Kentucky: Southern Bastion of Secularism...? Really?

The new issue of Skeptical Inquirer has a note about the findings of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (or ARIS). While the SI article was mainly interest in the survey is the overall increase in non-religious folk, something else caught my eye. Something surprising...

According to the Trinity College researchers that conducted the ARIS, Kentucky is the most secular state in the south! 13% of Kentuckians responding to ARIS in 2008 stated that they either had no religious preference or considered themselves to be agnostic/atheist. That's still well below states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and even Ohio (34, 29, and 17% respectively), but it also indicates that the number of secularists in Kentucky has nearly doubled since 1990 and is now nearly equal to the number of Catholics. I guess now I can quit bellyaching about how weird it is to be an atheist in Kentucky...which in a way is kind of a pity because that's one of my go-to topics.

Anyone interested in checking out the entire report on ARIS can do so here.

Bones of Contention...

Outspoken atheists are occasionally accused of “jamming atheism down other people’s throats”. The sheer fact that we aren’t cowering in the shadows, afraid to stand up to the all the righteous religious folk running around out there, just sticks in some people’s craw. We stand accused of “intellectual snobbery”, “dogmatic naturalism”, and, of course, all kinds of throat-jamming. There’s a certain irony to all this that isn’t lost on us, but it quickly becomes tiresome and the specific accusations need to be addressed.

A commenter recently left a rather long post elsewhere on this blog regarding the “Out Campaign” logo in my sidebar. The Out Campaign is a campaign being run by Richard Dawkins to help atheists find the courage to publicly acknowledge their rejection of religion. Would that there had been such a campaign when I was in high school, to give me a bit of moral support in the face of the jeers of my classmates. (I caught a lot of flak in school for being an atheist. I won’t pretend that it was from everyone, or even from a majority of people, but there was a large handful of folks who took every opportunity to give me a hard time about it.)

To quote the Out Campaign site, it’s all about

“[allowing] individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.”

Naturally this is considered throat-jamming of the highest order. There’s some beautiful irony to this as our dear commenter is Garret from over on Ray’s blog. Ray, as you’ll recall, is all about street preaching, evangelizing, and blindsiding random folks with threats of hell if they don’t pray to his fearsome God Yahweh. I know of no atheist equivalent to this. I have never, nor has, to my knowledge, anyone else, set upon a believer on the street, harshly admonishing him that his religion isn’t real and that no he won’t go to hell when he dies ("There'll be no hellfire for you, and you'd better learn to accept that, damn it!") . That being said, I’m more than willing to do such things, with what I hope is a bit more nuance, on internet discussion boards – after all, if people didn’t want to discuss things they wouldn’t be there.

There are a number of fearsome stereotypes about atheists. We’re called amoral monsters, depraved sex fiends, and minions of the devil. The current president has even gone so far as to say that atheists should be considered neither citizens nor patriots. And most of all, whenever we contest these claims, whenever we talk about our atheism without apologizing for it, we’re accused of jamming atheism down everyone’s throats.

One thing that is of particular concern to me is that a lot of Christians who feel threatened by organized atheism seem to confuse the two concepts of secularism and atheism. I don’t know that this is the case with Garret, but it crops up enough that I’ll address it here anyway. When atheists such as myself talk about things like removing “in God we trust” from our currency (added 1865 for coins, 1957 for bills), deleting the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance (added 1954), or teaching empirically based rather than religiously based science in public schools, we aren’t talking about an atheist state, we’re talking about a secular state.

A secular government exists to, among other things, secure the freedom of conscience of all of its constituents. Specific endorsements of Christianity (in the United States) or any other religion (Islam in Iran, for example) undermine that principle. Recall, for example that the only mention of religion in our Constitution (I keep a copy in my jacket at all times) is Article VI, section 3 and explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” It may also be worth noting that the addition of God to the Pledge has, very literally, divided “one nation, indivisible”. A secular government provides for “equal separation”*, wherein neither the religious or the nonreligious are favored over the other. The desire here is for everyone to be protected equally, rather than having some folks held up as "more equal than others". There is no desire to place the religious at a disadvantage, but there is considerable desire on the part of atheists to pull religion down from its privileged place and put it on equal footing with the rest of us.

In any event, Garret’s two main concerns are not really so much about the Out Campaign itself but assumptions that he feels it unfairly makes. I will quote him in full and address each in turn:

“The claim to intellectual superiority because of rejection of supernatural claims such as miracles. This is an entirely metaphysical, philosophical construct, a BELIEF that is based on a "lack of evidence", and is a representation of what exactly constitutes knowledge, and how we come to know things.
This is not the only possible legitimate metaphysical reality, though it is presented as such. As an educated person, I realize that I COULD be deluded - that in fact (atheists) might have it right. This should always be an option on the table, for civility to remain. The claim to all logic, reason and knowledge fall within multiple worldviews and philosophies, and is a debatable reality. To not acknowledge this is intellectual snobbery, and intellectual suicide. One can claim that they are right, but to add that they are intellectually superior is another thing altogether.”

As usual, there’s an extent of course to which Garret is right. As the old canard goes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Arguments from silence are never definitive. However, when it comes to the issue of the supernatural, this argument from silence becomes somewhat stronger because the silence is just deafening! Ghosts, miracles, the afterlife – to accept these things leads to assumptions about the world that can be empirically tested. Are there ghosts? Then we should be able to measure, interact with, or detect them. Is there an afterlife? Then NDE reports shouldn’t correspond so neatly with the physiological reactions of the brain to oxygen deprivation with occasional details of the individual’s religion training (regardless of what religion it is) shoe-horned in. Miracles? Should there not be miracles in modern times, measurable by modern means and flying in the face of understood natural mechanisms? What of “miracles” experienced by members of other religions (recall that Garret is speaking for Evangelical Christianity, not just general theism)?

It is not that people are not looking for evidence of these things – they are. Some people dedicate their entire professional lives to the search for ghosts or the verification of miracles. Yet always they fail. There is specific evidence that we would expect to find if such supernatural claims are true, but we do not. That is a powerful argument from silence. Sure, at some point in the future some supernatural phenomenon may be verified – something that so defies the current understanding of science that it forces a radical restructuring of our view of the world. When and if that day comes, I will be forced to seriously reevaluate my position on a lot of things.

That being said, those of us who prefer an experience-based worldview simply don’t have the evidence in front of us to decide in the way that our friend Garret has decided for himself. He, I can only imagine, would not buy into the contention that there is a magical purple unicorn flying invisibly around the solar system just outside of Pluto’s orbit. It's a patently ludicrous statement, but it cannot be disproved. Someone making that assertion would cause him, at the most, the slightest moment of pause. Why then, should we be compelled by his purple unicorn?

As for claims of “intellectual superiority”, I would note that it is a methodologically materialist worldview that yields useful results. As many of you know, I live in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the greatest sources of pride for my city is that it was the site of the country’s first hand transplant. A man named Matthew Scott lost his left hand to an M80 firecracker in 1985. 14 years later he received a transplanted hand from a cadaver and now has a functional left hand. Pictures of Mr. Scott at his 8-year check up are available here. It was methodologically materialistic science that gave this man a new hand, not metaphysics, spirituality, or miracles. In terms of real world results, it is naturalism that works, not supernaturalism. Another example, one that I am quick to point out, is that of Francis Collins, project leader of the Human Genome Project. Collins is an Evangelical Christian and devout believer in Yahweh (He is very impressed by the anthropic argument.), but his considerable contributions to the field of human genetics come entirely from his use of methodologically naturalist research strategies.

No one, to my knowledge, makes the claim that atheists are smarter than theists simply because we are atheists. (There is statistical correlation between level of education and non-belief in deities, but both of these things primarily correspond to socioeconomic class. That is to say that they often occur together because they both share an underlying factor, but they do not necessarily flow from one another.) Indeed, some theists, such as Dr. Collins, are eminent members of their fields. To pretend that religiosity is tantamount to stupidity is, in itself, asinine. We sometimes speak, however, of the irrationality of religious belief. Though he would disagree with that choice of terms, I suspect Garret would agree in spirit to what that means.

He believes, he has faith, in his deity despite the lack of concrete evidence. His god either lurks behind the natural laws that run the universe or dwells entirely outside them, never to be quantified by empirical methods. Nonetheless, he believes, not through evidence, but through faith. It sounds almost noble in some strange way, and it is something that most religions ask of their followers. Yet when we aren’t talking about religion, when we’re talking about purple unicorns and Sasquatch and faeries (or even science-ish things like orgone energy, n-rays, and Velikovskian cosmologyl), such claims of “faith” are quickly seen as irrational. Faith is inherently irrational. There’s an extent to which that’s the point.

His second concern is this:

“The claim that Christianity is illogical. It is perfectly logical IF the claims of supernatural in it are true, then Christianity logically follows from it! It is logical within itself and its own metaphysic, as it were. Even if one were to disagree- if you understand it properly and are able to understand the metaphysical concept that undergirds it, then you can see its logic.”

I understand what he’s saying here: Christianity makes perfect sense if the supernatural claims upon which it is based turn out to be true. Well…yeah. He’s 100% right on that one. He was, however, quite right in capitalizing his “if”. It’s an enormous if. There’s also an issue here that he doesn’t confront. I assume that it’s obvious to him and he simply left it out for the sake of brevity, but I’ll go ahead and state it here: ANY religion is logical if the supernatural claims under-girding it are true. That goes for Christianity. It goes for Judaism. It goes for Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, the Cult of Cthulhu, and Dungeons and Dragons. He’s right to say that “if it’s right, it’s right”, but there’s a limit to how far that logic can take us in a discussion.

On the other hand (and I run the risk of becoming snarky here), it must be admitted that there are doctrines of Christianity that, on their face, are quite paradoxical. The Triune Godhead, for instance. God is Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and all of these are simultaneously parts of a whole and yet also distinct. (Like Voltron.) This is a strange act of mental gymnastics – preserving monotheism while still claiming full divinity for Jesus and making reference to an autonomous “Holy Spirit” that acts in hearts of the people. Clearly it is understandable that proto-orthodox Christians endured long periods of controversy over just how many gods there were and do what extent Jesus was divine. Likewise the very idea of the Passion of Christ as redemption for humanity’s sins makes little sense on its face, given the Triune Godhead. Jesus is simultaneously both God and God’s son, ergo God sent Himself to earth to suffer horribly in order to redeem humanity in His own eyes and move Himself to mercifully stay His own hand…? I could go on – theodicy, free will, and numerous other issues have confounded theologians since antiquity. The internal logic of Christianity is therefore obviously not self-evident even to people who spend their entire lives discoursing on it.

Again, Garret is right that if it’s all true, Christianity makes sense, but that “if” is enormous.

Well, I think I've said I need all I have to say at the moment. I suspect my friend will have numerous objections to the issues I've addressed here. Notably I anticipate that he will claim that he does indeed have solid evidence for the veracity of Christian doctrine, though I would be quick to remind him that the approx. 3.9 billion non-Christians on the planet, the vast majority of them belonging to some other religion, also feel that their faith is fully justified, and he needs to address their contentions as well as my own.

* See this excellent book by the late Dr. Paul J. Weber, one of my mentors. We didn't agree theologically - he was a believer and former Jesuit - but his Constitutional analysis of church-state separation is tight.

Making a difference without all the preaching...

I consider it a mark of shame that religious folk donate more money to charity than secularists. That's one of the reasons I bug the hell out of everyone who will listen about donating money to Donors Choose. I've recently been looking into other secular charities that have a bit of a broader scope. That being said, a lot of secular charities seem to exist to perpetuate secularism rather than actually render services to those in need, which is frankly one of the concerns I have about religious charities. I want my money to go to people in need, not to proselytize about belief-systems - even if its one I agree with.

Sure, I agree in general with groups like the ACLU, but there's an extent to which I'd rather fund direct services like food and educational aid rather than give money to fight over esoteric, if often important, legal issues. With that in mind, here's a list of secular charities that do provide direct services that may be worth looking into for folks who want to donate some of their resources to the less fortunate.

UNICEF - The United Nations World Children's Fund. UNICEF provides everything from food and vaccinations to educational services and is also at the forefront of the battle against HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Second Harvest - Second Harvest is the largest food bank in the United States and provides emergency food aid to disaster victims throughout the USA and Canada.

S.H.A.R.E. - Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Efforts. Paul Kurtz's secular charitable organzation, S.H.A.R.E., provides emergency aid to disaster victims and helped to alleviate some of the suffering doled out by the recent Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Some of you may recognize Kurtz as the found of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

I'll continue to post info on other secular charities as I get the chance to do so.

Gone shoppin'...

I ordered a couple of shirts at Cafe Press recently and they showed up today. I'm slowly starting to experiment with just how much secularism I can get away with wearing on my sleeve at work. Most of the coworkers with whom I am closely involved know how I feel about stuff and have basically been nothing but cool about it, which is actually a bit surprisin' to me since my three best friends (the lot of them completely awesome) at work are a.) a guy who plans on going out west and preaching the Bible to children after retirement, b.) an ex-Mormon, currently non-denominational ghost-hunter, and c.) a practicing, if low key, Evangelical with a degree in Biblical studies. (Just goes to the show the obvious, if often forgotten, fact that any group of people can get along if they see each other as people first.)

I've had a bit more sideways glances and grumblings from some folks in the other department, most notably one with a large and collection angel stuff cluttering up the shared desk in the Adult Community Empowerment Services section, but really nothing that was at all bothersome. In all honesty the fact is that I live in the south and therefore have some concerns about outwardly expressing my non-belief. I'm certainly not in the majority around here and Kentucky is not necessarily known for its civil and measured discourse about religion.

In any event, I picked up a couple of shirts that should hopefully get some conversations going here and there. This one is getting worn in tomorrow, while this fellow here is probably going with me Friday. Honestly my main concern isn't my coworkers getting offended, because I don't think they will and, even if they do, enough of them wear religious shirts and paraphernalia that I can make a decent equal treatment argument. No, if anything I'm concerned that some of my (mentally disabled) clients might get upset and/or sic their caregivers on me. Such things have happened before to other trainers over other matters.

I teach a social skills/current events class on Friday and I've considered trying to use the "Imagine No Religion" shirt as a springboard for discussion, but it really isn't my place to proselytize secularism to the mentally handicapped. One thing that has consistently surprised me about working with the developmentally disabled though is the ability of some of them to summon up pretty decent critical thinking skills (all things considered), so I think some of them could handle at least a world religions discussion, but there's a couple whom I would expect to get upset. I noted one Christmas season that we have no reason whatsoever to think that the historical Jesus* was born on December 25th (Seriously, one of them asked how we knew what his birthday was and I replied that we don't.) and ended up with one of the higher functioning ones screaming at me that "It's baby Jesus' birthday!"

*I'm willing to grant that there was a historical Jewish prophet named Jesus who preached an ascetic, apocalyptic message and was eventually crucified. See this book and related works for a good argument that this was case.

When life gives you Lemons

Once upon a time in the a faraway land called "Pennsylvania", in a faraway time called 1968, there was a legal dispute that ultimately evolved into the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Lemon vs. Kurtzman. At issue was the question of whether or not the Superintendent of Public Instruction could be allowed by the state to reimburse private schools for textbooks, teacher salaries, etc. using public tax money. For example, would the state of Pennsylvania be allowed/obligated to reimburse a Catholic school for its textbook expenses, or would that violate the Constitution's Establishment Clause?

In 1971 the Supreme Court, headed by conservative Nixon appointee Warren E. Burger, struck down the Pennsylvania law and established what is now called the Lemon Test as a shorthand method of examining whether or not a government action may be in violation of the Establishment Clause. In short, it states that in order to be in keeping with the First Amendment, a law must meet three criteria.

1.) It must serve some clear secular purpose.
2.) It must neither advance nor hinder religion.
3.) It must not result in excessive government entanglement with religion.


The Lemon Test has sadly been used only inconsistently by the Court in the intervening years, but it is still worth using by us lay folk who want to examine the goings on of our increasingly theocratic American government. For example, let's use the Lemon Test to look at Tuesday's House Resolution 847. Now, I'll grant that both Congress and the various state legislatures pass all kinds of silly resolutions stating that this, that, or the other is awesome. However, given the current climate of "culture war" and religious fervor going on in the U.S. today, H.R. 847 poses a special threat to the legacy of government secularism that our founders intended. Anyway, on to the test:

1.) Does H.R. 847 serve a clear secular purpose? Hardly. Heck, most of these generic resolutions in support of Christmas or Karate or Ultraman or whatever else hardly serve a clear purpose of any kind. 847 compounds its general meaninglessness with explicit statements in support of Christian Theology.

2.) Does H.R. 847 advance or hinder a religion? Seems like. Numerous conservative sites are already touting it as an endorsement of a Christian America.

3.) Does H.R. 847 excessively entangle the government with religion? Almost certainly. By explicitly stating, for example, the government's gratitude to Jesus for dying for our sins, the government is taking on a priestly tone that is far from consistent with the views of the founders.

So, clearly, H.R. 847 fails the First Amendment test that was first established by a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court. Yet it's being met with adulation rather than abject horror by most of our populace. The founders would be appalled.