In Lehmann's Terms

Belief-O-Matic meme

You can take the quiz here. I gave the boilerplate atheist responses to all of the questions, except for agreeing that, yes, you should do "good" deeds (it doesn't ask you to define what "good" means, but I'd find it incomprehensible that anyone would answer people should do not do those deeds THEY consider to be good) and that yes, nonviolence is fundamental, but that's more a reflection of my understanding of the implicit social contract, not any divinely ordained morality.

Though I suppose there's nothing terribly surprising about the results, I do find it odd that those answers would peg me as 100% humanist and only 89% nontheist. The two categories are not mutually exclusive, but when a test such as this declares a misanthrope like myself to be a humanist, there's something wrong with the construction.

1. Secular Humanism (100%)  2. Unitarian Universalism (90%)  3. Nontheist (89%)  4. Theravada Buddhism (84%)  5. Liberal Quakers (67%)  6. Neo-Pagan (61%)  7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (52%)  8. Taoism (41%)  9. Mahayana Buddhism (41%)  10. New Age (39%)  11. Reform Judaism (37%)  12. New Thought (36%)  13. Scientology  (36%)  14. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (30%)  15. Hinduism  (26%)  16. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (26%)  17. Orthodox Quaker (26%)  18. Sikhism (26%)  19. Jainism (23%)  20. Eastern Orthodox (23%)  21. Islam  (23%)  22. Orthodox Judaism (23%)  23. Roman Catholic (23%)  24. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons)  (20%)  25. Bahi'i Faith  (17%)  26. Jehovah's Witness (17%)  27. Seventh Day Adventist (15%)

The Dark Ages: Secular Paradise?

I'm a big History Channel fan, but the promo for tonight's special on The Dark Ages irks me to no end. The program is being billed as "600 Years of Degenerate, Godless, Inhuman Behavior."

Now, there remains great historical debate about just how "degenerate" and "inhuman" the Dark Ages actually were, with a significant school of revisionists who would argue that the period between the fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE and the turn of the first millennium has gotten an undeserved bad rap.

But that's not my concern here. It's the "godless" part that rankles me. Let's take a brief tour through the historical highlights of that period, shall we?

• Leo I becomes the first emperor to receive the crown from the Patriarch of Constantinople. (457 CE)
• Clovis conquers France and Belgium and converts the territories to Western Catholicism. (500 CE)
• The debate between monophysitism (one nature of Christ) and Chalcedonianism (two natures of Christ) leads to civil unrest in Byzantium during the reign of Justinian I. (527 CE)
• Justinian orders construction of the Hagia Sophia (532 CE)
• Pope Gregory fuses the papacy with Benedictine monasticism and creates the Latin church to break with the Eastern emperors. Drawing from Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, introduces the concepts of penance and purgatory, which form the foundation of distinctly Western Christianity. (590 CE)
• Boniface III becomes the first Bishop of Rome to officially use the title "pope." (607 CE)
• The Byzantines conquer Persia to retrieve the Jerusalem cross. (614 CE)
• Umar I, the second caliph, conquers Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq in the 630s, forcibly converting most of the Byzantine peoples to Islam and submission to the Caliphate state. Uthman follows by doing the same to Egypt and North Africa (645 CE)
• Pepin of Heristal unites his Frankish forces with the Benedictine missionaries in unifying the Frankish territories of the Rhine and converting the Arian Christians (and a few remaining pagans) of the German territories to Western Catholicism. (687 CE)
• The Benedictines complete the conversion of England. (700 CE)
• The Moors, under Tariq ibn Ziyad, conquer the Iberian peninsula from the Visigoths (hence, white as I am, somewhere in my Portuguese ancestry, I've likely got a little black in me) and convert the Spanish and Portuguese to Islam. (711 CE) Their march northward into France is stopped by the Christians at the Battle of Tours. (732 CE)
• The Anglo-Saxon monk Venerable Bede writes the Latin treatise The History of the English Church. (735 CE)
• Emperor Leo the Assaurian and his son, Constantine V, begins the first of what would be several Iconoclastic movements in Byzantium, ordering the removal and destruction of religious avatars as paganistic heresy. (740 CE)
• Beowulf is written, fusing Anglo-Saxon culture with Old Testament traditions. (750 CE)
• Irish monks produce the Book of Kells (750 CE)
• St. Boniface anoints Pepin the Short a "divinely sanctioned" king, and the Frankish monarchy is fused into the papal order. Pepin, in turn, grants huge swaths of Frankish territory to the Holy See, which would become the "Papal States."
• The Iconoclastic controversy erupts again in the 8th Century, when Emperor Leo III reinstates the ban on icons. The Second Council of Nicaea is called, under pressure from Empress Irene, to declare that icons may be venerated but not worshiped. (787 CE)
• Charlemagne is crowned emperor in Rome. All monasteries are brought under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. (800 CE)
• Bulgaria adopts Christianity in 864 CE. Subsequently, under Tsar Simeon I, it becomes the largest state in Europe. (893 CE)
• Monastic reform begins in Cluny, bringing the monasteries under direct subjugation of the Pope. (910 CE)
• The Bulgarian Orthodox Church becomes the first to declare independence and its own patriarch. (927 CE)
• Otto the Great is crowned king in Germany, and cements the German alliance with the Church. (936 CE)
• Iceland becomes the last outpost in Western Europe to be converted from paganism to Christianity (1000 CE) (also bringing about the beginning of the end to the anarcho-capitalist period that David Friedman has written of glowingly, and that Jared Diamond considers, more or less, the worst society in human history.)

The Dark Ages were many things, but "godless" is certainly not one of them. Tremendous evils were perpetrated by Christians, by Muslims and by pagans, although that last category is far, far smaller than popular treatments of the time generally present. Most of the Barbarians were fully Christianized by the time of the sack of Rome, and among the marauding hordes, only the Vikings maintained paganism for a significant length of time.

The godless can't be blamed for any of it.

You can keep your #$*!in foxhole

Once I received the complaint review memorandum, the discussion paragraph said it all. "€œThough perhaps incentive, Lt. Gen. Blum’s remarks regarding atheists did not rise to a level that violated a standard." Well, this is contrary to every single EO brief or annual requirement that I'™ve ever heard. With any other group, we are told that if a reasonable person is offended by your behavior or remarks, you have violated the standard. Had the same remarks been made about any other group, the results would have been different. If a chaplain had said there are no Jews in a foxhole, implying that they really do believe what a more "spiritually fit"€ soldier believes, the punishment would have been swift and harsh. The implications are exactly the same, except the group identified is different….Instead of punishing bigotry, the Army is using your taxpayer dollars to publish these bigoted remarks by Army officers in Army publications and on Department of Defense Web sites.  

€I can no longer be part of an organization that denies my service in combat, ignores discrimination complaints by soldiers, violates its own regulations, and protects bigots. I'€™m resigning my commission as an officer in the Ohio National Guard as soon as possible.

--1st Lt. Wayne Adkins, on the outcome of the equal opportunity complaint he filed about remarks by H. Stephen Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, likening atheists to bigots and repeating the slander that "there are none in foxholes." 

The Spiritual Instinct

Joanna writes:

I’m reading G.K. Chesterton’s slim volume on Saint Francis of Assisi. In it, he makes a great little point about the historical setting for said Saint that totally resonates with how I feel about libertarians who hate religion - or i guess any religious atheists for that matter:

To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and papal, [referring to H.G. Wells’ Outline of History] is practically to hate nearly everything that has happened. It comes very near to hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind for which not all the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a saint.

If religion doesn’t work so well for you and the concept of spirituality is totally baffling, that’s fine. But becoming hateful or crusading about it seems as ridiculous to me as it would be for Asperger-types to rail against the need for empathy and social skills. You’re obviously just missing some hard-wiring, so leave it alone.

From my vantage point, the temptation to impute great explanatory power to superstitions and conjectures where observable effects would otherwise have no known explanation is hardly "baffling." It's an essential part of the human pattern-seeking brain. And in this, science and religion share the same root source. Where they part is whether those intutions evolve into testable hypotheses or calcify into immutable dogmas.

Thus are we "hard-wired" for many things that may have both positive and negative manifestations. We are social creatures, inclined toward cooperative behavior with fellow members of the pack. One can celebrate how this inclination has yielded nurturing families and the division of labor, while also loathing the tendency of the accompanying "pack loyalty" to stoke the fires of war and prejudice.

Speaking of the pack, we also are hard-wired to establish and respect hierarchies within the pack, a tendency whose evolutionary necessity cannot be denied, but which doesn't withstand even a first blush of moral scrutiny. Even still, one can delineate those manifestations of this hard-wiring that are essentially harmless (children's roughhousing, sporting contests) from those that are clearly vile and disgusting (prison rapes, running for political office.)

One can look to Rome -- to church and to state -- and see extraordinary examples of human potential, but certainly, examples of human fault, folly and flagitiousness also abound. Are we simply to accept it all as the result of "hard-wiring," above or beyond critical analysis because the bad was so thoroughly intermingled with the good? If so, then why ever make any value judgments about anything?

So, yes, I can appreciate the human urge to try to make sense of the senseless and to fish for meaning in the abyss. I revere the majesty of our pattern-seeking brain, and am in awe of all the happy accidents it has bestowed upon us, singularly among the mammals. After all, beavers can build houses, but they can't construct metaphors. Dogs can recognize faces, but they can't spot archetypes. Hyenas can cackle, but they don't appreciate irony.

One can drink in the joy of all of this and more.....and still find religion to be not only a crock of shit, but one whose continuing prevalence in human affairs, at best, stymies progress, and at worst, gives comfort to the worst -- the most base and vile instincts -- that remain hard-wired in the circuitry of mankind.

Fun with Semantics

I share Glen Whitman's assessment that there simply is no need for a concept of "agnotheism." The coinage has been around for a while, and I've seen it used to refer to a number of different concepts, but I guess Jane Galt gets credit for inventing or popularizing its current meaning as "an agnostic who puts a very, very low--yet non-zero!--value on P(God)."

Of course, my first problem with the term is that it would appear, on its face, to break down to something like "the theory that one can't have knowledge of whether believers-in-God exist." But Glen lays out the more cogent argument -- essentially that Galt's definition amounts to yet one more distinction in search of a difference:

As recently as a few years ago, I referred to myself as an agnostic for just the reason that Jane describes. I reserved “atheist” for absolute certainty of the non-existence of god, and “agnostic” for a degree of certainty less than 100%. But after many conversations with my old roomie Julian, I realized that was silly, because I’m not 100% certain about anything. I’m not 100% certain that unicorns don’t exist, yet I don’t call myself a “unicorn agnostic.” I’m not 100% certain there’s no such thing as ESP, yet I don’t call myself an “ESP agnostic.” When I say I don’t believe in unicorns or ESP, it means that I just don’t have any good reason to think they’re real, and so I proceed on the assumption that they aren’t. If P(unicorns) and P(ESP) are sufficiently small, they don’t merit having representation in your label. Why treat P(God) any differently?

I'd go a step further than that even. The idea that one can simultaneously be "agnostic," and assign a probabilistic estimate to whether God exists, strikes me as incoherent. Presumably, agnostics agree with atheists (and even most theists) that there is no physical evidence of God's existence, so that would seem to rule out assigning a frequency probability. But agnostics also believe (at least, as I've always understood the term) that it is impossible to know whether God exists. So what room does leave for Bayesian inference or filtering?

Sure, anyone can just randomly assign numbers to serve as ordinal placekeepers, but since these numbers don't actually refer to any extant information about the real world, why bother? Would you actually use them to compare the likelihood that God exists to the likelihood that, say, unicorns do? And what could serve as the basis of any such comparison?  Unicorns likely would strike most as the more fanciful  hypothetical, but hey, at least there we might be able to point to the recombinant potential of horse DNA. Where's the starting point to begin ascertaining the "probability of probabilities" when it comes to God?

Moreover, I would contend the thought that there are actually some statistically significant number of adherents to what is sometimes described as "strong" atheism -- i.e. the stance that P(God) = 0 -- is fallacious to start. I can't say I've never met ANYONE who held that view, but at least in my subjective experience, it's been a tiny minority of those who self-identify as atheists. Most, instead, hold to some variant of "weak" atheism, or what Michael Shermer has called "nontheism."

But I think Shermer's coinage to be just as unnecessary as Galt's. A-theism is "without a belief in God," much as a-pathy is "without pathos." Nothing in the construction of the word suggests a positive rejection of or active hostility toward belief in God. To the extent there are any who hold such a stance, it would properly be labeled anti-theism, much like anti-pathy.

Of course, these semantic games bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to the inane libertarian/ liberal/ classical liberal/ market liberal/ anarchist/ minarchist/ anarcho-capitalist  debates that have dragged on for decades in libertoid circles. Perhaps some of this can be attributed to both fringe anti-state and fringe anti-church communities drawing similar types of adherents (or, in many cases, the exact same adherents.)

That being the case, if Megan's "agnotheism" could serve to unite all non-believers under one banner, then I'd be perfectly willing to dispense with any quibbles about the awkwardness of the term and just run with it. But since that's not what she's proposing (and it wouldn't happen, even if she were) I think "atheist" already covers the people she's describing pretty well.

Atheism: 1, Foxhole: 0

By the good grace of modern medicine, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett reports to edge.org that he has emerged from the foxhole of an dissected aorta. If that weren't enough good news, he survived the ordeal both with his atheism firmly intact, and singing a few bars of that old Broadway showstopper "Don't Pray For Me, Argentina."

These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it. 

Thanks to Ted Frank for the pointer.

The K. O'Reilly Factor

In comments below, the honorable Kevin O'Reilly, the man I used to be able to refer to as "that OTHER libertarian insurance journalist," takes issue with my dramatic whinging on behalf of the downtrodden atheist class:

As an atheist myself, I must say that I've never felt discriminated against. Now, I don't go around broadcasting my beliefs, just as I probably wouldn't be wearing a giant gold crucifix if I were a Christian.

The inclination to remain discrete and modest about one's own religious outlook is an understandable one, and under slightly different circumstances, I might even call it an admirable one. But the tenor of these particular times suggests to me that remaining humble about what we believe is no longer a virtue.

For too long, our silence has been used against us, as implicit acquiescence to the will of the majority. Over and over we are told how “America is a religious country,” usually in defense of some asinine policy like school prayer or gay marriage bans. That a full 5% of Americans report that they do NOT believe in God – 1 in every 20 – is never offered as a counter to that assertion. If it is mentioned at all, it is only to support the claim that since there are relatively few of us, the majority is fully entitled to shove whatever pro-religion nonsense they’d like down our throats.

And by and large, we just take it and keep our mouths shut. When one of us has the gumption to stand up for himself, even on the most minor or mundane of issues – as Michael Newdow did over the “under God” wording in the Pledge of Allegiance – he is treated like the proverbial uppity n*gg*r who doesn’t know his place is to sit in the back of the bus.

Firmly ensconced on the current bestseller list is a tome by a man who shares your surname, the central thesis of which is a call for an all-out jihad on those of us who would welcome a declining role for religion in public and civic life, and celebrate the secularization of American society. And in what amounts to a sick joke, he has managed to convince millions of his lapdog followers that it is WE who are the well-organized cabal, pulling all the string from behind some magic curtain. As the other O'Reilly puts it:

For the S-P agenda to succeed, religion in America must be de-emphasized, just as it already has been in Western Europe and Canada, where secular-progressives have made huge gains. … [T]he American S-P generals have learned that goal No. 1 is to secularize the American public school system in order to drive children away from religion and into the S-P camp. And what is the most wondrous display of religion worldwide? Why, Christmas, of course. Little kids seeing a manger display just might develop a curiosity about this baby Jesus person. … There is no danger of that happening with winter solstice or with a holiday tree.

Well, Bill, count me guilty as charged. I do cheer when I see children driven away from the delusion of religion. I would consider it progress if America was just as secular as Canada and Western Europe. I believe a more secular America would be less likely to interfere with the free choices of its citizens, whether those choices are little things, like the ability to do on-line gambling or to download some porn, or big things, like being able to enter enforceable marriage contracts with one’s chosen life partner or to more fully research the potential of embryonic stem cell lines. 

The onus should be on men like THAT Mr. O’Reilly to explain why this isn’t progress. And the retort that “America is a religious country” shouldn’t be an acceptable response.

Now, as to discrimination, I’ll concede that blatant, Civil Rights Act-type discrimination may be rare, but clearly there is unequal treatment in a variety of areas. Some of them are so obvious that the only reason you don’t think about them is that you’ve been institutionalized, my brotha.

Case in point: If you were to hold a weekly lecture series to which you charged admission, then each year, come April 15, the fine gentlemen at the Internal Revenue Service would be kindly expecting their cut.

But break out the incense, put on a backward collar, put up some stained glass, and all of a sudden….

A more serious case in point: Consider yourself lucky that you haven't endured a child custody battle with an ex-spouse who happens to be a believer. As Eugene Volokh has demonstrated, the odds are pretty good that you’ll lose.

As for electing atheists, it happens all the time. Most people who aren't religious don't go around talking all the time about why or how they're not religious. It's a waste of time.

I have no doubt that it does. In fact, I know of more than one closeted atheist in Congress, though I don’t think it my place to out them. Still, does it not discomfit you even a bit that this should be an issue? Does it not fill you with melancholy that no matter how brilliant he or she might be, no jurist who has ever admitted to atheism publicly will ever be named to the Supreme Court? It does for me. And no, I’m not so deluded to think there’s anything my little Web site will do to rectify that situation, but sweet Popper, we’ve got to start somewhere, don’t we?

And perhaps I could more easily accept that it were a waste of time were it not for the fact that, in less than one week, control of the United States Senate may very well come down to a single race in Tennessee, where even the Democratic candidate has been given to making pronouncements like:

My friend Lincoln Davis who chairs our campaign says there are, there's one big difference between us and misfortunate Republicans when it comes to our faith: he said that Republicans fear the Lord; he said Democrats fear AND love the Lord. – Harold Ford Jr.

Get me a barf bag, please.

Most Americans are seemingly willing to dispense with religious principles they find discordant with modern living without giving up their belief in God or whatever. And when it comes to public policy, it's rare to see even religious figures make explicitly religious arguments.

You’re absolutely right on that. Instead they make fallacious secular arguments to promote policies with specific religious intent. Like how the institution of marriage need be “protected” by reserving it for those who are capable of rearing their own biological children (which is, of course, why we don’t let the elderly or the infertile get married, right?)

And hey, as I see it, the infidels are our natural allies. Perhaps Dawkins gets a kick out of antagonizing hypocritical believers, but I think it’s our duty to reach out to them and encourage them to raise their own voices. They don’t want to be told what to do by their church leaders any more than we do.

In the United States today, people are rarely punished for having unpopular or idiotic beliefs. It's going to take some doing on your part to convince me otherwise and to get exercised about it, so I look forward to reading to see what evidence you come up with.

Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I ought to have been, but it’s not my intent to show we are being “punished.” But we are certainly hated. Turning to Volokh again, he posted late last year about a Pew Center poll that showed 50% of Americans had either “mostly unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” attitudes toward atheists.

Substitute “blacks” or “Jews” or even “gays” for atheists in that poll, and you’d see a five-part CNN series on “The Hate that Divides America.” But because it is atheists, no one bats an eye – even, it seems, other atheists. That disturbs me, deeply. Which is not to say I have an answer to the problem, but that there is a problem is something I don’t think I can just sit back and ignore any longer.

Episode IV: A New Hope

There comes a time in every blog's life when it must stop and ask itself the big questions -- what am I? Why am I here? What purpose do I serve, other than to occupy bits of bandwidth and server space, and for what good reason would anyone keep coming back to read me on a regular basis?

Almost since its inception, In Lehmann's Terms has been unable to answer those questions. In part, this is because it is a blog, not a sentient creature, and thus incapable of animate thought or speech, no matter how far its creator tried to stretch out this tortured metaphor. But in larger part, it is because that same creator, yours truly, never really had any good answers to those questions to begin with.

For years, I resisted the call to start blogging, because I considered the whole enterprise....well, kind of goofy. Eventually, on a lark, I decided to give it a whirl. But while it's been fun at times and, yeah, there are a small handful of posts I've made that I don't consider to be complete crap, I can't say I've ever been completely sold on what I was doing. That is, when I bothered to do it at all.

The problem, you see, is that this has always been a blog without a purpose, and that's never sat particularly well with me. I'd intended originally for this to be a space to blow off some steam. My day job is comprised entirely of reporting straight news, so having an outlet to bloviate my own opinions once in a while seemed like a welcome opportunity.

But opinions....about what? Does the Web really need yet one more libertarian screwball, tossing off the same old hoary cliches on all the same old topics? Spend just a few minutes cruising the libertarian blogosphere -- and especially the giant echo chamber that is the D.C.-centered libertarian blogosphere -- and the answer comes back a categorical NO FUCKIN' WAY!

So, what then? Pop culture? I don't consume nearly as much of it as I used to, and dwelling on the subject mostly leaves me feeling old and out of touch. Philosophy? Still fun for the occasional mental wank session, but I'd end up boring even myself. Economics? It's already a crowded field, and I don't have nearly enough technical training to do the subject justice or compete with the big boys. Business? Finance? Insurance? Only in that last area can I say I have a true comparative advantage, and it's the one subject that prudence dictates I just the shut the hell up about.

Which doesn't leave much. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David may have been able to get away with doing a show "about nothing," but a blog about nothing is a pretty gruesome thing.

It seems Professor Bainbridge had been thinking along these same lines recently. As he put it:

With the blogging "market" increasingly crowded, the model of an eclectic, general interest blog is a less viable one. Perhaps more importantly, I'm just getting tired of the punditry style of blogging. I'm not enjoying writing that style as much; for that matter, I'm not enjoying reading other punditry blogs very much these days.

The Prof is now currently in the process of remaking his blog to focus much more exclusively on business law and economics. And after much deliberation, I've finally decided upon a specific focus that I would like to pursue as well, one that engages my mind and inflames my passions, but which has little to do with my politics and nothing at all to do with my day job.

So let me welcome you to the newly relaunched In Lehmann's Terms, a site devoted to the cause...of secularism, devoted to celebrating progress made toward a more secular culture, and to defending the social status of the non-religious in American culture.

I know what you might be thinking, but let me stop you right there. Whether you believe it or not, I promise that the decision to steer the site in this direction was made several weeks before Wired magazine's publication of Gary Wolf's article on The New Atheists -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett. Nonetheless, if theirs is a movement that helps to push this debate forward, then I proudly declare myself a fellow traveler, if not quite an enlisted soldier in the Army of (Not)God.

The New Atheists' represent a strident brand of atheism toward which I maintain a certain degree of ambivalence. Don't get me wrong. I don't have any fuzzy-bunny feelings toward believers. I don't particularly care if it's "mean" to call their beliefs "delusions." It doesn't make it any less true. But the problem I see with the Dawkins-Harris strategy is that all it does is amp up the volume on the same program they've been trying for years.  At its heart, it's still consumed with the idea that one can use reason to persuade the irrational, a conceit just as deluded as anything the fundies themselves could come up with.

The reason Dawkins and Dennett and their ilk always return to pick from this same fruitless branch is that they are academics. Moreover, they're conservative academics, and thus accustomed to a certain type of polemical discourse. They think if they dominate the debate and win all the points, the other side will have no choice but to see the light.

For men so smart, this is a profoundly stupid approach. This war will not be won in a classroom. In fact, it will not be won at all, if the goal is to "convert" the other side. My goals are much more modest. I don't demand that any current believer change his mind about his or her own beliefs. I just, frankly, don't give a toss. What I do demand is that I, and the other nonbelievers, be given the same damned respect that any other citizen could count on as a matter of course. Maybe Dawkins and Co. just can't see it, but to me it's plain as day --  the issues that face atheists and agnostics and other nonbelievers today are the issues of prejudice and civil rights.

Let's face some facts, gentlemen. We are a minority, both in America and in most countries around the world.  We are, furthermore, a minority that has been, and continues to be, profoundly marginalized. We live in the midst of a majority that is hostile, both to us personally, and to our beliefs, generally. Make no mistake about it -- we are hated. And not only does our culture offer no sanction against those who express that hatred publicly -- such contempt is encouraged, often by our very own elected leaders.

If you doubt the claim, or think it an exaggeration, consider this: Depending on whose statistics you use, there are between five to 10 times the number of atheists in America that there are Jews in America. And yet, despite that numerical advantage, and despite eons of anti-Semitism, six years ago, a clear plurality of Americans voted to elect an Orthodox Jew to the second-highest office in the land.

Can you think of one place -- one city, one county, one hamlet -- where an admitted atheist would stand a chance to be elected dog catcher? I can't.

Now, when I say this is a civil rights issue, I don't mean that it is primarily a civil liberties issue. I disagree with a great many of the currents in the American political scene, and find many of those currents are hostile to the nonbelieving minority. But that's only a tiny piece of the problem, and often -- particularly in the hands of groups like the ACLU -- it can be used to distract from the broader issues.

As I read the First Amendment, it says the federal government can't establish a state religion or prosecute people for their religious beliefs. I can be simultaneously grateful for the doctrine of separation of church and state while also recognizing that it appears nowhere in the Constitution. And the greater point is -- it need not appear in our Constitution. We should endorse it as a rule of thumb because it's simply good public policy.

But first, we need a seat at the table, the table of our own culture. Just as the homosexuals have been doing for 30 years, we need to come out of the closet. We need to stand up to anti-atheist bigotry. We need to make our voices heard. We need to highlight positive atheist role models and support atheist youth groups and establish atheist charities and atheist civic organizations.

Let's not forget that, in the end, the ultimate triumph of the original civil rights movement was not the Supreme Court decisions or the Civil Rights Act or even the end of Jim Crow. It was in a whole group of Americans standing up, en masse, and changing the culture -- changing it simply by insisting that their voices be counted. Some of those voices were just as strident, in their own way, as Dawkins and Harris are today, and I don't begrudge them that at all. It took all of those voices to create the conversation.

Ours is one that has only just begun.

The only chain that a man can stand
is the chain of hand in hand.
Keep your eyes on the prize
and hold on.

America's Worst Nightmare

Apparently, it's not terrorism or bird flu or those melting polar ice caps. It's a godless heathen like myself showing up at the door to announce "I'm going to marry your daughter."

So says a new study from the University of Minnesota:

"Church attenders, conservative Protestants, and those reporting high religious saliency are less likely to approve of intermarriage with an atheist and more likely to say that atheists do not share their vision of American society..." In respect to the former, the survey presented respondents with the following statement: "I would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group."

Once again, Atheists were at the apex of this negative-image cohort at 47.6%, followed by Muslims (33.5%); African Americans (27.2%); Asian Americans (18.5%); Hispanics (18.5%); Jews (11.8%); conservative Christians (6.9%) and Whites at 2.3%.

May God damn you, Hitch

And in the end, when the Cosmic Barkeep has flicked on the house lights and I’ve tossed back my final gulp of the sweet nectar that is oxygen, when I stumble bleary-eyed out the exit doors of Ye Olde Moertle Coyle and tumble wretchedly into the back alley of damnation, it is your face, Mr. Hitchens, that I wish to see brightening that damp corner of Hades reserved for we heathen unbelievers, holding aloft a bottle of that most notorious Speyside single malt and bellowing “There is no last call ‘round these parts, lad!”