Yesterday I posted a diary which discussed a P. Z. Myers article that denounced the overreaction to a college student stealing a communion wafer.

Today, Dr. Myers is receiving DEATH THREATS and is the target of a campaign to get him fired over writing this article

Religiously speaking, 2008 may seem like an upside-down political season.  John McCain doesn’t do God talk, Barack Obama does.  And the general consensus seems to be that even though Obama acknowledged that he went searching for a church only after he began organizing in Chicago, he genuinely means it.

That may seem upside-down because for seventeen years the U.S. has grown steadily more secular – and democrats pander to secularism, don't they?  The data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) from CUNY, first conducted in 1990 and repeated in 2001.  The study asked thousands of Americans "What is your religion?"  "No religion" came in third after "Catholic" and "Baptist" – and the number jumped from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.5 million in 2001.

So where’s the evidence of rising secularism since 2001?  Well, I interviewed one of researchers behind the survey – and he heartily believed that the trend had continued.  But I can’t really cite that with links here.

There is some citable evidence, however, in modern politics.

There's news on the intelligent design front. Ben Stein has written and narrates Expelled, a "documentary" coming out mid-April (maybe--it's been postponed before) about academics who propound ID and are expelled (get it?) from universities because academia is biased in favor of evolution and natural selection (like that’s a bad thing).

I'll use this introduction part to tell a little about myself and what I'll be writing about.

First of all, I have just recently joined the Kos, but have been a reader from quite some time now. I am a student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and was born and raised in the great state of Ohio as well. I was also raised a catholic, went to catholic school, but faced a turning point in my life when I realized that everything I was worshiping and following was completely, to put it gently, bogus.

So, to the point of my diaries. Not enough time is spent on this website talking about religion and its inherent consequences, so I've recently decided to join and do a daily (as that is all I am allowed) item on a religious story from that day, so here goes.

Richard Dawkins pays tribute to Newton's birthday, December 25th. With it, he wonders why the world pays such tribute to Jesus and a god who seemingly went out of his way to fulfill prophecy in a way that can only be accepted by faith. There are many reasons to question the veracity of Biblical literalism, and Dawkins lays it on:

The Sh*thead/Democracy Paradox

We are in serious trouble.  We as Americans and we as human beings have multiple problems on the horizon that will define life on planet Earth for many generations to come.  The major problems fall into these two major categories:

We are squandering blood and treasure on unwinnable and unjustifiable wars fueled more on hype and fear than substance.

The amount of oil left on the planet is finite and rapidly declining; we literally eat fossil fuels when we eat food grown with fertilizer; and CO2 causes global warming while particulates (pollution, which causes respiratory illness) prevent it.

If we are to avoid massive societal upset and avoid the massive economic depressions, famines, ethnic cleansing, and all-around die-offs that so many of our ancestors endured, we, as citizens of the United States, and as citizens of the planet, need to have a very sober and serious discussion about reshaping modern society.

If someone calls me a godless animal, I'm not the least bit offendend.  There is no god.  Humans are animals. Why are progressives so accepting of the delusional who believe in god? We should be crushing their beliefs with reason, not coddling them. The reality based community is not at Daily Kos, but here.

The 25% hanging on to Bush are blinded by religion. Religion needs to be humiliated before this country begins to see real, progressive change.

We pride ourselves on being part of the reality-based community.  Karl Rove's brand of slash and burn politics where truthiness^TM and gut instinct are more important than facts, data, and reason, is collapsing.  As Al Gore has so eloquently written about in his recent book "The Assault on Reason," appeals to fear in the mass media and our national discourse have coarsened the political climate.  Here's hoping that this community continues to take pride in living in the reality-based community and does the hard work necessary to argue its case from the evidence at hand.

SOME SAY that if we withdraw from Iraq, it will collapse in a bloody religious sectarian tribal genocide, and become a failed Taliban/Al Quaeda state.

SOME SAY that Iraq will self-stabilize if we withdraw, and turn against Al-Qaeda and drive all foreign elements out of the country in a paroxysm of newly found national pride.

The guarantee behind both statements seems to be certainty that the behavior of religion in an overstressed society is predictable. I find that a foolish notion.

However, I can see some good in all this, on a planetary scale. If there is a huge massacre, it will occur amongst the religious, whose accidental rendings of the   precious fabric of society are getting very annoying and dangerous to world peace.

I’m sick to death of the whole Imus flap, so I thought I’d offer up nice, uncontroversial topic for discussion: atheism.

A popular frame among religionists (and even some non-believers) of late is that the current batch of prominent atheists, particularly Richard Dawkins, are espousing a sort of "atheist fundamentalism."

I call bullshit.

Central to understanding how we communicate is to understand what we are communicating with, not just our mouths, our brains, our language, but the structures and processes that happen when we speak and think.

Of course we all know about ideas, and how they can stick in your head, and how they spread, and even Jesus talked about stony ground, and how his ideas could fail to take root.

But have you ever thought of ideas as being subject to Darwinian natural selection? Have you ever thought of ideas as things that literally live in your head? As a poster, have you wondered about why some ideas live on in dKos and some just slide away to oblivion?

PLEASE RECOMMEND TO HOLD FOR ALL TIME ZONES.

Yesterday I attended a debate in Westminster, headlined,

‘We’d be better off without religion.’

Arguing for the motion were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and A.C. Grayling (whose regular pieces on Comment is Free can be viewed here). Opposing them, bravely, were Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Prof. Nigel Spivey and the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.

"I have never really understood missionary zeal of any sort," wrote a commenter on the blog Cosmic Variance in reaction to the zeal of both religious proselytizers and Dr. Richard Dawkins, a geneticist and the author of The God Delusion, a book that attempts to demonstrate both that the existence of God is exceedingly improbable (for all intents and purposes, effectively impossible) and that religion, on balance, is bad for humanity and the individual.

The idea of missionary zeal can be basically defined as the determination to convince other people of your own point of view. Since missionary is a word loaded with religious associations, I think a better term could be found, but I've not been able to come up with one. The best I can manage is "activist" zeal, a term I will use in this post interchangeably with "missionary" zeal.

One of the frequent criticisms of those who do not believe in a God and are outspoken about their viewpoint, is that their beliefs are akin to fundamentalism of a different nature. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins defends himself against this charge in The God Delusion with a tale of two scientists. The first is an anecdote about a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when he was an undergraduate.

Courtesy of an old friend, a seriously thought provoking article regarding a form of spirituality I simply can't deny, because I've felt it deep in my bones on numerous occasions:

Pastor finds message in Grateful Dead music

Of course the lede drives me nuts...

It was a clear-cut decision back in the ’60s, either you loved the Grateful Dead, the bluesy folk band that got its start in San Francisco, or you went for the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion.

Do we always have to choose sides? Do you have to be deaf and blind to the creative wonders of Lennon, McCartney, et al, to thrill to the magic of Jerry and friends? But that's just the writer of the piece. The item that's interesting is the Pastor (if you don't mind calling a Unitarian Universalist that) who's using the Dead as the focus of a series of sermons he's giving and how this ties in to the whole "God is a delusion" idea. In short, he's hitting me in my soft spot and left me pondering.

Good morning everyone!  I am a huge fan of the online video revolution.   I found some good videos last night I want to share with the new DKos video sharing syntax thingy.

I know there is a great spirtual battle going on these days between the believer and the non-believer, with the booms, snapping, and screaming sounds of the front lines coming from the area of evolution.  I am one who has always maintained there is no direct conflict between evolution and the Bible.  Whatever side of the line you start on, I believe it is in everyone's best interests to educate themselves as completely as possible to the matter of the debate.  Know your enemy as they say, if you want to get that passionate about it.  I don't.

I’ve just gotten past the chapter in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he states his core argument for "Why There is Almost Certainly No God." The case Dawkins presents is extremely impressive, entirely readable, and powerfully uplifting. At the conclusion of the chapter he summarizes the key points succinctly and I will present them verbatim below the fold.

Now, that wasn't very hard to say, was it?

Yes, it was very hard. So hard that I don't think I've ever made such a simple and clear statement of my non-belief since my teens, and even then I'm not sure I ever told anyone. It is a statement of simple courage, for it comes with significant risk. Atheists are looked down upon to such an extent in our culture that it's very close to a real taboo. Despite that, I don't think I'm all that rare.

The first thing I want to make clear is that this statement, this profound admission, has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else's beliefs and should not be seen as an attack or a statement of intolerance. If I believe anything, I believe people need to figure out their beliefs for themselves and that it is a terrible crime to push anyone to accept a belief they don't feel or to tear away a belief that gives them something of perceived value.