* Great American Historians, Father & Son

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights.... In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide. Religion during most of the history of the West saw the trials visited on mankind in this world as ordained by the Almighty to test and purify sinful mortals.... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality; hated blasphemy; and feared heresy.... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake. ~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., from his speech at the inauguration of Vartan Gregorian as president of Brown University, 1989, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. ~ (1888-1965)

Schlesinger pioneered the new social history and women's history. He was a Progressive School intellectual who stressed material causes (like economic profit) and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors.

~ The Master: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
1879 - 1955

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

~ Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist

* An Acceptable God ~ Hands-off & Do-it-yourself

ears ago I was writing a paper for my religious studies class. At the time I was a questioning Christian. As I struggled for a thesis for my paper, sitting at home next to shelves of my books, I glanced up and zeroed in on two of them, by chance. One was Hans Kung's, Does God Exist? and right beside it was a home improvement manual titled, Fix-it-Yourself. I prefaced my paper with this experience and throughout the rest of it referred to God as "it." Even though my professor was a Christian I received an A for the paper.

Dr. Anthony Kelly responds to Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life. In Dr. Kelly's article, articulated is a God that I had already built in my paper. It is validating to find someone else who shares a vision of God that I've continued to ponder over the years as the only kind of God, if it exists, that would be acceptable to me as it is not interventive and is completely divorced from religion.

Resolving the Goldilocks Enigma - An Evidence Based Approach

by Anthony Kelly (Faculty of Education, Humanities, Law and Theology, Flinders University) Philica.com

Abstract: "The Goldilocks question [Paul Davies asks: "Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?"] is answerable but neither of the two main answers considered by Paul Davies, the existence of an interventionist “hands-on” God or the existence of a Multiverse, is convincing. The evidence provided by Cosmology and by the process of Emergent Evolution shows the Universe to be a purposeful process involving the self-organisation of Matter and Life and the self-creation of Humanity. The Universe exists for a purpose. The world is humanity’s 'do-it-yourself' kit."

Dr. Anthony Kelly lives in South Australia and holds a BA in Philosophy, Sociology and Theology from Flinders University, did Honours in Philosophy in 1988 and Postgraduate work in Philosophy 1989-95 and in Theology 1996-1998. He was admitted to Doctor of Philosophy in Theology in 1998. He has been a Board Member of the Inter-Church Trade and Industry Mission for years 1973-1977, and its Chairman in 1977-78. Between 1970 and 1982 Dr Kelly was Secretary, then Vice President, and finally President of the SA Industrial Relations Society, and was a member of the Flinders University Council 1981-84.

"I argue that Creation is a process involving a series of Emergent stages. Each new Emergent stage sublates the previous stage in that it incorporates the previous stage but transcends it. The present Human Moral-cultural stage provides a platform for the final Emergent stage. Previous Emergent stages have developed by self-organisation. The final Emergent stage can only develop by human self-creation. Jesus is a proleptic exemplar of the final Emergent stage."

Dr. Kelly's thesis and articles can be read at his website.

Dissertation, The Process of the Cosmos: Philosophical Theology and Cosmology

Lonergan, Metaphysics, and Mythology, pp. 45-58, The Examined Life Journal

Humankind is never the victim of God;
God is always the victim of humankind.

~ René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning,
Orbis Books, 1999, page 191

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne, Essays 1580

* Another Religious Horror Story ~ Authored by the New Testament this Time

The following was posted to the JesusMysteries discussion forum today:

Marcion was the first to realize that the Jewish Scriptures (OT) have nothing to do with Christianity. Even without his belief in 2 biblical gods, one must use twisted, tenuous arguments to make the OT predict Jesus. It is too bad that Marcionites did not win the Church struggle. Marcionites accepted that Judaism was true - on its own terms. We would not have had 2 millennia of nasty Jewish-Christians relations, for Judaism was just another totally different religion.

It's true, no Jew accepted that the messiah would suffer and be executed. If somehow, Jesus had truly been alive again, such that anybody could see him, probably many more Jews would have accepted him; and, if he led an army of angels to destroy the hated Kittim, all Jews would have accepted him. Didn't happen.

Check out Price's The Pre-Nicene New Testament for a great discussion of this.

Best,
Prof. D. Showley

Newest Release by Robert M. Price

The Pre-Nicene New Testament
Fifty-four Formative Texts

The Word of the Aion! Not just a new translation, but a new canon, The Pre-Nicene New Testament supplements the usual twenty-seven writings with another twenty-seven that might have been included long ago but were not. Here is an inclusive, truly representative portrait of early Christianity in all its amazing theological diversity. Familiar works are rendered new again by the first translation to embody generations worth of scholarly proposals, as well as by introductions featuring ultra-radical yet sound biblical scholarship.

Another of Dr. Price's books not to be missed is his The Reason Driven Life, Foreword by Julia Sweeney.

"[The Reason Driven Life] is a deeply thought out, theologically accurate, heartfelt dismantling of Rick Warren’s (and all Evangelicals’) worldview. Even the ideas that seem, on the surface, to be unassailable (like Warren’s call to a life of service to others) Price takes apart, reveals each for the sham it is, with elegance and charm and disturbing accuracy."

~ Julia Sweeney formally of Saturday Night Live, from the foreword.

Cross-reference METAXY Robert M. Price and Julia Sweeney

* Mark Twain, 1835-1910 ~ A Bitter Critic of Religion

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), "better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." He is also known for his fascination with science and his quotations.

Faith is believing something you know ain’t so. ~ Following the Equator, Ch. 12

Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea. Letters from the Earth, 1909

Twain falls into the 'ambiguous' category regarding belief in gods but he was highly critical of organized religion. He did, however, maintain that the Presbyterian church, his childhood religion, was safe.

"In later years, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story. Twain was critical of organized religion and certain elements of the Christian religion through most of the end of his life, though he never renounced Presbyterianism." Wikipedia

See also METAXY

* God and the Master of Mythicism Deny that Jesus was Sacrificed for Sinners

~ Artist Unknown

"But perhaps the truth of the matter is that this world took up residence in him, in that common device of the human mind which seeks to render indeterminate, broadly-based developments as proceeding from one superior individual, someone who can serve to epitomize and focus the multifarious features and innovations of complex social movements."

Earl Doherty reviews Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus

* To Claim that the Bible is Divinely Inspired is Spurious, Pernicious, and Moot ~ Robert M. Price

In the following brief essay, Robert Price presents tight arguments against the inspiration and authority of the bible. The essay speaks for itself. But I would add--in light of what Price says--the observation that Christians adhering to the inspiration and authority of the bible worship it as if it were a god in itself.

The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible: A Critique

by Robert M. Price

Price concludes, "This is the root of the urgency of biblicism. As I have tried to show, there is not much logic to it, just psycho-logic. The psychology of superstitious fear. The claim to biblical inspiration is a rationalization whereby we allow ourselves not to hear the things we fear to hear from the Bible. But I am not afraid. I love the Bible, and perfect love casts out fear."

* Secularism is on the Rise on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Brits Say

The Observer
Mark Kermode
December 24, 2006

"If headlines are to be believed, the rise of secularism on both sides of the Atlantic is threatening to crucify Christianity in general, and Christmas in particular. Here in the UK, scare stories in the run-up to the 'Winterval' knees-up have ranged from British Airways banning staff from displaying crosses on uniforms to local councils allegedly outlawing any mention of Baby Jesus in their festive greetings. In God-fearing America, video ads for the film The Nativity Story were reportedly removed from a downtown Chicago Christmas festival after city officials claimed they would be 'insensitive to the many people of different faiths who come to enjoy the market for its food and unique gifts.'"

* Recent Instance of Human Evolution

Does the EEA extend right into the neolithic?

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

by Nicholas Wade
December 10, 2006

It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant....

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the new findings were "very exciting" because they "showed the speed with which a genetic mutation can be favored under conditions of strong natural selection, demonstrating the possible rate of evolutionary change in humans."

Full article - but not for intelligent design creationists ...

* Noam Chomsky ~ Linguist, Political Commentator, Intellectual, Prolific Writer

"The Bible is probably the most genocidal book ever written." Noam Chomsky

Nim Chimpsky
Sign-Language Chimp
Appropriately named after the great Noam Chomsky, Linguist

Nim Chimpsky

"The chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky was the subject of a landmark experiment in teaching sign language to apes. Named in a humorous salute to language theorist Noam Chomsky, Nim was raised in a human-like setting and taught sign language as if he were a human child. Nim learned to use basic signs but, it was generally agreed, did not develop complex language skills."

Nim by Herbert S. Terrace

* * *Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern Linguistics, is also among the leading leftist thinkers in the world. Teaching at MIT, he is one of the world's top three intellectuals.

Biography
Bibliography
Chomsky's ZBlog

Chomsky said: "I was just looking at a study by an American sociologist (published in England) of comparative religious attitudes in various countries. The figures are shocking. Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population."

Definition of God

"How do I define God? I don't. Divinities have been understood in various ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic, with the warrior God demanding of his chosen people that they not worship the other Gods and destroy those who do -- in an extremely brutal way, in fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the God who was to be worshipped. So that's one definition ..."


Read more ...

Further resources ...

The Noam Chomsky Website
Articles, Debates, Interviews ...

A selection of Chomsky's posts
from the ChomskyChat Forum

Wikipedia
Bartleby.com
Notable Names Database Weblog (NNDB)

* For Katharine Hepburn, Life was a Delicious Dinner

May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003

I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.

~ Katharine Hepburn, Ladies Home Journal, Oct. 1991

Hepburn wrote about her freethought views in her autobiography, Me (1991), and spoke about her atheism and other unconventional views in interviews.* * *God "was a concept too vast for her mind to consider," but she believed in "the lessons of Jesus Christ" despite her feeling, shared with Marx, that "religion was a sop for the masses."

[circa 1984] Katharine Hepburn's work for Planned Parenthood had, in fact, been taking up a great deal of her time. Mailings carrying her name and soliciting funds had been sent out by the hundreds of thousands, and they had brought her a rush of unpleasant letters and numerous threats ...

"Things are getting worse," she told one interviewer. "Now they've even changed the rules about when a fetus is alive--although I've never seen a religious service for a miscarriage, have you?" To another writer, she confessed: "I was always a bit on the outside because I belonged to a small element of society who thought they were better than others because of their beliefs--they were out to help people who were victims of idiotic attitudes. When some local girl got pregnant, she would have the baby in our house if she had no place to go."

adherents.com

Celebrity Atheists

* International Human Rights Day ~ December 10

Voice of America News
Human Rights Day Focuses On Poverty Eradication


by Lisa Schlein
Geneva
10 December 2006

The United Nations is calling on governments to urgently come to grips with poverty and end the discrimination that systematically deprives poor people of their fundamental human rights. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from Geneva on this year's theme for Human Rights Day Sunday.

The United Nations chose poverty as this year's theme for Human Rights day because, it says, poverty is both a cause and a product of human rights violations. It says the poor are more likely to have their rights denied, and to be victims of discrimination and persecution.

Mac Darrow, of the U.N. Human Rights Office, says that over the last decade, poverty has come to be seen as a human rights issue, rather than just an economic issue. He says, research shows poor people suffer from a wide-range of civil and political rights violations. "Lack of access to adequate schooling. Lack of personal security. Lack of ability to participate in public affairs or community level decision-making bodies - really, a very integrated and multi-faceted vision of dis-empowerment. And, this and like research has driven international development agencies to understand poverty as precisely that, as about social exclusion, about issues of access to political power, economic power and discrimination," he said.

Darrow, who coordinates the Millennium Development Goals for the Human Rights office, says it is not easy for people to see poverty as a human rights violation equivalent to gross abuses such as torture, forced disappearances or summary executions.
Rather, he says poverty is perceived as tragic, but inevitable. He says poor people often are blamed for their own situation, and are accused of being lazy and undeserving.

The United Nations says poverty is part of a vicious cycle that tends to repeat itself from one generation to another. It says poverty exists everywhere, even in rich countries. It says women suffer most from being poor.

As part of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals, countries have pledged to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. The U.N. says time is running out on this pledge, and urges governments to speed up the process. It says eradicating poverty is a human right.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights came into being. Together, these three rights treaties constitute the International Bill of Rights. International Human Rights Day celebrates this achievement.

Human Rights Day 2006
Fighting Poverty
A Matter of Obligation
Not Charity

National Human Rights Institute

All About International
Human Rights Day and This
Year's Focus on Poverty (PDF)

Amnesty International

* Northern Lights, a Wing and a Prayer

You've got your phenomenon on one hand. Concrete and knowable. On the other hand you've got the incomprehensible. You call it God, but to me, God or no, it remains just that, the unknowable.

Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, A Wing and a Prayer, 1994

Internet Movie Database

* Significant Growth of 'Faithless' in America from 8% to 14.1%

SURVEY INDICATES MORE AMERICANS "WITHOUT FAITH"


Growth in the segment of the adult population "identifying with no religion" is significant. "In 1990, 14.3 million or roughly 8% identified with this category. The new ARIS count now shows that the non-believer population has grown to 29.4 million, roughly 14.1% of the American community. The ARIS team notes that the 1990 figure "may be downwardly biased due to a slight change in the working of the key survey question in 2001. In seeking a more accurate measure of identification, the clause 'if any' was added this year to the question, 'What religion do you identify with?'"

"The study introduction quotes an observation by anthropologist of religion Diana L. Eck (A New Religious America: How a 'Christian County' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, Harper - San Francisco, 2001) who observed, "We the people of the United States now form the most profusely religious nation on earth." "Often lost amidst the mesmerizing tapestry of faith groups that comprise the American population," notes ARIS, "is also a vast and growing population of those without faith. They adhere to no creed nor choose to affiliate with any religious community. These are the seculars, the unchurched, the people who profess no faith in any religion."

"In addition, 'the present survey has detected a wide and possibly growing swath of secularism among Americans. The magnitude and role of this large secular segment of the American population is frequently ignored by scholars and politicians alike...'"

Graduate Center Survey of Religion in America Complements U.S. Census

"Fifty-two percent of adults in America are Protestant, 24.5% are Catholic, and 14.1% adhere to no religion, according to the latest American Religious Identification Survey, 2001 ("ARIS 2001") just released by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Those giving their religion as Jewish are 1.3% and those as Muslim or Islamic are 0.5%."

City University of New York

* Richard Dawkins and God ~ Transcript

Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, Australia

Kirsten Garrett interviews Richard Dawkins
November 26, 2006
Transcript

* My Kinda God

gapingvoid

* Richard Dawkins ~ A Glimpse

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

-- Richard Dawkins, in Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.

Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Richard Dawkins, The Humanist, Vol. 57, No. 1

Also see ...