But seriously.

What makes all these pious advice-givers think that we (we gnus) can’t bring people together (or build bridges and help people cross them) around shared values? What makes them think that gnu atheism is obviously and inherently and always a coalition-preventer? If I wanted to bring people together or build bridges with others (which I don’t, because I’m a nerd), I would just do it. I don’t want to because I’m a nerd, but if I did want to, I could. I could find out how to do it, and do it. I don’t have two heads, or twelve legs, or eyes that shoot sparks.

What do they think we do, anyway – quiz every human being we come within ten feet of about their relgious beliefs? Ask everybody we meet if they are theists? Wear ATHEIST on our shirts at all times no matter what? Have big giant neon signs securely fastened to the backs of our heads, that say ATHEIST – ATHEIST – ATHEIST?

In other words do they really think we can’t form or join a coalition with a bunch of people to do a particular thing without dragging atheism into it? If so, what the hell makes them think that?

And then, the bit about wanting to convert everyone is wrong too.

When a large and vocal number of atheists say that their number one goal is convincing people to abandon their faith, it comes as no surprise that our community is construed as extreme and aggressive.

I don’t think a large and vocal number of atheists do say that. I don’t say that. Here’s what I do say: I say 1) I want atheism to be an available option for people who want it, and 2) I want people to abandon the expectation that religious claims will be treated with automatic deference.

In other words I want us to be able to say what’s wrong with religious claims, instead of having to smile politely or look at the ceiling or examine the gravy for termites while everyone else is “saying grace.” I want to get away from the situation where public religious claims are fenced off from disagreement.

I want, in that sense, to put religious people on the defensive. That’s aggressive, if you like. I want people who like to talk nonsense in public – whether John Haught or Francis Collins – to realize that they are going to get pushed back now.

But that’s all. I don’t want to convert them. I want conversion to be wide-open to them, not hidden away in the back attic under five rolls of geometric-pattern wallpaper and a rusty trike. I want it to be right out there in the open, where they can grab it if they want it. But I don’t want to force it on them. And if they want to join up with me to fight violence against women, why, I’ll join up with them – or I would if I weren’t a nerd.

Oh hooray hooray hooray, Chris Stedman gives us more advice on how to be a Good™ atheist instead of a Bad atheist. I’m so pleased to have more because I can’t ever seem to get it straight in my head, you know? What is it they think we should do – shout a little louder was it? Start the chainsaw earlier?

I spoke with a Christian friend about my budding efforts as an atheist promoting religious tolerance and interfaith work. She too was excited about the idea of bringing people together around shared values in spite of religious differences…

Oh yes that was it! Not shouting louder, no no; bringing people together around shared values in spite of religious differences. I totally get it now.

It’s bringing people together around shared values in spite of religious differences. Stinging people together around shared poison ivy in spite of religious differences. Kicking people together around shared buckets of blood in spite of not having enough guns. Stabbing people and then shooting them with guns – oh dammit I’ve lost it again.

Oh hooray, here’s Matthew Nisbet to help!

On one side, “accommodationists” argue that non-believers should build bridges with others around shared values in order to work on common problems such as climate change and failing schools.

Yes, yes, yes! That was it – build bridges with others around shared values in order to work on common problems. I won’t forget it this time, I promise. Shared values – just remember that part. Shared values, shared values, shared values.

I get it!

Stedman asks a pensive question.

I wonder if fewer nonreligious people would actively try to dismantle religious communities if we had a more coherent community of our own. Perhaps if we spend less energy negatively “evangelizing,” we’ll find ourselves well positioned to reach out in ways that build bridges instead of tearing them down.

Hmmmmmm I don’t know. I wonder if fewer bridge-builders would actively tell falsehoods about explicit atheists if they weren’t so eager to ingratiate themselves with the mainstream community. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never in my life actively tried to dismantle a community, nor have I ever torn down a bridge. I also haven’t bombed any nursery schools, or hacked to death any children on their way to Sunday school, or put broken glass in the potato salad at the Baptist Picnic.

John Haught says, in God and the New Atheism, that gnu atheists get faith all wrong, at least from the point of view of theology, which

thinks of faith as a state of self-surrender in which one’s whole being, and not just the intellect, is experienced as being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason. [p 13]

You know…there’s a problem here. I would like to say something sober and restrained about that; I would like to give a cool, sarcasm-free account of what I think is wrong with it, for once; but I find it very hard to do that, because it seems so babyish. I can’t get past the babyish quality, because if I do, there’s nothing left. It’s babyish all the way down. And that’s typical of Haught, at least in this book. It’s just packed with baby talk.

But I’ll give it a shot. The trouble is (obviously) that “a state of self-surrender” is indistinguishable from a state of self-deception, and is the sort of state to invite self-deception. An experience of being carried away into a gurgle-gurgle sounds just like either a hallucination or a powerful daydream. Period. There’s nothing else to say about it. That’s what’s so babyish – Haught has dressed it up in the usual boring purple language to make it look significant and meaningful and maybe even true, and that’s just silly. He’s also installed a handy device for forestalling the question “yes but what exactly do you mean by ‘a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than’ yak yak?” by making it the faculty that asks the question the comparison. That question is an emissary from science and reason, and the dimension is much deeper and more real than that, so the question is by definition not answerable, so ha.

…there are many channels other than science through which we all experience, understand, and know the world…To take account of the evidence of subjective depth that I encounter in the face of another person, I need to adopt a stance of vulnerability. [p 45]

Bollocks. He’s talking about unconscious processing, among other things (like empathy, intuition, and the like), but those are not dependent on adopting “a stance of vulnerability.” He uses sentimentality to persuade, and it’s a babyish trick.

…if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace?

Same thing – attempted persuasion via sentimentality. Why infinite Love? Why not infinite Hate?

Well we know why: because when you go limp and let yourself go off into a lovely fantasy, you don’t fantasize about infinite Hate. But Haught’s confidence that his fantasies reflect reality (and indeed are realer than anything else) is…foolish.

The Anglican Bishop of Fulham is going to switch over to Catholicism because he prefers the Catholic church’s way of dealing with pesky women, which of course is to tell them to shut up and do what they’re told.

The Pope created a special enclave in the Roman Catholic Church for Anglicans unhappy with their church’s decision to let women become bishops.

Too bad all men can’t find enclaves like that, isn’t it. If only. If only there were special enclaves in universities for male academics unhappy with the prospect of seeing women become professors. If only there were special enclaves in law for male lawyers who don’t want to have to put up with women judges or prosecutors; if only there were special enclaves in medicine for male doctors who don’t want to have any female colleagues. If only the whole god damn world were full of special enclaves every few feet for men who are so benighted and greedy and conceited that they can’t get over thinking that women are inferior.

[Broadhurst] is currently the “flying bishop” charged with looking after traditionalist parishes opposed to women priests and bishops in the dioceses of London, Southwark and Rochester.

The Catholic Group said it was determined to stay in the Church of England and fight for a better deal for Anglicans who did not want to serve under women bishops.

These poor damaged people need looking after, they need a better deal, because they have been so bruised and battered and harmed by the mere suggestion of female equality even in church.

…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a woman bishop, but might hesitate in the face of a decision likely to cause them considerable personal hardship.

The level of protection? They’re unhappy with the level of protection? Men need protection from having a woman boss?

What level of protection do I get? If protection is being offered, I want protection from hearing from men who think women are so stupid and weak and incompetent that it’s dangerous to have to work under them. I want protection from this stupid, vicious, taken for granted misogyny.

Imagine re-writing that passage.

…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a black bishop.

…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under an Indian bishop.

…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a Mexican bishop.

The disgustingness and social unacceptability is instantly obvious – but when it comes to women – oh that’s a whole different thing. Of course women can’t be treated as equals; don’t be silly.

Twelve of the Chilean miners went to a “service of thanksgiving” at the mouth of the San Jose copper and gold mine today. Thanksgiving for what?

Imagine this scenario. Imagine last Thursday the Minister of Mines and all the engineers held a press conference and revealed that they had blown up the mine and trapped the 33 on purpose.

Would the 33 and all the people who were afraid for them for 70 days feel grateful to the minister and the engineers for rescuing them after first trapping them?

They wouldn’t, you know. They would be livid. They would be angry beyond imagining – they would want to do violence.

But that’s what “God” did, obviously.

So why are people thanking “God”?

Michael Ruse is explaining about religion and morality now. It’s way deep.

Is there a place under the accommodationism canvas for the non-believer? I think there is for I aspire to be one such person. As…argued at length in my book Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, I believe that one can argue for all of modern science and yet agree that there are certain questions that science leaves unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate ground of morality?

I believe that although one need not turn to religion — I am simply a skeptic on these sorts of questions — it is legitimate for the believer to offer answers.

What does he mean “legitimate”? It’s not a crime; the believer has a legal right to offer answers; but that doesn’t mean the answers are any good, or interesting, or well reasoned, or worth paying attention to.

“Legitimate” isn’t the right word, because it’s beside the point. Legitimacy is not the issue. The issue is why should anyone care what “the believer,” qua believer, “offers” on questions like why is there something rather than nothing and what is the ultimate ground of morality? The answers that religion “offers” to those questions are dogmatic and stupid and wrong, and thus they are worthless, so why does Ruse bother with this elaborate minuet of deference to them when he doesn’t buy them himself?

Who knows, and who cares, except that I have a heightened awareness of Ruse’s malice toward unapologetic atheists at the moment, so I feel like pointing out what pointless deepities he’s giving us here.

So let’s just make it a solipsism triple, and get it out of the way, shall we?

Michael Ruse, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, talking at first about the pressures on people who teach at religious colleges, but then, as usual, veering back to the real subject, which is the evilness of gnu atheists and their especial evilness toward him and his debonair indifference to that evilness toward him.

I hope very much that this will blow over.  I hope even more that if it does blow over it will not be with the understanding, implicit or explicit, that neither Schneider nor any other Calvin faculty member ever again try to reconcile science and religion.  These days it is not easy for those of us who argue that science and religion can live in harmony.  For my pains, I have been likened to Neville Chamberlain – the pusillanimous appeaser of Munich.

Aw. But don’t worry – he remains debonair.

Just last week, the editor of the British magazine the New Humanist, who argued for some modicum of accommodation, was called a quisling – after the Norwegian Nazi who supported the Germans in their Second World War occupation of his country.  But really, what does this matter to us?  I rather thrive on abuse.

Yeah yeah yeah, we know, but never mind you, this is about me.

No really, it is; I’m the perp! Amusing, don’t you think? Especially since that same editor of the New Humanist did not pause to boast of how he loves abuse, but instead simply asked me to write an article replying to his. Caspar is a good guy, and a lot less self-admiring than Michael Ruse (who no doubt loves to be told that he is self-admiring, and I’m always happy to oblige).

And while I’m in solipsistic vein, and besides I’m even later than usual, I will point out that B&W is another year older, and more. Last year I celebrated on the 16th of September, so I’m a whole entire calendar month late by that standard, and that standard was already late anyway, so I’m metaLate.

B&W is (more than) eight years old. That’s, like, 40 thousand years in butterfly time. B&W is older than the oldest Galápagos tortoise, older than the redwoods, older than the wingéd trilobites, older than bacteria, older than water, older than the sun.

But thanks to a healthy constitution, maintained by daily walks and a quart of wine every evening, and thanks to Josh Larios and Cam Larios, B&W survives and flourishes. Happy boitday.

Oh look, Radio Zamaneh has something about Does God Hate Women?

I’m not sure exactly what it has, because Google translate doesn’t seem to do Farsi very well, and I can’t make much of what it comes up with. But something is better than nothing, yeh?

Radio Zamaneh is based in Amsterdam and was (according to Wikipedia) set up by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs but operates independently. At any rate –

Radio Zamaneh was among a list of foreign organizations, including media outlets and human rights groups, which Iran’s Intelligence Ministry placed on a blacklist over their alleged role in fomenting the unrest that followed the disputed presidential election in June 2009.

Good on them.

In the introduction to God and the New Atheism, the theologian John Haught says [p x]

The belief system that Dennett and the other new atheists subscribe to is known as “scientific naturalism.” Its central dogma is that only nature, including humans and our creations, is real; that God does not exist; and that science alone can give us complete and reliable knowledge of reality.

That’s not how I would put it. I think naturalism means that all there is is all there is. There is what there is. The theists’ claim of God seems to include the idea that it has to be mysterian.

Why not just think of it as part of what there is, and then ask how to figure it out – how to find it or argue for it or show how it is explanatory or necessary (having first carefully defined it)? Why not give it a less tendentious and more descriptive name?

The idea that there is nature, and then there is something else, or more, or outside nature, or supernature, or metaphysic, is a religious idea. Without it, one just thinks there is whatever there is, and we certainly don’t know all there is to know about it.

To us it doesn’t make sense to say there is what there is, and then there is something above or “beyond” that. How could there be? There is what there is. Maybe it includes some cosmic intelligence or design-force – but if it does, it is part of what there is.

We don’t think of nature as some closed boundaried thing with special attributes that distinguish it from some other thing on the other side of it. We just think of it as what there is. Not what we know there is – not what we’ve discovered of what there is – just what there is. So if you think god is, god has to be part of that.

Two thirds of the Supreme Court is Catholic: six of the nine. And they’re not kidding. Joe Biden and five justices attended the “Red Mass” the day before the new term of the court.

The mass is a Catholic service, but power brokers of other faiths are asked to attend the invitation-only event. Critics have called the attendance of leading decision-makers, including members of the highest court in the land, inappropriate.

Oh, what’s the harm – it’s just a bit of incense and some pious mumbling.

A Vatican archbishop told the VP and 5 of the 9 justices

that laws are based upon certain principles: “the pursuit of the common good through respect for the natural law, the dignity of the human person, the inviolability of innocent life from conception to natural death, the sanctity of marriage, justice for the poor, protection of minors, and so on.”Di Noia later decried a trend toward “exclusive humanism” and said, “That innocent human life is now so broadly under threat has seemed to many of us one of the signs of this growing peril.”

So…….involuntary pregnancy, no divorce, no gay marriage, no rights for women……..

Well, at least Ginzburg can see what’s going on.

One member of the court who no longer attends is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, like Breyer and Kagan, is Jewish. Ginsburg has said she grew tired of being lectured by Catholic officials.

“I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion,” Ginsburg said in the book “Stars of David: Prominent Jews talk About Being Jewish” by author Abigail Pogrebin.

But Catholic officials go right ahead and lecture the other justices and the vice president, of what is supposed to be a secular country.

Bad.

Jason Rosenhouse has done the perfect, brilliant reply to Josh Rosenau’s latest on Hau too Hellp and on howtohelping in general. I would love to have written it myself, but I’m not clever enough.

Turns out people tend to mistrust information that comes from people they don’t like. Who knew?

Heh. Yes, we knew, and we also knew that’s not quite all there is to it. We know for instance that there are not just two participants in every conversation. We know that liking or not liking are not the only two possibilities. We know that information is not the only product of discussion.

Atheist spirituality, such as it is, has almost nothing in common with traditional religion. So far as I can tell, it refers simply to the notion that atheists, no less than theists, can look at nature and be impressed. To suggest that this represents a point of contact between the religious and the nonreligious, which was, after all, the point of Mooney’s original USA Today article and was the issue raised by Jerry in his post, trivializes religion to the point of making it vacuous. People with religious concerns about science are not worried that if they accept evolution they will no longer be able to feel things deeply.

Well some of them are, or pretend to be. Josh is one of them, in fact – he did a post awhile back saying that if religion were kept out of science then baseball and ice skating would disappear – or something like that. It was that random. Cathy Grossman pretended to think that Jerry Coyne, being an atheist, is incapable of appreciating a sunset – Jerry Coyne, who gave us a picture of a rabbit at dawn on the U of Chicago campus recently. But the larger point is right: no, religion is not just a matter of landscape-plus-emotion (Wordsworth notwithstanding).

Josh acts as though it is a problem of poor marketing that people think evolution and religion conflict. That, I believe, is a misapprehension of the issue. They see a conflict because they are thinking clearly. You can tell them they are not, and you can point out the folks who manage to reconcile the two, but in the end all of the slick marketing in the world cannot change the basic facts.

Exactly. What I would have said if only I had thought of it.

I am far more interested in changing the religious values themselves.
The big problem that needs fixing is not so much that people reject evolution. It is that people’s religious values are teaching them to be mistrustful of atheists…if you want to mainstream atheism you have to make it visible. You have to make it ubiquitous, so that gradually it loses all of its mystique and scariness and becomes entirely ho hum and commonplace. It is not so much about making an argument that will cause conservative religious folks to slap their foreheads and abandon their faith, as though that were possible. It is about working around them, by making atheism part of the zeitgeist. It is a long-term strategy, one starting deep within its own endzone thanks to years of more effete strategies. Will it work? I don’t know. But I am confident that nothing else will.

Yes.

In defense of the New Atheist strategy of creating tension and making atheism visible we have a body of research on advertising that shows that repetition and ubiquity are essential for mainstreaming an idea. We have the historical examples of social movements that changed the zeitgeist by ignoring the people urging caution, and by working around the people whose value systems put them in opposition to their goals…

Against this Josh has a few papers breathlessly reporting that people don’t like it when you offend them. It is on this basis that he gives smug lectures about communications strategies.

I am underwhelmed.

A bit of good news for once – the US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Association of Christian Schools International against the University of California for refusing to grant college-prep credit for courses with religious viewpoints. UC says the schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible.

So…there’s a problem with that? But science and religion are supposed to be in harmony, aren’t they? So why is it a problem if schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible?

Oh don’t be silly, the religion&science people snap; you know perfectly well we don’t mean, when we say religion&science go together like ham&eggs, that the Bible should be used as a biology textbook. We mean the right kind of religion, not the wrong kind.

Yes, we snap back, but our claim is that that distinction is neither so clear nor so easy to maintain as you like to claim. Our claim is that the distinction that matters in this context is the one between science on the one hand and religion on the other, not the one between biblical religion on the one hand and liberal religion ‘n’ science on the other.

The association’s 800 high schools in California teach “standard course content” and “add a religious viewpoint in each subject … as an integral part of their reason for existence,” the group’s lawyers said in their Supreme Court appeal.

But a federal judge said experts testifying for the university refuted those claims in reviewing textbooks.

Biology texts, one professor concluded, teach students to reject any scientific evidence that contradicted the Bible. A history text declared the Bible to be the “unerring source for analysis” of past events, in the view of another expert…

See? That’s where the conflict is, and there is no reliable, consistent way to stipulate a brand of religion that never does that – that never rejects scientific evidence that contradicts a particular religious belief – in such a way that religion and science can be made to seem inherently and entirely not-in-conflict.

A few more telling items from Science and Religion (Ferngren ed). Chapter 10, “Causation,” p 136 [“occasionalism” is the idea that god intervenes to keep the universe going from minute to minute as opposed to starting it and then leaving it alone]:

The fullest system of occasionalism was developed by Nicholas de Malebranche (1638-1715), who was driven by his own religious commitments to push Cartesianism in a theocentric direction.

Er…right. This is what we mean. This is the kind of thing. This is why there is an epistemic conflict. Those commitments that drive people to push things in a particular direction? That’s a problem.

A similar item on the next page. Al the great and Aquinas

undertook to interpret the whole of Aristotelian philosophy, correcting it where necessary, supplementing it from other sources where possible, and, in the process, attempting to define the proper relationship between the new learning and Christian theology.

Um…there it is again. That “proper relationship” thing – that’s one of those items that can drive people to push things here rather than there, for reasons that are extraneous to trying to figure out the truth.

In chapter 5, “Medieval Science and Religion,” there’s a real admission [p 57]:

The warfare thesis has retained a following throughout the twentieth century, at both a scholarly and a popular level, but it has also elicited strong opposition from scholars (some with a religious agenda)…

Aha! Just as I thought – helpful of David C Lindberg to spell it out.

I’m offended. I’m offended by the sheer stupidity, the voluntary stupidity – the non-thought, the hostility to thought, the chosen crudity. It’s from a reporter called Cathy Lynn Grossman, who is responsible for the “Faith and Reason” blog at USA Today. She is also a Templeton Fellow 2010, which makes her a classmate of Chris Mooney’s. was also a Templeton fellow in 2005 – the inaugural class.

She was of course reacting to Jerry Coyne’s piece declaring that science and religion are not friends. “Reacting” is all she did.

Move over Richard Dawkins. Yet another scientist is weighing in on science vs. religion and wheeling out his most outrageous language for his point

She tells Dawkins to move over then says “yet another” scientist is joining in – is more than one really “yet another”? Is two such a vast number that a reporter gets to roll her eyes at the exhausting flood? She probably had more than one in mind, but then it was stupid to tell Dawkins to move over as if he had been in solitary possession, wasn’t it. It’s just lazy cliché-mongering without actually thinking about the meaning.

And then what is so outrageous about a scientist “weighing in” on science v religion? It’s a subject that scientists have a stake in, surely, so why shouldn’t they write about it? No reason – Grossman just wants to convey an impression of impertinent intrusion without the bother of actually arguing for it. And then how does one “wheel out” langugage? And what is so “outrageous” about Coyne’s language, anyway?

Well it’s that unlike Chris Mooney (whom Grossman praises without mentioning the shared Templetonian history), Coyne “sees no reconciliation.” I suppose that could be because he doesn’t particularly want to share his lab with the theology department.

Coyne, whose latest book is Why Evolution is True, takes the Monday USA TODAY op-ed Forum spot to blast faith as an enemy of truth, an oppressive social force and the impetus of all evil rather than evil’s nemesis.

Notice all the veiled accusations of aggression – Coyne “takes” the op-ed spot, as if he had seized it by force. (How? Did he recruit his grad students to storm the building and tie up the editors?) And then there’s that favorite verb of Mooney’s to describe what enemies are doing – Coyne “blasts” faith. That’s faith-speak for “criticize.” And as for “evil’s nemesis” – tell that to generations of children raped by priests, tell it to the women whipped for showing a bit of hair or stoned to death for talking to a man, tell it to the women and children tortured to death as “witches.”

Coyne argues we must clear vision from the fog of belief and religious structures that nourish communities of faith. No common awe for the dazzling sunrise here.

Oh really – no awe for the glaciers on Denali? No awe for the Galapagos, for the Mojave, for the sunrise over Lake Michigan?

She’s a good example of the harm faith can do to the mind.

I’m listening to the PZ-Mooney Point of Inquiry. I expect to be highly irritated, since everyone says Jennifer Michael Hecht forgot to be the interviewer and instead acted as a third party to the debate, and took Mooney’s side.

Update: Uh, yeah. Ten minutes in and she just starts arguing away as if she’s a participant and not the interviwer. A few minutes later she just plain interrupts PZ to say what she wants to say – the interviewer! She reminds me of Alex Tsakiris.

From Science and Religion: a historical introduction Gary B Fergren ed.

Chapter 1, “The Conflict of Science and Religion” by Colin Russell, which is an overview of the “conflict thesis” and how it has been displaced by the “complexity thesis.” Page 8:

…the conflict thesis ignores the many documented examples of science and religion operating in close alliance…[He lists examples from 17th century.] Since then, a continuous history of noted individuals making strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion has testified to the poverty of a conflict model.

Wait. The mask slipped a bit there.

If it took strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion, then it wasn’t easy, right? It wasn’t just a natural combination. So maybe it’s not quite right to say that such strenuous efforts are evidence of the poverty of a conflict model.

“Strenuous efforts” sounds like the kind of thing Karl Giberson engages in now, and his efforts are not all that convincing. That’s not to say that complexity is not a much better way to describe the relations between science and religion in the past than conflict pure and simple, but it is to say that the more strenuous the efforts are, the more they indicate a difficulty. If the “integration” of science and religion is difficult and strenuous, then maybe there are reasons for that, real reasons, to do with methodology as well as ontology.

He’s Helping by having a frankly and unapologetically atheist article in the mainstreamyest of mainstream newspapers in the US, USA Today. He’s Helping by writing a lively, interesting, readable piece. He’s Helping by writing a piece that is one of the five most popular on the site today – an atheist piece! He’s Helping by getting a lot of favorable comments there.

One of the more irritating aspects of the “but how is this Helping?” brigade is their assumption that As things are now, So shall they ever be. Here’s a newsflash about the world and people and stuff: change happens. Change happens a lot, and it often happens quite fast. Sure, it’s naïve to think that Progress is Inevitable, but it’s equally naïve to think Progress is Impossible. Stuff happens. Things move back and forth. People change their minds, for good or ill.

It’s happening now. You’d better start swimmin’ if you can’t lend a hand.