If only most religious people would use very simple Web searches when religious questions arose, organized religion would shrink at incredible rates. In the 1990s, freethinker Farrell Till predicted that religion would wither away with the growth of the Web. Though the rise of the Web has been a factor in turning people away from organized religion, there are still large numbers of people attending houses of worship, and so forth.
Many people reject important critiques of their culture because they have problems with the sources of those critiques. Many people commit the genetic fallacy by assuming that because a critic exists outside one’s group, that critic cannot be taken seriously. Or they will go further and commit the fallacy of poisoning the well by asserting that a person’s membership or former membership in a particular group makes that person hostile and untrustworthy where criticism of another group is concerned. Others will launch ad hominem or personal attacks against their critics.
Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University, is the author of the controversial book Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008.) Kennedy was moved to write the book because many African Americans had accused him of being a sellout. Often, he has been accused of being a sellout for not supporting positions that most African Americans support.
Theists continually maintain that the Big Bang theory makes no sense unless God could have produced the explosion. Indeed, The Buffalo News carried an article titled “God must have existed before the Big Bang,” by Zach Krajacic, in the December 21, 2014 issue (p. H2). Krajacic, of Lancaster, New York, is vice president of 107.5 FM the Station of the Cross Catholic Radio Network, headquartered in Williamsville, New York. He was reacting to Pope Francis’ recent comments that “The Big Bang, that today is considered to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the creative intervention of God. On the contrary, it requires it.”
Once upon a time, not so long ago, most people were civilized enough to consider it a no-brainer that torture is clearly wrong. Today, not so much. In light of media reports about the largely redacted CIA torture report, shockingly large numbers of US citizens have come out in support of the use of torture to supposedly save innocent American lives. While most of the information in the report was already available to the public, there was information made available about so-called “rectal feeding” of prisoners.
In early October 2014, PBS featured videos on their Website under the title “White people in Buffalo, NY talk about race.” The videos are part of “The Whiteness Project,” the brainchild of filmmaker Whitney Dow. Twenty-one Whites sit down to discuss what it is like to be White. Some speak of White pride, some complain that Whites face racial discrimination, some believe Blacks have a sense of entitlement, etc. Some people praised the project, others slammed it.
Victor Stenger was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. He spent a successful career as an elementary particle physicist and research scientist. He worked at the Department of Physics at the University of Hawaii. He retired in 2000 and became a professor _emeritus_. He was one of those rare scientists that had the courage to challenge absurd religious ideas, especially when they were in very clear conflict with firmly established scientific knowledge. He had no patience with scientists, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, that insisted that science and religion occupied separate non-overlapping magesteria (or NOMA), meaning, ultimately, that the two areas were concerned with addressing different kinds of questions. Stenger knew better. Indeed, Stenger insisted that theists made actual scientific claims, and insisted that scientists should put those claims to the test.
In light of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the violence that followed, Minister Louis Farrakhan has maintained that the Qur’an condones a “law for retaliation” in which people may resort to violence to avenge wrongs.
Many African Americans hate it when people refer to “nigger,” “nigga,” or “nigguh,” as the N-word. They believe that it is a word that must always be uttered without any hint of self-consciousness, shame or discomfort. It is an identity that many African Americans perversely embrace as a (highly tarnished) badge of honor. It has become so popular among fans of rap music that even some Whites, Latinos and Asians refer to each other as “nigga.”
An example of the latter kind of conspiracy theory can be found in West Africa, rooted in fears around the Ebola epidemic. People are afraid of being quarantined and they are afraid and distrustful of Western medical doctors. Indeed, many medical workers have had their throats cut and their corpses thrown into a ditch in Guinea. Moreover, fearful Africans have physically assaulted six volunteers of the Red Cross as they attempted to pick up the corpse of a person that had died from Ebola.
In the 1970s, there was a popular sociology book titled Blaming the Victim in which the author argued that the powers that be and their apologists blamed the victims of oppression for their plight. This notion remains popular among bleeding heart liberals, progressives and radicals. The thinking goes that historically oppressed peoples are absolutely powerless to substantially improve their condition, and that their only real hope for anything approaching genuine liberation must come from the powers that be. Most people embracing this view accuse most people advocating self-help strategies for the downtrodden of blaming the victim(s). Indeed, some progressives go so far as to proudly make such absurd statements as “I don’t believe in self-help.”
While it is great that young children learn in Sunday school that they should be good, they are also taught to be irrational. They are being taught that a possibly existent demon tempts us to do evil. In this way, they are being set up to accept many more irrational ideas as they mature. However, it seems to me that the cultivation of rationality is at least as important as the cultivation of morality. After all, as many philosophers have pointed out, we human beings are as dependent upon the use of our brains for survival as birds are dependent upon their wings, as cheetahs are dependent upon their speed, and as fish are dependent upon their ability to swim for their survival.
John W. Loftus, a former Christian minister, demolishes some the best defenses of theism imaginable. Like former preacher and superb debater Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) and many other former preachers, Loftus struggled with the fact that he was losing faith. However, he felt intellectually compelled and morally obligated to follow the evidence where it led.
Many people assume that “true” religion is mostly or completely benign. They believe that, though religionists are fallible, certain “sacred” texts are not. Many Christians believe that all of the teachings of Jesus were necessarily good and true, and many Muslims believe likewise about Muhammad. Religionists certainly have their role models, i.e. those individuals that represent the best that a particular religion has to offer. One such role model is Tony Dungy, the former Super Bowl-winning NFL coach and mentor to many former fallen NFL athletes, such as quarterback Michael Vick.
Of special interest to humanists is Molefi Kete Asante’s claim that Afrocentricity “is opposed to spookism, confusion, and superstition.” The use of the word “spookism” grabs attention, because leading Afrocentrist, non-theist and founder of Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga, once denounced spookism among Africans. Many critics derided him for it, and he has since stayed away from the term.
