways to dress, rituals to follow, time-scales to adhere to. African Caribbean people in the UK sometimes still have open-casket funerals (something I maintain would have helped me to say my last goodbye to my friend properly), Muslims and Christians have their various traditions, Hindu people wash and dress their dead relatives as a final farewell.

I genuinely understand why people find comfort in religion. I would love to think that I’ll get to see my friend again one day and to finish all those silly conversations that we had while drunk and philosophising (well, drunk anyway) and to be able to tell him how much he meant to me as a friend. Problem is, I don’t believe that. Neither did he.

As an essentially culture-less, Caucasian, middle-class atheist, how should I grieve? I honestly do not know. The lesson I learned in my first crash-call was that one second you’re alive and the next you’re dead, so you’d best make the most of the first part – because the second part lasts a long time and you don’t get a do-over. Applying that to a close friend (who wasn’t yet thirty, by the way) is a very difficult thing to do. I miss him tremendously and I know that it’s going to be a long time before the pain of his absence is lessened. In the meantime, if I figure out a secular grieving regimen, I’ll let you know.

What is a “New Atheist”?

How are the New Atheists different from the previous generations of atheists? Who constitutes the New Atheists, and who are still Old Atheists?

Cracked.com has gotten ambitious and published a list of 10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On. And … eh, it’s Cracked.com. Not bad – I’d say he’s usually half right on both sides – but don’t expect anything deep.

For example, they do the classic comparison of theistic villains and Stalin:

Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God’s law, and thus isn’t a good Christian. Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen.

The problem is that atheism is not a belief system, and it has no moral dimension. I’m perfectly happy saying that atheists are just as likely to be horrible people as believers. But you can’t corrupt something as simple as atheism: you either hold a belief in a deity or not.

Atheism is clearly no guard against bad behavior, but no one – well, no one sane – has argued that it is.

And some of is is mystifying, for example:

Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.

Do what, now?

Sorry, that’s the southern expression of male bafflement. Have I actually claimed to live only by “cold logic”? I’ve got a microwave, I could warm it up. And the idea of dedicating oneself to living within the physical sciences is just … odd. “With the FSM as my witness, I shall always obey the laws of thermodynamics!” … yeah.

But the most painful part is the confusion of categories implied by his statement “absolute morality.” In this, and later paragraphs, he seems to be saying that if you don’t have God, you don’t have a basis for declaring anything morally good or bad. Thousands of years of thought into the matter of morality and ethics just … gone. You need a God or you got nothing.

Victor J. Stenger, author of works like God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, came out with a work last year titled The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. In it, Stenger apparently has a section on the nonhistoricity of Jesus.

First off, he doesn’t do himself any favors by confusing Philo and Josephus. It looks like a simple mistake of confusing quotes, but someone should have caught it.

But second, is this really the battle we want to be fighting?

I know I’m suspect in this discussion, because I’ve stated that I do not accept mythicism. But I think it should be pointed out that even the most scholarly of the mythicists – Robert Price and Richard Carrier – acknowledge that it’s a very complex argument.

For example, Carrier has pointed out that a lot of the arguments from previous generations of mythicists have been really bad. Pointing to parallels between the Gospel stories and other myths in the Greco-Roman world doesn’t cut it. You need to explain why the biblical authors were adapting those stories. Carrier has argued that you really need a solid grasp of Jewish writings and other ancient literature before you can understand what was going on.

Lacking that knowledge, the mythicist argument is going to be counter-intuitive and, therefor, a hard sell.

In contrast, what do we gain from making the mythicist argument? If nothing else, it should be noted that even to mythicists, Paul and the authors of the Gospels did believe in Jesus – just a semi-divine Jesus who wasn’t present on earth. If we could, through masterful debate and sound reason, push believers back to that point, we still haven’t really gained anything for atheism.

I’m not going to argue against mythicism here, but I will argue that mythicism should not become a plank in the New Atheist platform. It is a difficult argument that stands to gain us very little.

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.

[...]

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved.

I’m always uncomfortable when I receive criticism that I feel misses the mark. I simply don’t recognize any of myself or my community in Rosenbaum’s remarks. I’ve seen a kind of messianic scientism before, but unless I’m missing something I do not see it reflected among the atheists I know.

Oh, it’s true that some of the statements made by Carl Sagan, as an example, could be interpreted as a type of “science as messiah” sermon. But when he talked of people joining hands and marching forward into a new age free of superstition, I interpreted that as a particular type of rhetoric; a pep talk or a type of soaring inspirational language rather than an accurate description of how he saw the future.

(hey, whattaya know, our own “literal-vs-metaphorical” debate!)

I myself am not convinced that we will ever know how the universe came to be. I suspect that there are scientific and philosophical hurdles that we might never clear. Our friend Daniel Frinke – at his newly renovated blog Camels with Hammers – has this response to the problem of how something came from nothing:

My best philosophical answer—not a dogmatic assertion with no reasoning, not a faith position I am committed to against all contrary arguments and evidence, not my 100% certainty, but merely my best philosophical answer is that we need to better understand the words creation and nothingness. Everything we see “created” is only a recombination of preexisting matter. We never see creation from nothing, but only creation from something.

And we have no experience whatsoever with “nothing”. We can only have experience with some things which are not other things. If I say there is nothing in the cupboard, it is not because I have encountered nothing, but it is because what was there was nothing edible or nothing but air and woodshavings and bacteria invisible to my naked eye, etc. I have no experience of nothing. I just have experience of things which are not expected things or things detectable by the senses.

So at least for Frinke and myself, Rosenbaum’s comment just don’t hit home. Simply because we see insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a deity – and thus we don’t believe in a God and are therefor atheists – it doesn’t follow that we worship at the altar of science.

And then you step outside and find your neighbor is worshiping a tree.

It’s a pole. You watched him cut it last week. Half of it went into his fire, and the other half he paid Jethro down the street to carve an image into. He’s kneeling in front of a log.

Alright, you know that if you approached him he’d have some explanation. Maybe a dream directed him to make an image of Asherah and burn incense in front of it. It’s not really a God, he’d say, it’s just a representation of a God. Or maybe it is inhabited by the spirit of a God. He’d have some way of explaining how he wasn’t really worshiping a chunk of kindling.

And maybe you know that the majority of the world (or the little of it you know of) worships in front of idols. And maybe you are uncomfortably aware that your family used to worship in front of Asherah poles like that one. And maybe a few of your family members still keep small idols of their household gods around.

But, I mean, come on! He’s worshiping a stick!

The New Iconoclasts

Pullquote: “Any God who can be killed, should be.”

It’s not a perfect analogy by any means, but I think this relates well to the reactions of atheists towards religion.

If Atheists have a God, the way many believers insist we have, it isn’t science. The God of atheists is Truth (or Reality, or the Universe, depending on how you want to spin it.) Science, reason and logic are only the means of finding the Truth, but they’re also the only means we’ve found that work.

We are constantly appalled at the things that people want to slap the label of “Truth” on. Time and again we find people declaring something to be Truth on the flimsiest of pretexts. A reference to a holy work, or some revelation in the distant past or some deep inner feeling.

Yes, we know that there are many arguments to be had. Many religions have theology that is internally consistent, and many have theology that is quite beautiful. But when you hold them up to the light of Reality, it’s hard not to feel that your looking at some fancy decoration painted on a stick.

And so the temptation is always there to take up the hammer and join in the long tradition of idol smashing.

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I was listening to Muse the other day—specifically the song “Thoughts of a Dying Atheist.” Here’s a highlight from the lyrics:

and I know the moment’s near
and there’s nothing you can do
look through a faithless eye
are you afraid to die?

it scares the hell out of me
and the end is all I can see
and it scares the hell out of me
and the end is all I can see

Of course, it got me thinking about my own mortality, and the natural fear of nonexistence. For me, the knowledge that I will end just makes my brief existence all the more meaningful and precious. What kind of response do these kinds of thoughts elicit for you?

I discovered a pamphlet under my windshield the other afternoon. It was a typical and rather unimaginative evangelical pamphlet. It took promised me salvation and eternal life, and paved the way to heaven with a string of bible quotes.

I started to think about what beliefs were required to make this argument work. How many layers of faith existed between myself and the person who wrote this pamphlet.

We could start at the bottom: what do we mean when we use the word “God?” Is it a force? an entity? a person? Can we speak meaningfully about such a thing? Given two statements about God, how do we determine which is accurate? Is there one God, or more than one, and how can we tell?

We could start at the top: who is this Paul person? What authority does he have? How far can we trust a man who acknowledges that he never met the living Jesus, and proclaims that he received his message directly from God without the instruction of those others who had known Jesus? If we’re to seek some knowledge of Jesus and what he meant, wouldn’t it be preferable to find someone who actually participates in Jesus’ ministry?

Or we could bore in on that word “salvation.” Is the pamphlet just inventing a disease and peddling a quack cure? I remember a Jewish theologian pointing out that God was always willing to accept a straying follower who was willing to repent. So at least for the Jews, Jesus’ sacrifice was unnecessary.

All of these are questions go unasked and unanswered in the sort of “convert or burn” discussions that the pamphlet entails. The only reason the pamphlet can exist is because it can skip over all of these issues.

The evangelist is leaving it to our culture to do all the heavy lifting. Each and every one of us knows what it means when someone asks us, “Have you been saved?” We absorb monotheism and salvation with our mother’s milk.

It’s sometimes called “public religion.” If you raised a child in this culture without giving him or her any religious education, what would they pick up from the society around them? For most of American history it would be a sort of Protestant Christianity. It’s been getting a little more complicated in the past few decades, but I think it’s still the case today that a broadly Protestant Christianity is our public religion.

One of the things that I think atheists can do is help to break down this public religion. First, just by being us. But second, we can promote a healthy separation between church and state, in order that the playing field between various religions should be more level. As American culture continues to get more religiously diverse, and as more of the religious minorities – including us – find their voices, we complicated things for the public religion. We don’t have to stop people from saying “Merry Christmas,” all we have to do is say “Merry Newtonmas” and keep pushing that diversity into the public sphere.

We may never reduce religion to the point of bing a knitting club, but at least we can make the evangelists work for it.

1. Misconception #1: Scientists Have an Atheist Agenda
2. Misconception #2: Theories Require “Faith” to Believe
3. Misconception #3: Scientists Disagree on Everything
4. Misconception #4: A Scientific World View Leads to a Brutal, Bloody Society
5. Misconception #5: Scientists Are Arrogant; They Can’t Know Everything
6. Misconception #6: Science Takes the Beauty Out of the Universe

What other misconceptions about science are pervasive in fundamentalism?

Some time back I wrote about Charles Chilton Moore, the Kentucky atheist and editor of the Blue Grass Blade. (and thanks to reader Sman for providing the link to this repository, as the LoC link I originally used is no longer working).

At the time, I gave a tongue-in-cheek description of Moore as the “first atheist blogger,” because his confrontational style and the personal voice of his articles made him seem more like modern bloggers than modern journalists. Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis picked up on this and set out to deconstruct the snippet of Moore’s writing that I provided. In typical AiG fashion, Hodge provides no link to my post, any source for Moore’s writings, or the Religion in American History post that started it. As I’m more versed in netiquette than Hodge, let me direct you to his post, Feedback: Back to the Future? (and thanks to reader MaiaZavala for finding this.)

He never got out of the rut

The key to understanding Moore, and his diatribe, was diagnosed by one of his fellow freethinkers: Moore started out as a preacher and never got out of the rut. He was an atheist second but a moralizer first.

Moore was the grandson of Barton Stone, who formed an offshoot of the Presbyterian Church during the Second Great Awakening. He later merged with the Campbellites to form what is now the American Restoration Movement. At an early age, Moore was tapped to follow in his footsteps, which he did with all signs of faithfulness.

Moore lost his faith in the normal manner for a child raised to believe in the innerrancy of Scripture. He and an unbeliever both agreed to read some of the new works arguing both sides of the issue. Oddly, both ended up converting to the other side – though it took Moore a while to admit it and leave the pulpit. It might have ended there, but Moore was too much of a moralizer.

This played out in two ways. First, it limited his sources of income. He owned the family farm, but his opposition to gambling meant that he could not invest in Kentucky’s famous racing thoroughbreds, and his support of temperance meant he couldn’t sell corn to the distilleries. So, while keeping up his farm, he sought additional means of supporting his family. He eventually turned to writing columns for the newspapers.

Second, his upbringing seemed to give him the urge to thunder against hypocrisy. Given that Moore had been a young man during the American Civil War, there was plenty of that hypocrisy on display. Both sides claimed God as an ally and prayed for the destruction of the other. Both sides claimed to be the more Christian while engaging in the bloodiest war in American history. Both sides argued the issue of slavery while quoting scripture. During his college years, Moore himself had been read the riot act in college, in to form of 1st Timothy, for daring to suggest that slavery was less than good.

Newspaper men meet such interesting people

Both his grandfather and Alexander Campbell, one of the leaders of the Campbellites, had edited and published newspapers. They were an effective way to preach to a sprawling congregation in the American west. So it’s not surprising that Moore took up the trade as well. He was already known as an “infidel” (to use the word he preferred) by that point, since he’d announced from the pulpit why he was leaving the pulpit. It took him three tries to figure out that his attacks on hypocritical preachers went down much better if he broke them up with his uncompromising Prohibitionist stance.

Moore’s style is very reminiscent of those precious “editor-preachers” of his grandfather’s movement. What you’re reading is in the thundering style of a Kentucky preacher – complete with hyperbole – turned back on itself.

The original selection that I posted, and which Hodge rebutted, was the opening to Moore’s article about the assassination of the controversial Governor of Kentucky William Goebel. It was a polemic directed at the good Christian folks who, in Moore’s eyes, supported and initiated that assassination. After all, the title of the piece (with typical extensive subtitles and Prohibition tie-in) is “Damned Drunken, Christian Devils Assassinate Their Christian Brother, Goebel, Taylor Should Be Arrested as Accessory Before the Fact, Down With The Sky-Pilots.” It is heavy handed, but basically it is a condemnation of how supposedly Christian men in a Christian society would look the other way while a Christian is murdered over political issues.

I’m not going to defend Moore’s exact words; defending a polemic is pointless. You don’t look to an intemperate rant for factual accuracy. It’s purpose is to have an emotional impact, much like a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But frankly, I expect that this comes too close to Form Criticism for anyone at AiG. It’s silly to expect someone who insists on literal, factual accuracy from their ancient myths to appreciate the genres of modern writing. So let’s just pat Hodge on his tousled head and move on.

(source)

I’m pretty conflicted about religion. On the one hand, I’m a huge fan of abortion. I like performing them, getting them, watching them, you name it. Then again, I think Communion wafers are delicious.

—Matt Tobey