Obama and the middle way

The Economist has been following Obama's acknowledgment of godless America with the giddiness of a LDS missionary finally allowed into a home. The latest installment followed Obama's inclusive language at the National Prayer Breakfast, an event that is decidedly not inclusive:

There is no doubt that the very nature of faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same. We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and where we’re going next – and some subscribe to no faith at all.

And there are signs that he's putting our money where his mouth is with plans to widen the focus of the Faith-Based initiatives to include Muslim outreach and religious dialogue and emphasize initiatives aimed at reducing abortion.

The audacity of hope...

An Atheist Fascination with the Bible

Today in Salon, Steve Paulson interviewed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. The couple shared their thoughts on language and realism and finally outed themselves as atheist. Paulson followed-up their admission with a question similar to the one that Freakonomics author Steven Levitt asked a month ago. You can find the Bible Bending Watchdog's answer to why Bible-bashers are bestsellers here.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that's overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books -- at least that kind of highbrow trade book -- are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don't just turn
a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to." I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It's a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who've been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they're not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people
from a religious background -- perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background -- are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, "Letting Go of God," would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.

Evil Bible.com

By this point it should be clear that figuring out "what the Bible says" and "what the Bible means" is a national pastime in many countries. When it comes to the Bible, everyone's a scholar and thanks to the Internet, everyone is also a student (albeit, not always a willing one).

I am not breaking any earth-shattering ground here. But in my defense, neither does Evil Bible.com, the official website of The Church of Theists Suck. Its primary purpose is to point out the Bible's cruelty (or, in its own words "to spread the vicious truth about the Bible") by highlighting instances of rape, murder, slavery and human sacrifices. It also counts 143 inconsistencies.

This need to vent about the Bible--its ridiculousness, its inapplicability to modern life--is an itch many have needed to scratch. And not just recently. Thomas Jefferson cut out all the bits he did not like, Mark Twain's wrote his own hilarious account and Robert Ingersoll in the late 19th century offered a large sum to any pastor who would preach the passages he chose.

It is an understandable itch. Of course, I have to ask the same question of Evil Bible.com as I have of Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris: who is your audience?

The fire to talk about the Bible is coming from all directions. So how do we get light out of this heat?

Bible Bashing Bestsellers?

Steven D. Levitt, author of the widely popular book Freakonomics, asked his blog readers a few days ago why all these "anti-God" books have been selling so well. In the last two years, Atheists have made a dent in the bestseller list with books such as Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Victor Stanger's God the Failed Hypothesis ,Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, David Mill's Atheist Universe and John Allen Paulos' Irreligion (coming out Boxing Day 2007).

But Levitt, who is after all an economist, cannot grasp the motivations behind people who buy "anti-God books." Since he doubts that religious people would spend time or money reading why they are wrong, he wonders, "Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?"

Levitt received dozens of responses (178 at last count). Most readers gently pointed out that people care about God. A lot. In the words of one blogger, "'apatheism' is much less common than you imagine." Others went on to say that Atheism is a belief-system and requires nurturing and mulling over details like any other "faith." This is especially true since Atheists are the most hated minority in America. But all this talk of where the "anti-God" market comes from got me to thinking if this is more about an "anti-Bible" market. After all, as many responders noted, this deluge of books declaring that God is Not Great is more a reaction to Judeo-Christian religion than the esoteric spiritualism trumpeted by authors such as Deepak Chopra and Karen Armstrong.

Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens each include numerous mentions of the Bible's inconsistency and inapplicability to 21st century life (I have not read Stangers' or Mill's book, though I would be willing to bet that they could not avoid mention of the Bible either). Dawkins, for example, responds to Stephen Jay Gould's suggestion that religion has a different sort of truth then science does by asking: "To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn--for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standard?"

Dawkins and others seem to be under the impression that the Bible is the infallible foundation of faith. But many people these days are "freelance monotheists" (as Armstrong calls herself) who considers the Bible to be more a poetry of the sacred than a history of the profane. This crowd can "Amen" to much of these books, only pausing to add that where these authors looked at the evidence and said "no," they have decided to say "yes."

Perhaps we can say these books are more about "To Hell with the Bible" than declaring that God is Dead. Aren't people more enraged when Bible creeps into science textbooks, political debates, and social policy than when people gather to pray after a disaster? I may be accused of pointing out the obvious on these posts, but isn't Bible bending what is really on people's minds?

(The above picture is from the website of the James Randi Foundation.)

Atheists are good too

The Chicago Sun Times reported last week on a study which concluded that non-religious medical personnel were just as likely to care for those without insurance as religious doctors (actually, the non-religious doctors were slightly more willing: 35 to 31 percent, respectively). In the puerile spirit of this study, I would like say: see? I told you you didn't need the Bible to be good.