WIP

I bolded that first sentence, because that's the intersection where all of these problems between religion and science, and religion and secularism get hung up. According to many progressive theologians, the religious experience is not supposed to be treated as an equivalent to objective reasoning, and they allegorized scripture.....and treating bible stories like historical facts makes it next to impossible to personalize these stories. I don't know whether this is line of thinking that's promoted by people like Karen Armstrong has any basis in fact, but if it was the general way of understanding religions, we wouldn't be having religious wars, fights over evolution, or having problems with religious leaders trying to stop any and every movement for social reform. I grew up with fundamentalist Christianity; and when I was in high school, I was told that I had to accept 6 day biblical creation as an historical event.....so, for me, that meant heading for the door and abandoning religion. This sort of stark choice only offers two options: either believers accept everything that's handed to them, and shut themselves off from any learning that could conflict with a tight, fundamentalist understanding of everything. According to some interpretations of the science/religion conflict, the problems really took off when some very early religious scientists like Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal, decided to use their new method of inquiry to prove the existence of God, and how God created the Universe. But, every time since then, a mystery has been explained without appealing to some mysterious supernatural force, it provides one more reason why God isn't necessary, and proof to the religious that science is openly hostile to their beliefs and trying to explain God out of existence. There were some theologians of the time who did not appreciate efforts to scientifically prove God, since there is no room for faith if it could all be proven objectively. When it comes to new atheist writers, the reason I have turned against them is because they would rather see the religious believers hold onto a literal, materialistic interpretation of their dogmas and resist change until they finally crack and abandon religion entirely. That would be fine if there is nothing of value in religion, but what if there is something of value...at least for some people? For every criticism that Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens and others have about fundamentalism, they heap more scorn on progressives and moderates who are trying to adapt their beliefs. They will even speak admiringly of fundamentalists, when they compare them with modern theologians that refuse to present a God that they can analyze as a scientific problem. This makes sense only because both fundamentalists and new atheists have adopted the same rules about how to find meaning and make sense of the world.

I've responded to a few posts from before Christmas, but rather than getting into the back-and-forth that's gone on since then, I'd like to make a general statement that the problem seems to be that fundamentalists have defined religion and their religious dogma as empirical scientific theory. So, every new scientific discovery that conflicts with a literal reading, from evolution to modern neuroscience is fought against as an attack on religious faith......if you're wondering why most atheists have arrived at where they are now, this is the precise reason! Most atheists are former Christians of one fundamentalist denomination or another, and when we were developing a curiosity about the world, we were told that we had to accept biblical creationism as our science. Most people don't really give a damn, but for the minority who want to believe in things that are real, that often meant abandoning our churches, and turning against religion entirely. Even though I later took the time to learn about religious views that do not try to dress themselves up as pseudoscience, I still did not see any reason to go back to supernatural beliefs.....but that's what's best for me! Many people have a strong inclination to believe in a purpose-driven universe, and I don't see any problem with this way of understanding, as long as it doesn't demand denying scientific discovery. I don't believe that everyone should be a believer....in whatever....nor that everyone is cut out to be a rationalist. There are enough problems in this world without creating extra ones for no good reason.

I think that every set of rules and ethics is from human origins. The difference between secular humanism and Christian humanism for example, is that Christian humanist claims his principles are from a divine source. But Christian ethics (even among fundamentalists) has been shaped and molded over the eons by political and economic conditions. The secular humanist system may have borrowed from Christian philosophy as much as from the Ancient Greeks, but it is no more arbitrary than Christian ethics....which has also changed over the centuries. Slavery for example, was a universally approved social institution before the concepts of human rights and freedoms were considered. Over time, a consensus of opinion developed that slavery was an immoral institution, and the church leaders who led the fight for abolition could dress their arguments in religious language, but they did not have scripture or Christian tradition to support the change in attitude on slavery. The issue is more about applying ethics than developing lofty sounding principles. Some atheists will be ethical, while others will be selfish hedonists. But almost the same thing will go among the believers who think that the rules they learned at church are divine and unchangeable. If people feel that they need the security of believing in an underlying intelligence and purpose, that's fine; but not everyone sees a reason for having these beliefs, nor that they are essential for having a good life.

Don't think that many atheists haven't noticed how anti-theists like Hitchens, Ayan Hirsi Ali, or PZ Myers, are welcomed at the rightwing neoconservative table as long as they point their guns at Islam! The ones who join the neocons and support U.S. empire-building in the Muslim World, like Hirsi Ali, are even given membership at clubs like the American Enterprize Institute for their service. No doubt that her support for converting Muslims to Christianity has also been a rewarding experience for book sales and paid lectures! She is almost as useful as Foxnew's frequent atheist contributor - S.E. Cupp! But most atheists don't want to serve as pawns for global capitalists who want to continue the occupation of the Middle East, nor the Christian theocrats who want their religion to dominate the whole world. I would prefer a strategy of turning down the heat, so that moderate Muslims have a better chance to combat the reactionaries and fundamentalists that use violence, intimidation and over-the-top rhetoric to force their agenda.

I guess that must be why I avoid 90% of the activity!

But, he still considers religion to be an overall, negative influence...and he doesn't make any distinction between the two primary aspects of religion: supernatural belief systems and how they function as social organizations; he just lumps everything together under the category of religion. There are positive and negative aspects to both. No one's talking about abstaining; it's a matter of how much someone is willing to understand other perspectives before criticizing them. If atheists are supposed to reason-driven, and using evidence to arrive at valid conclusions, then group-think should be the last thing we are using! Some atheists who have taken an antagonistic, anti-theist viewpoint, and even drive away progressive and liberal believers, rather than maintain a harmonious relationship with the moderates, are guilty of doing the same thing that many fundamentalist cults do -- deliberately drive a wedge and isolate their small communities from the mainstream. Persecution is interpreted as validation by cultists, and small atheist groups that seek to close themselves off from contact with religious believers are acting like just one more cult.

Have you considered that your global warming-denying sources concentrate on the ups and downs and volatility of the world's atmosphere, while avoiding attention on what's going on in the oceans? There's a good reason why they do this -- 90% of the energy that's been absorbed has been in the planet's oceans, not the atmosphere. The most dramatic effects of climate change have been melting glaciers, both on land, in Greenland and the Antarctica, and in the Arctic Ocean, which has lost nearly half of the amount of ice it had 50 years ago. If you do a simple grade school experiment by placing a thermometer in water, and then freezing it; you'll notice that after taking it out of the freezer, the thermometer won't rise until the ice surrounding it has melted. On a planetary scale, this shows us how most of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gas levels, has been dissipated by melting ice, rather than raising air temperatures. But now that the glaciers have significantly melted, and could be gone in a matter of decades, guess where the energy increase from the increased greenhouse effect is going to be felt?

That video also demonstrates the seasonal fluctuations in CO2 levels. CO2NOW.org runs the latest updates on atmospheric CO2 levels from the Mauno Loa Observatory, which has been tracking CO2 levels for over 50 years; and to get a proper understanding of how fast carbon dioxide rates are rising, you have to compare the present level with that month's CO2 level of the previous year. Monthly CO2 levels go up and down throughout the year, but the upward progression year after year is undeniable: http://co2now.org/images/stories/widgets/co2_widget_brundtland_600_graph.gif

I'm back! I'll give you a couple of reasons why, although some forms of geo-engineering may be necessary, they should not be the front-line response to climate change: 1. Geo-engineering schemes do not address the core issue that our civilization is progressing in an unsustainable manner - consuming natural resources plus fresh water, and degrading the topsoil necessary to sustain a "green revolution" that supports 7 billion people today. Earth's population today consuming about 25% more resources than Earth is producing. Pollution and rising CO2 levels aside, the fundamentals of our world economic system are unsustainable, and tossing up more quick fixes, like geo-engineering, is not going to solve these underlying issues. 2. The big problem is geo-engineering means messing with a system that no one knows the details of exactly how it works. I posted a couple of weeks ago an article on tree-planting that demonstrated that planting more trees north of 30 degrees latitude will have a neutral to negative effect on CO2 absorption. So much for carbon offsets! Even strategies that seem a no-brainer, like tree planting, can have neutral to negative impacts.....so Al Gore's carbon offsets to balance his frequent flyer mileage and $900 a month electrical bills, are not helping to reduce his large carbon footprint. "North of 20 degrees [latitude] forests had a direct warming influence that more or less counterbalanced the cooling effect of carbon removal from the atmosphere," said Prof Caldeira. Past 50 degrees, forests warmed the Earth by an average of 0.8C. But in the tropics forests helped cool the planet by an average of 0.7C. Dr Bala explained that forest canopies, because they are relatively dark, absorbed most of the sun's rays heating falling on them. Grassland or snowfields, however, reflected more sun, keeping temperatures lower. Planting trees above 50 degrees latitude, such as in Siberia, could cover tundras normally blanketed in heat-reflecting snow. In the tropical regions, though, water evaporating from trees increased cloudiness, which helped keep the planet cool. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/dec/15/ethicalliving.lifeandhealth

Do we need to point out that there were no humans living on Earth at the time? Let alone a modern civilization that is dependent on good weather to sustain. As our weather has become more and more extreme in the last few years, take a look at what has been happening to global food production. Here's a niece little article about some recent new discoveries of another time when the poles were covered with tropical vegetation: Cache in Chinese Mountain Reveals 20,000 Prehistoric Fossils Only problem is that the high carbon levels produced by prolonged volcanic activity in Siberia 250 million years ago, also poisoned the Earth's oceans, and cut oxygen levels to what we now find at 10,000 feet altitude. More than 90% of animal species became extinct at the end of the Permian Age....and today, we are making a headlong rush to create the same conditions in a matter of decades, that occurred over hundreds of thousands of years at that time.

Something's wrong with your first link. The 2nd one just illustrates how dangerously delusional people with power and authority are! So, they think they are going to "own the weather by 2025." Do I need to point out that scientists who started experimenting with cloud-seeding back in the 60's thought they were going to own the weather too? The experiments with rain-making and hurricane modification led to disastrous and unanticipated results; so the experiments were scrapped...except for those that were conducted covertly according to some sources. The recent cold weather of the last two years (especially in Europe) should be enough to serve as a warning that we don't have any idea what the hell we are doing by increasing greenhouse gas levels, and trying to counterbalance them artificially. This cold snap has come from something that climate modelers hadn't predicted before -- instead of the usual low pressure dome that hangs over the Arctic Ocean during the average winter, for the last two years, we are seeing Arctic high pressure cells that are blowing the cold air down on us. Now the climatologists and meteorologists are trying to figure out reasons why it is happening: Cold winter in a world of warming? Whatever the reason is, it should serve as a warning to attempts at geo-engineering and notions such as presented at the Copenhagen Climate Summit -- that everything will be okay as long as we limit the rise in global average temperatures to 2 degrees. The real story is that we may already be past a tipping point, and not even be aware of it yet. The only long term solution is to stop doing the crap we're doing now and be willing to sacrifice an economic system that is not going to be sustainable in the longterm anyway -- because of the decline in available cheap, easy-to-access oil.

Just because there are boneheads who are going to push forward with carbon offset strategies, doesn't mean that there is any value in it! From the article I posted previously, the problem is that outside of that narrow band around the equator, planting trees will increase heat, rather than reduce it: Professor Caldeira and his colleague Govindasamy Bala, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also in California, said that outside a thin band around the equator, forests trap more heat than they help to get rid of by reducing CO2 Their research comes in the wake of criticism from scientists of forestry schemes to offset carbon emissions, which they argue let consumers carry on polluting with a clear conscience. The schemes are big business; within three years, the market is expected to reach £300m. "North of 20 degrees [latitude] forests had a direct warming influence that more or less counterbalanced the cooling effect of carbon removal from the atmosphere," said Prof Caldeira. Past 50 degrees, forests warmed the Earth by an average of 0.8C. But in the tropics forests helped cool the planet by an average of 0.7C. Dr Bala explained that forest canopies, because they are relatively dark, absorbed most of the sun's rays heating falling on them. Grassland or snowfields, however, reflected more sun, keeping temperatures lower. Planting trees above 50 degrees latitude, such as in Siberia, could cover tundras normally blanketed in heat-reflecting snow.

Thanks! Sometimes I need to get away from discussing issues and politics because it ends up just going in circles after awhile. I'll try to stay connected here at some level; I don't want to leave all of the heavy lifting to you on what I believe is the most important issue facing the world today.

No, I suggested that people are different, and some people find comfort in what you call the "vengeful sky-god". I would rather not be wondering all the time what the divine surveillance camera in the sky thinks of me or what I'm doing; but this seems to work for some people, so why mock them for it? Because the claims such as those made here for example -- Viruses Of The Mind, need to be backed up with something more than the bad things that religious beliefs can do. Dawkins's essay does not address the positive aspects that many people take from religion; so it ends up as just a one-sided diatribe based on very flimsy hypothesis that all ideas are memes that are taught to us and can be unlearned or eradicated.

It sure sounded like that guy from the American Family Institute interpreted the investor of the talents as equivalent to modern day investors who score big on the capital markets. The New Testament doesn't provide any plans for how to create a government or a judicial system, but most of the verses in the old and new testaments consider "charity" to be an obligation, and not something you can choose to do, or not to do. And there are several examples of mandatory alms for the poor in the old testament. The problem with the modern right wing notion that aid to the poor should be dependent on whatever others are willing to give them, is that this puts those who are most destitute in a precarious situation during hard times....such as right now, when the economic downturn has seen a drop in charitable contributions and to food banks.

Yes, there are atheists such as physicist Victor Stenger, who believe they can prove that they can scientifically prove that God does not exist: God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. The problem is that if Stenger (and more recently: Stephen Hawking) can prove that natural theories can explain the origins of our Universe, that still doesn't prove there is no supernatural creative force lurking in the background. When it comes to scientific evidence, everyone is an agnostic on the God question. Believing in anything supernatural, that cannot be demonstrated with evidence that we can evaluate, takes a leap of faith. Believing in God, or some kind of creator probably comes from our natural intuitions of cause and effect. Believers follow their intuitions, while skeptics ask why God is so hidden from objective analysis. That's not to say that non-believers are going to be perfectly open-minded about this question. The more certain we are about our conclusions, the less willing we are to change them. In the end, I don't think it should matter whether we believe or don't believe; the key issue should be whether or not our beliefs are harmful or detrimental to ourselves and others. If they're not, live and let live! Even the humanist philosophical movement has its origins in Christian theology. This is surprising, since humanism upended the traditional Christian teaching of man being depraved by nature.

I was going to leave a comment here yesterday, but forgot about it; so I want to fix that now because it is a rare occasion that I agree with you, let alone understand the points you are making. You are correct here that the vast majority of the Bible (both old and new testament) is overwhelming in its condemnation of materialism, greed, and just plain being rich! Modern right wing, pro-business, capitalist Christianity that has changed the blessings to the billionaires, and the condemnations for the poor, has probably only come about because of the long Cold War against Communism. Before the 1930's, you would be hard pressed to find any prominent Christian minister, whether liberal or fundamentalist, who was a strong supporter of the rich and the free enterprize system. Generally, they would teach that continued focus on acquiring more wealth put a Christian businessman's soul at risk. Needless to say that this may have been a ruse to extract more money from them to support the church, but I want to get on to the Parable of the Talents, which seems to be the only arrow in the Christian capitalist quiver, if you follow the logic of the American Family Institute: Jesus was a capitalist. A rebuttal to AFI's logic in Religion Dispatches notes that the parable of the talents doesn't even portray the master as a good man in the first place: William Herzog, in his 1994 book, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as the Pedagogue of the Oppressed, sees this parable differently. We’re never told, for instance, that the master is someone we should emulate or admire. In fact, the “wicked and slothful” servant calls him a “hard man, reaping where you have not sown.” Instead of condemning the last servant as slothful, Herzog proposes that this servant is a “whistle blower”—someone who will not participate in creating wealth “at the costs of the poor,” and refuses to break the Hebrew laws against “usury” or charging interest (Leviticus 25:36-37 is one example). Instead of a parable about the blessings of capitalism, this is a parable about the wickedness of greed: According to Herzog’s reading, the point of the parable is to show how much it can cost for an underling to expose the truth about injustice in society. Indeed, this parable is the last Jesus delivers before his crucifixion, the ultimate consequence of his own speaking of truth to worldly power. In addition, just after this parable, Jesus says those who inherit the kingdom are not those with the most wealth, but those who serve “the least of these” by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Like many people have already said many times, the 66 books of the Bible make it the great book of multiple choice! Whatever crazy idea you've got, you kind find a bible verse to support it. That's why there is now estimated to be more than 33,000 different Christian sects and denominations in the world today. But when it comes to what Jesus has to say about economics, it's very little if anything! And this parable of the talents is about the only thing that Christian capitalists have to sanctify their theology of blessing the rich and condemning the poor.

I accidentally put the wrong comment here previously. All I want to add here is that you have to take that Zeitgeist movie with a grain of salt. The creators of that documentary never seem to get around to explaining how the three issues they discuss are actually connected to each other -- what does the origins of Christianity have to do with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the modern system of global banking? For some reason they have focused only on the similarities between the ancient Egyptian Trinity and the modern Christian version. What about the other influences that came from Sumeria, and the Persian religions for example? Maybe that would complicate things too much for them.

Thanks. Glad you appreciated it

Journalist John Cole wrote about the Bush Administration: The message is clear – you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter. If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted. In fact, the Obama Administration DOJ is prosecuting more whistleblowers than the Bush Admin. Under Bush, torture was official policy. It remains so under Obama who absolved CIA torturers, despite unequivocal evidence of their guilt. But leaking it risks criminal prosecution for revealing state secrets and endangering national security.

Even Robert Gates said that this story was blown all out of proportion. If anything, there were few Afghan collaborators endangered by that first Wikileaks dump of unredacted emails...what about the new releases? What is the excuse for treason besides the fact that they confirm the rumours of crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administrations? And as long as we're all bent out of shape about crimes against Afghan civilians, how about some attention for the scores of civilians who have been massacred by missile attacks based on dubious tip-offs of Taliban or Al Qaeda being at those locations.

The first problem I have here is that atheists don't have a core set of beliefs to think as a group in the first place. Atheism only describes non-belief, not a set of beliefs or principles. This puts the new atheist movement in a bind, because they are putting a lot of emphasis on organizing atheists around a non-belief. From my brief time in the atheist movement, I was finding that there were a lot of atheists I had almost nothing in common with aside from atheism....especially the fans of Ayn Rand. I find that I have more in common with religious believers who share the same causes I support, than I do with atheist libertarians.

Not all "Abrahamites" are trying to destroy secular, public education. And that's why the alarm bells go off when someone like Sam Harris specifically targets moderates as enablers for the fundamentalists. It appears that we are heading into difficult times on a lot of fronts; and fear and uncertainty are enough to increase the appeal of simple-minded fundamentalism for a lot people looking for something to put their trust in. Fundamentalists of all stripes are attacking moderates and progressives who they claim are diluting their "truth."

Most people know what's right, but whether they will actually attempt to do what's right is another matter entirely. If it taken seriously, the weekly church interlude can at least remind the people sitting in the pews that they should have other concerns than their own narrow self interests. It's one thing to say that ethics do not need to have a religious source; but another thing to say that no one needs the structure of a religion to behave ethically. And the other point I mentioned -- new atheist thinking that everyone should be a naturalist, and supernatural beliefs are unnecessary and harmful, do not have any evidence to support them. There is a lot of contrary evidence from developmental psychologists that most supernatural beliefs have their root origins in basic human intuitions of how we make sense of the world and things around us. Whether we continue to be superstitious and/or follow our intuitions -- or choose to find our truth through a process of rationalization, depends alot on our personality and other factors like education and who we have chosen as role models in life. It would be better if all fundamentalists (religious or naturalist) did not assume that everyone should think like they do and value the same things in life.

El Nino's and La Nina's have been happening in the Pacific for eons, and does not explain the recent trends, like melting glaciers and permafrost. The contradictory claims that global warming has stopped recently ( previous to a record year 2005, it was claimed to have stopped in 1998) are based on measurements restricted to land and atmospheric measurements -- and ignore the energy accumulating in the world's oceans, not to mention the heat energy being absorbed by polar glaciers which are melting at an increasing rate of speed as a result. The entire planet is accumulating heat due to an energy imbalance created by rising carbon and other greenhouse gases.