Apoplectic Skeptic

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If the Catholic church were a secular institution in Ireland and had been found guilty of child abuse to the massive extent the Church has, it would be forced to close. Its top officials would not be issuing statements of apology and regret, but serving sentences in jail. The name of John Paul II would not be a revered mantra; it would be synonymous with the head of an international organization that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge its own long-running, institutional brutalization of generations of defenseless children.

In the name of Jesus.

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“What if mice showed greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage-mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?”

“Scientology is not a religious organisation; it is a criminal organisation that hides behind its so-called religious beliefs.”

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Now what about this Bible and it’s old wisdom? Let’s take a central claim from the book of Genesis.

The authors of the Hebrew Bible said that “first there was nothing, and then there was a universe.” This, by the way, was not said in other religions. In other religions, [the] Gods, or God, takes some preexisting stuff and makes the world. The Hebrews said “no, there was nothing, and then there was a universe.”

Modern science declares that to be absolutely true.

Now the Hebrews did no experiments, they weren’t scientists, they said “God told us.”

Two thousand years later the essential insight of the first book of Genesis is confirmed.

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“The truth is that religion, as we speak of it - Islam, Christianity, Judaism - is based on the claim that God dictates certain books. He doesn’t code software, he doesn’t produce films, he doesn’t score symphonies, he is an author. And this claim has achieved credibility because these books are deemed so profound they could not have possibly been written by human authors.

Please consider for a moment how differently we treat scientific claims and texts and discoveries.

Isaac Newton went into isolation for 18 months starting in the year 1665. When he came out of his solitude he had invented the calculus. He had discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation. He had singlehandedly created the field of optics. No one thinks this was anything but a man’s labor, and it took 200 hundred years of continuous ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who ever lived to substantially improve upon Newton’s work.

How difficult would it be to improve the Bible?

Anyone in this room could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually… in moments.

If God loves us and wanted to guide us with a book of morality, it’s very strange to have given us a book that supports slavery, that demands that we murder people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft.

The true basis for hope in our world is open-ended conversation, and religion has shattered our world into competing moral communities. What we have to convince ourselves of is that love and curiosity is enough for us, and intellectual honesty is the guardian of that.”

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The argument that some [would use] against the laws of physics and the heat-death of our universe is “well, don’t spread the news because it would lead people to despair.”

I don’t want anyone to despair. We have a number of consolations. We have our own solidarity, we have love, we have literature, we have our duties to each other.

What leads to despair is to live the only life one has being told what to do by despots and crackpots and pseudo-scientists who claim the right to order us around in the name of God. Humanity has to outgrow and transcend that oldest of all the tyrannies.

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“It’s often imagined that nonbelievers like myself must be, in principle, closed to spiritual life. This is not true.

You can have a deep spiritual and ethical life without lying to yourself or to your children about the nature of reality, without pretending to know things you do not know.

There’s nothing that prevents a nonbeliever from experiencing ecstasy, and self-transcending love, and rapture and awe. In fact there’s nothing that prevents a nonbeliever from going into a cave and practicing meditation for a year, like a proper mystic.

What nonbelievers don’t tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the nature of the cosmos, and about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences. That is a difference worth noticing.

But I want to suggest to you that whatever is true about our circumstance, ethically and spiritually, can be discovered now, and can be talked about in language compatible with our growing scientific understanding of the world and of the human mind. Whatever discoveries are there to be made, about how to maximize human well-being, can be talked about in language that is not an outright affront to all that we’ve come to know in the last 2000 years. And to subscribe to one of the Iron Age religions, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam, is to make the tacit claim that that is impossible, that there is, in fact, no way to understand our circumstance using the tools of our modern understanding of the world, that some measure of superstition is necessary, some measure of mythology, that we have to lie just this much [pinching his two fingers together].”

“If the basic claims of religion are true, science is so blind to this underlying reality, and the laws of nature are so susceptible to supernatural modification, [so] as to render the whole enterprise of science ridiculous.

If, on the other hand, the basic claims of religion are false, most of the people on this planet are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, and beset by quite irrational hopes and fears. And many people are simply wasting their lives and spreading delusion, often with tragic results.”