Bishop Broadhurst, who is the chairman of the Forward in Faith organisation, declined to say whether he would leave the Church of England, because he said he needed time to talk to the priests under his pastoral care.

“My organisation has 1,000 priests and about 8,000 lay people in it. None of those priests are happy,” he said.

“Now people have to decide whether they will knuckle under – if they do, that is not a very happy situation for them or the Church – or whether they’ll go, or whether they’ll just defy it, and I can see that happening with many people.”

Part of me finds it hard to suppress a little soupçon of glee over this; as an atheist it confirms some of my opinions of religion in general so very nicely – particularly that some people simply use religion as a cloak for bigotry and that their bigotry is far more important to them than any faith they might profess. Most of me, however, finds it deeply sad that the laws of my country still permit exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation on religious grounds, effectively allowing organisations like the CofE to remain decades behind the rest of society in their attitudes towards equality and fairness.

Background story from the BBC.
Main story from the BBC.

Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), “On the Value of Scepticism”

Question of the Day:

Do you agree? Is it bad to hold a belief for which there is no evidence, even if it harms no one?

We’re all very familiar with this kind of thing. Perhaps I was actually thinking back to a few days ago when I actually had left them on the desk. Maybe last night I had a dream in which the memory was dredged up, and that dream confused my brain. Maybe it was just a stray neuron firing. But still, I was convinced …

This is the kind of thing that I think about whenever I’m dealing with a believer, particularly the liberal persuasion, who wants me to understand why they believe in some higher power or alternate reality that we might call God or spirit. I hear a lot about trusting the inner conviction or listening to that still small voice. Yes, our minds might be wrong about where we left the keys last night, but somehow our instincts are better equipped to tell us about this higher reality.

It may be worse for me, because my family has a propensity to manic depression and related mental illnesses. I’ve dealt with people having odd convictions, compulsions and the rare hallucination. It was brought home to me early that our brains are not perfect instruments, and that we are prone to any number of illusions, fallacies and errors.

One of the reasons I like the scientific enterprise is that we’ve spent generations honing the process to try and weed out as much human error as we can. As Robert Feynman said, “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” Everything from the peer review process to the collective and combative nature of the enterprise works to try and cancel out these problems. If it still fails on occasion, well, that gives you some idea of what we’re up against.

So I was a bit taken aback when I saw that Stephen Venner, some bishop across the pond, said the Taliban can be admired for their faith and loyalty:

“We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,” said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really.

“The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

We must remember that there are a lot of people who are under their influence for a whole range of reasons, and we simply can’t lump all of those together.

“To blanket them all as evil and paint them as black is not helpful in a very complex situation.”

These are people, as the article points out, responsible for attacking the armed forces and “public beatings, amputations and executions and have launched bomb attacks on the civilian population in Afghanistan.”

And we can, ahem, admire them for how faithful they are to their beliefs and loyalty to one another as they kill people? Oh yes, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about how faithful and loyal the Nazi’s were. Putting all those Jews, homosexuals, and blacks in extermination chambers took a lot of dedication, after all.

The Taliban’s faith is irrational and hate-filled. It is deserving of denunciation and derision, not applause and approval.

A new Pew Research Poll has found that significant minorities of American religious believers mix their primary religion with elements of other faiths. For example:

• 24% of respondents say that they occasionally attend services in a faith different from their own.
• 22% of Christians indicated that they believe in reincarnation
• 23% of total respondents believed that yoga is a spiritual practice in addition to a form of exercise

They also found belief in a variety of “New Age” practices, with about one quarter of Americans believing in astrology and “spiritual energy.”

These kinds of results aren’t really surprising to anybody who’s been paying attention. Actually, they seem a little low. But the Pew Forum concludes that:

The religious beliefs and practices of Americans do not fit neatly into conventional categories. [...] large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions.

So many Americans continue to practice “cafeteria Christianity,” picking and choosing the spiritual beliefs they accept while resisting some of the traditions and revealed wisdom of their church.

When I read this, I automatically think of the Burned Over District, when Upstate New Yorkers seemed to mix and match their beliefs and folding the result into their existing Christianity. April DeConick over at Forbidden Gospels compares it to 2nd century Christianity:

The argument I have been developing about second century Christians is that they were eclectic, and that gnosticism was an amalgamation of Egyptian astrology and religion, Greek mysteries and Hermetism, middle Platonic philosophy, Judaism and Christianity, with its constituents comfortable attending more than one religious house or being part of a multiple of religious bodies. It is exactly the kind of ‘hybrid’ that we are seeing today, and may have been seeing since the 1800s. I think it has something to do with ‘internationalization’, when a variety of religious traditions become available for consumption within a given culture at a given point in history.

Several branches of Christianity came out of the Burned Over District, including Seventh Day Adventist and the Church of Latter Days Saints. I wonder what the current mix is going to produce. Any ideas?

Wow, you mean given enough time and eggs, you end up getting a soft one with an impression of a chicken foot? Hallelujah! Irrefutable proof of the existence of the Invisible Pink Unicorn!

Then again, maybe it’s Jesus’ way of commanding us to say, “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”

My friend Hemant Mehta (FriendlyAtheist) had a great interview with blogger Nancy Duke on the Chicago Coalition of Reason billboard, atheism, and religion.  The questions gave away her semi-hostile position, but I feel like Hemant did a great job answering in a positive way:

ND: What is ChriFSMas?
HM: Christmas for the Flying Spaghetti Monster followers.

ND: Are you equating Jesus to a Flying Spaghetti Monster? That doesn’t sound like a “Friendly Atheist.” In fact, it sounds a little mean.
HM: Well, the ChriFSMas thing is just a play on words, but there is a FSM movement where the argument is: There’s as much evidence for a Flying Spaghetti Monster as there is for any other God. So, why not worship the former and not the latter? It’s tongue-in-cheek, but I think it makes a good point. In any case, I think Christmas is a good time for everyone to give presents and spend time with loved ones. It’s not limited to Christians.

Oof.  She’s clearly looking for a fight.  An interesting exchange came near the end:

ND: One more question and then a few quick hits to wrap it up. You mentioned that after research, you couldn’t find evidence to support any of your previous religious ideas. But isn’t that the point? Isn’t faith supposed to be based in a belief of not needing evidence, not needing proof? It wouldn’t be faith if you needed evidence and facts, because that’s called science. So, why use science or atheism or anything else to debunk religion when religion is based on embracing something you cannot prove, i.e. faith?

HM: Yes, relying on faith is the opposite of relying on evidence. However, I was always taught my beliefs as if they were facts. I don’t know of any Christian churches that say, “We believe Jesus resurrected after three days but we don’t actually know that for sure.” No, they say it as if it were true and proven and factual.

I discovered at 14 that my beliefs, which I always believed were factual, were just ideas that people of my faith shared and there was no good reason to believe any of it was true. I guess I discovered that my faith was indeed faith. And I decided I wanted to rely on things that were evidence-based and actually factual. That led me to atheism. It doesn’t say that God doesn’t exist, but atheism says that there’s no good evidence for God’s existence, so why bother believing in one. To me, that’s honest.

Bewildering image and caption:

---

Facts are fun! …
Sometimes.

This meme is what we need to combat in America, and Hemant does a good job explaining why he dismissed faith.  It’s not a reason to belive something is true.  It’s funny that both sides are saying “there’s no evidence for this belief!” but meaning it in completely opposite ways.  It is central to our arguments that people need reasons to assert something as true.  If they don’t accept that basic tenant of thinking, literally any belief is acceptable.

A big distinction that I make time and time again is that we’re never looking for proof – we’re looking for a reasonable amount of evidence to support the level of belief.  It would be a positive step if churches did what Hemant suggested – admit their own uncertainty and instead use stories as non-authoritative metaphors about life.

I’m a bit puzzled – and concerned – that Duke had a small clipart of someone pointing to a chart with the caption: “Facts are fun! … Sometimes.”  What in the world is that supposed to convey?  In context of the discussion – it was right next to the above blockquote – it wasn’t saying that sometimes the world isn’t as we wish it to be.  No, it seems to be dismissing the very value of facts when assessing a worldview.  “Facts are great unless they contradict my beliefs!”

How do you respond to such brazen disregard for logical thinking?

[Update:] You raise the point that this might be a Poe, especially given the “Keeping democracy intact since 1912″ slogan. If it’s satire, it’s remarkably subtle. I’m looking into it. What do you guys think?

They thought their God was testing their faith. They didn’t want to show their lack of faith by going to a doctor. So the child died of untreated diabetes.

When she was on trial last Spring she explained her thinking:

Leilani Neumann told the jury in her husband’s trial that she thought her daughter’s March 2008 illness was a test of her religious faith and she didn’t take the girl to a doctor because that would have been “complete disobedience to what we believe.”

Leilani Neumann testified for nearly five hours Tuesday, describing the events leading up to her daughter’s March 23, 2008, death on a mattress on the floor of the family’s rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called for help when she stopped breathing.The mother said that she and her husband believed their daughter’s deteriorating condition may have been the result of a falling out with another couple, and called them once the girl was unconscious and persuaded them to come pray for the girl.

“I asked her if she loved Jesus,” the mother testified. “She might have said yes. I know for sure she was acknowledging it. What sounds came out, I don’t remember. She was making noises. … My focus definitely was to pray.”

“We thought even the lifelessness was something that she would come out of,” the mother said. “Everything for us is about faith. It is about trusting in God. We either believe in God’s word or we don’t.”A pediatric expert on diabetes told the jury Monday that even right before her death, doctors might have been able to save the girl’s life had she been brought to a hospital.

I think everyone can agree that this kind of faith is dangerous. They had “biblical” faith — they put their trust in God and not in man. And, as usual, God failed where humans could have helped.

Believers constantly say they need to rely upon God, but why would anyone put their trust in a God who has failed, over and over again? Granted, it’s hard not to fail when you don’t exist, but you’d think that people would stop relying on someone so notoriously unreliable.

Shortly after I became a Christian, I saw a book about Jesus at the library. I couldn’t get enough of Jesus, so I brought it home and began reading. Excitement turned to horror as I realized it was arguing there was hardly any evidence that Jesus even lived, much less was a miracle-working god who rose from the dead. I was appalled. But I was also a little shaken. I never realized someone could question the existence of Jesus. Could my new found belief be wrong?

After much prayer and counsel, I decided to stop reading the book. I was convinced it was Satan trying to attack my faith, and I took that as evidence my beliefs were correct — if Satan was trying to convince me I was wrong, then I must be right!

I didn’t have any doubts about Jesus for another decade.

I was a fool.

Doubt Can Be Scary

Doubt can be frightening for a believer. It can be so frightening that some people suppress any doubt, no matter how much counter evidence they are presented with.

But you’re different, aren’t you? I know that because you’re reading this essay. You know you’ve been wrong in the past, and now you are beginning to question some things about your faith. You’re not as certain as you used to be.

Perhaps you’ve been scolded about your doubt. People of faith rarely look at doubt as an opportunity — instead, they see it as a danger. That’s why they talk about ”battling” doubt. They fear it. They tell you to pray to God and ask him to remove your doubts, to read your holy book until you believe it again, and to learn to doubt yourself instead of “God” (by which they mean whatever they teach about him).

Pullquote: Doubt shouldn’t be feared and battled. If we love truth, it should be embraced.

You’re not stupid. You realize that would be brainwashing yourself, just like people do in every other religion. What you want is evidence. And that it is lacking is causing you to doubt.

You are being given an opportunity that few believers get. You are actually searching for truth. While many say they are searching for truth, really they are searching for an experience, a community, and/or comfort. And that’s why you’re different — you want the truth, even if it’s not what you want to hear.

Doubt shouldn’t be feared and battled. If we love truth, it should be embraced. Here are 10 ways a truth-seeking theist can embrace doubt.

1) Accept that doubt can be good.

Doubt is not evil — it is a tool for discovering truth. That you are doubting is a good sign. It means you’re thinking critically and not simply accepting things because someone says so. As Peter Abelard said, “By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we come to truth.” If we love truth, we must embrace doubt.

The only reason to fear doubt is if you fear truth. Fundamentalists of all stripes fear doubt. Is this a coincidence?

2) Be open-minded.

You don’t want to defend faith — you want to believe whatever is true. Seek the truth, no matter where it leads you.

When people speak, listen. When others challenge your beliefs, consider they might be right. In other words, be humble. There’s no reason to think we’re right about everything, so why act that way?

3) Learn to love truth, not being right.

Truth is beautiful. Unfortunately, none of us possess the entirety of truth. That’s why we see arrogance as a vice — nobody likes a person who think they are always right. We all know people like this. Don’t love being right and telling others they are wrong — love seeking the truth. This requires humility and skepticism.

By doing these things, you’ll be well on your way to embracing and using doubt instead of fearing and repressing it.

4) Learn to ask and consider hard questions.

People of faith fear hard questions. That’s one of the worst things about faith.

Hard questions lead us closer to truth. It helps us break out of false paradigms and shows us inconsistency in our logic. Hard questions should be encouraged and embraced — not feared or condemned. If those around you don’t want to think through hard questions with you, perhaps that is a sign you’re asking the wrong people for answers.

5) Look for historical and/or experimental evidence for claims of your religion or philosophy.

Look especially for evidence for supernatural claims. If this evidence is not accepted by any scholars outside your religion, then chances are it’s not reputable. Now ask yourself if you would accept a different religion’s supernatural claims with this kind of evidence. Bonus points if you look into evidence for other popular religions.

6) Pray to your god for a week. Then choose another and try again.

You probably have some doubts about prayer. Fortunately, there is a way for you to know if your God answers prayers or not. Follow these directions:

1. Pray to your god for a week. Make your requests specific and something that could only come about through supernatural intervention. I’m not talking about getting a front row parking spot, which happens to us all every now and then. I’m talking about regrowing limbs, people coming back from the dead, walking on water — things that are impossible on our own.
2. Keep a record of all your requests and mark the ones that were answered (if any).
3. Next week, pray just as fervently to a different god (like Baal or Zeus) and keep track of your requests.
4. Then the week after, don’t pray at all — but still write down your requests.

Does prayer to your deity really work? The evidence (or lack there of) will be before you.

7) Read your holy book.

Yes, read your holy book, but also look at it from a viewpoint of an outsider. Then read up on the history of the book from secular scholars. Ask yourself if this book is really written by God, when history shows it to be written by mere men.

Have you read any other holy books? If not, now is the time to learn about them. Every religion has millions of followers who believe it is the only true religion, and that their holy book(s) are inspired by God. What makes yours any different?

8) Find other doubters.

When you start embracing doubt, you’ll discover many fairweather friends — they love and support you when you think like they do, but when you start questioning, they begin to back away. Forget these “friends.” Seek out those who are comfortable with doubt and view it as a friend instead of a foe.

If you can’t find any locally, there is a thriving community online. Participating in blogs, forums, and social networking can be helpful to doubters.

9) Read widely.

Pullquote: Read other subjects and expose yourself to different viewpoints. You can only be better for it.

There’s nothing like reading other perspectives to encourage doubt. That’s how I began having serious doubts about my Christian beliefs. First, I began questioning whether the Bible was accurate about the age of the earth. Then it was about if it was right about how animals was created. Then it was Adam and Even. Then Noah’s Ark. I kept going from there. But it all started out from reading outside my perspective.

Too often we only read from authors we already agree with. I remember once, when debating with some doorstep Mormons I asked, “Don’t you guys ever read outside your own religion?” Their reply was, “Why should we, when we know we have the truth, and others are still looking?”

Narrow reading will only confirm what you already believe. If we’re always right it wouldn’t be a problem. But who of us are right even 50% of the time? As Dale Carnegie said:

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

Reading people on our side is satisfying, but why not branch out a little? Read other subjects and expose yourself to different viewpoints. You can only be better for it.

10) Always ask yourself, “How do I know that?”

Pullquote: The more extraordinary a claim is, the more extraordinary evidence there must be in order to believe it.

This is a powerful question because it gets at the root of belief. On matters of religion, you will probably find there is nothing to stand on but “faith.”

Here’s an example of how a thought conversation can go when asking yourself this question:

I believe Jesus was born of a virgin.
…Hang on a minute. That’s an impossible event. How do I know it really happened?

Well, the Bible says so.
…That’s true. It does say Jesus was born of a virgin in the later gospel accounts, though not the earlier ones. How do I know the later accounts can be trusted about such an extraordinary claim — made almost a century after it was claimed to happen? Are there any contemporary witnesses? Is there any positive evidence for it?

No, but it’s in the Bible, and God himself wrote it. That’s amazing evidence, isn’t it?
…Well, maybe. But how do I know God wrote it?

Hmm. The Bible says God wrote it, but that’s what all holy books say. So that’s not a very good reason, is it?
…Afraid not.

Unless a belief has positive evidence, then it usually isn’t worth believing. And the more extraordinary a claim is, the more extraordinary evidence there must be in order to believe it. By asking “how do you know that?,” the burden of proof is put on the asserter.

When the answer comes down to “faith,” there’s a problem. Why put your faith in one belief over another? Based on faith alone, why believe in a god at all, much less a very specific version of him? What are the chances you are actually right about such a belief, especially since there is no evidence?

So doubt isn’t something to fear. It isn’t something to repress and fight against. It is something to be embraced. It is a powerful tool to find truth, and I hope you’ll use it.

Science has always reserved its greatest accolades for those who prove what came before to be wrong, and every scientist in the world knows the best way to become famous is to prove everyone else wrong. Nevertheless, pseudo-scientists always argue that scientists have some vested interest in preserving the current order (and thus dooming their careers into obscurity when they could have become famous Nobel prize winners).

This argument has never made any sense, but that doesn’t stop them from making it. So, one more example won’t make any difference to them — people who advocate a bad argument that runs counter to evidence are not dissuaded by more evidence.

The point is, if a scientist found evidence against evolution, he would have every incentive to publish it and argue against evolution. If they could make their case, then they would earn their place in the history books, along with Kepler, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein.

If evolution isn’t true, we don’t want to believe it. We don’t have unreasonable faith in evolution — we accept it because of the massive amounts of evidence for it, and how it allows us to predict future findings (which often come true). If new evidence comes up that shows we were wrong, then we’ll happily believe the new theory.

Empire of Miracles

He healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons, and said, Behold, I am coming quickly!

Jesus Christ?

Not this time. The Lord’s good buddy Oral Roberts, of course.

The Oklahoma-born Charismatic faith-healer Roberts had queues of thousands of sick waiting for his healing touch. He also raised people from the dead. Hundreds of them.

He received his commission from the Lord directly — Jesus appeared to him countless times in person. Oral dropped out of Bible College to travel America in the ‘40s, setting up folding chairs under giant circus tents for revival.

And a circus it was. There was weeping and shouting and a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, as demons and diseases departed from the masses. “I personally laid hands on more than 1.5 million individuals who had all manner of sickness and disease,” wrote Roberts in When You See the Invisible, You Can Do the Impossible.

“I also engaged the demon spirits in tens of thousands, calling to them, ‘come out you foul tormenting spirits of Satan’…. people saw healing for the first time since the days when Jesus and his disciples publicly healed the sick…”

“All of us in the ministry could talk … of certain dead ones being raised,” the big O told 5,000 at a conference in 1987. His son Richard said that same year, “dozens and dozens of documented instances of people who have been raised from the dead.”

Baby, We Can Talk All Night

Pullquote: Oral said God would kill him if the sum fell short of $8 million.

Add to those marvels his gift of prophecy — but perhaps the greatest blessing of the Holy Spirit was giving Oral his name. Tremendous oratory skills granted him a different kind of power than other brilliant speakers like Hitler.

That power included bilking the public for country clubs, Beverly Hills properties, vacations via private jet, fancy cars, horses… his school has faced dire financial problems, but the Roberts families have not — his daughter-in-law once spent $39,000 in one clothing store!  (Allegedly, Oral now maintains a humble salary in his old age.)

Once, Oral told his public that God asked him for $8 million. Oral said God would kill him if the sum fell short. The prophecy came true, of course — Roberts made over 9 million and did not die.

Not long after Roberts learned that God wanted him to be rich, he also had a vision of a 900-foot-tall Christ telling him to build a City of Faith, a medical center/prayer/faith healing school, to add to the university he’d previously prophesied and built. His own personal Jesus may have loomed large, promising a cure for cancer, but the medical center shut down quickly. No cure in sight so far.

The university with the giant praying hands towering into the sky goes on, though it’s riddled with the usual money-funneling scandals. There were bizarre allegations against Roberts’ son’s wife for wee-hour conversations with teenage boys — and cell phone bills of $800 per month.

Tragedy, not Triumph

Pullquote: “I’m coming back … and I’m going to get my rightful place. I’m going to rule and I’m going to reign … when I get back from the other side.”
Oral Roberts

Further woes included the death of son Ronald in 1982, found shot in his van. It was rather uncertainly ruled a suicide and swept under the rug. Ron was an openly gay antiques dealer, says the LGBT community, including MCC, the “gay” church. The Roberts’ deny this. His suicide was blamed on army trauma from Vietnam.

Sadly, Oral’s daughter Rebecca died in a plane crash with her husband. A grandchild also died just after birth.

As of this writing, none of these have been raised from the dead.

The “documented proofs” of Roberts’ healing touch vanish under scrutiny. Many who appeared on his shows with testimony of cures died hours or days later, but these unimportant details were never aired. It has been said that a little hope never hurt anyone, but I beg to differ. I also vote we start charging these con men with murder, because thousands of hopeful believers turn from treatments that could help them.

If there are any doubts of Oral’s intentions, one need only listen to his own prophecies of returning with Christ in the clouds. “I’m coming back … and I’m going to get my rightful place. I’m going to rule and I’m going to reign … when I get back from the other side.”

All that said, Oral is distinguishable from most other televangelists. He was, as far as I can tell, never caught with his pants down.

Lorette C. Luzajic writes about all kinds of interesting people at Fascinating People.