The parents belong to the Followers of Christ Church, which has long history of child deaths from lack of medical care. The judge said that the parents committed a crime that "was a product of an unwillingness to respect the boundaries of freedom of expression."

If religions would at least practice the "right to life" they proclaim, these crimes shouldn't happen. Many religions often encourage believers to impose their view of what god wants on others, even to the point of murder. Fortunately, civilized societies try to protect the right to life and liberty of all, even those deemed by a religion as unworthy to live.

Reports on this sentence are at the Pew Forum and OregonLive.

In a previous post, I described how religion has perennially tried to force accommodation upon science . Science uses empirical experiment while religion uses submissive conviction. However, that very difference gives religion the option of staying out of science’s way. That “pacifist accommodationism” might not be such a bad thing.

Science must never compromise its empirical methodology: postulate hidden things responsible for nature's ways, pursue new observations that can test hypotheses, and permit bad predictions to damage theoretical credibility. Modern religion has noticed the first stage: science postulates hidden things responsible for nature's ways. Some theologians are tempted to force accommodation with science at this methodological starting point: Religion postulates hidden things, too! 

Yes, religion postulates hidden things behind nature's evident ways. Religion postulates REALLY hidden things -- not like tiny atoms or distant black holes -- but utterly supernatural things. All the same, scientific methodology seeks "best explanations" and perhaps supernatural things (a god, etc.) can supply better explanations. However, religion's inherent instinct for submissive conviction betrays it. It is too easy to "see" evidence supporting only your favored theory, or to "see" evidence unexplainable by the competition as supporting evidence for your favored theory. Intelligent Design and theistic evolutionism fall into these two traps with enthusiasm. Science uses safeguards against these temptations. For example, a community of scientists will pass judgment on whether evidence supports one theory or another (or neither). And a theory needs to pass fresh tests against new evidence rather than just rest easy with support from old evidence. Notoriously, religions don't like to be asked for specific predictions that a neutral public can test for confirmation. (But I do hope that fundamentalists can share a laugh with atheists in 2013.)

Religion just can't resist submissive conviction. This instinct is also obvious in the sort of hidden entities that religions offer as "explanations". Religions typically resort to postulating unpredictable willful agents to explain particular extraordinary events (deeds done by fairy sprites, evil spirits, thunder gods, immortal souls, devils and angels, creator gods, etc.). No matter what happens, religion stays safe by putting responsibility on a deity who could do just about anything at anytime. Could a God destroy a city? Sure! Could a God tweak a law of nature? Why not!

There is a “smart” match here, even in religion, in a manner of speaking: if you need an explanation for some quite surprising singular event, that doesn't seem to part of any familiar pattern at all, our intuition suggests that an agent, a living mind, is responsible. The point of being an agent is that an agent has an unpredictable mind and will of its own. Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett, among others, suggest that humans instinctively try to spot agents behind peculiar and otherwise unpredictable events. As summarized here , an over-active agency detection instinct may have gradually inflated into stories about gods with supernatural powers who unpredictably interact with nature and people. Religion can offer huge “explanatory power” for otherwise completely mysterious and uncontrollable (and distressing) events. 

By contrast, science does not prioritize agents as fine explanations. The psychological and social sciences deal with agents, of course, but scientific method itself prefers trying non-agents first. Science prefers postulating things that are more habitual and predictable, because that’s what the logic of testing hypotheses requires: to rigorously test a hypothesis, specific predictions must be made, so postulated entities must behave the same way under set conditions. That is why science has an innate preference for habitual impersonal forces in explanations. Each atom has its characteristic properties and mathematical habits, and atoms can’t just decide to misbehave one day. 

Religion favors postulating unpredictable willful agents to explain particular extraordinary events. Science, by contrast, favors postulating habitual impersonal forces to explain regular patterns in nature. Religion should admit that it really isn’t made for undergoing scientific methodology. On the other hand, religion will never run out of extraordinary events to try to explain. Religion can stay busy for a very long time if it retreats away from science.

Religious people who realize that religion and science have very different jobs are better off in the long run than advocates of Intelligent Design or theistic evolutionism. A “pacifist accommodation” instead says: let religion continue to handle explaining truly mysterious singular events of cosmic proportions (the universe’s “design”, or the universe’s creation in the first place). This pacifist accommodation will never have to worry about running out of work. Science does a great job of predicting results from initial conditions, and can predict those initial conditions from prior initial conditions, but the question of “why just those peculiar initial conditions” can always be asked at any stage of science. 

The fact that pacifist accommodation can keep religion busy forever adds nothing to its reasonableness, of course. Deism deserves as much skepticism as theism. I would point out that at least pacifist accommodation has a better grasp of scientific method and a higher respect for science than militant anti-science fundamentalists.  But this essay went into details about science and religion in order to set up these questions for the non-religious to try to answer:

(1) If a scientist happens to be a religious person who accepts pacifist accommodation, does this scientist anywhere betray the principles or spirit of science?

(2) If a religious person uses pacifist accommodation to convert a anti-science fundamentalist into a fellow accommodationist, should friends of science complain about such tactics?

(3) If a non-religious person mentions pacifist accommodationism as a preferred alternative to anti-science fundamentalism, should other atheists complain about some betrayal of atheism?

These lectures, by Alan Guth and Lawrence Krauss, explain how cosmologists now understand the natural origin of the universe, and why the universe can come from 'nothing' and still amount to nothing.

Guth and Krauss also suggest how science can deal with questions about the universe's "design". This new understanding of our universe radically changes debates with religion.

"Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse?" by Alan Guth, MIT.Guth

Guth part one:

Guth part two:

"A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, at AAI 2009

The Pew website offers this summary:

"Americans ages 18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans. Fewer young adults belong to any particular faith than older people do today. They also are less likely to be affiliated than their parents' and grandparents' generations were when they were young. Fully one-in-four members of the Millennial generation - so called because they were born after 1980 and began to come of age around the year 2000 - are unaffiliated with any particular faith. Indeed, Millennials are significantly more unaffiliated than members of Generation X were at a comparable point in their life cycle (20% in the late 1990s) and twice as unaffiliated as Baby Boomers were as young adults (13% in the late 1970s). Young adults also attend religious services less often than older Americans today. And compared with their elders today, fewer young people say that religion is very important in their lives."

What can this data on young adults say about the future of Humanism? Millennials are helping push the overall demographic trends towards more secularization: religion is less important to them, less church attendance, less prayer, less fundamentalist, less confidence that god exists, more pluralistic and open-minded.

All the same, the fact that there are fewer Millennials in churches doesn't mean that they don't like authoritative institutions in general. As the Pew website notes,

"Surveys also show that large numbers of young adults (67%) say they would prefer a bigger government that provides more services over a smaller government that provides fewer services."

The Pew website adds,

"more than three-quarters of young adults (76%) agree that there are absolute standards of right and wrong, a level nearly identical to that among older age groups (77%). More than half of young adults (55%) say that houses of worship should speak out on social and political matters, slightly more than say this among older adults (49%). And 45% of young adults say that the government should do more to protect morality in society, compared with 39% of people ages 30 and older."

Millennials still want to join institutions and they like moralistic institutions (see more data on their social and political attitudes here ). They will punish and flee from institutions suffering from moral hypocrisy or harboring unfair prejudices.

Their combination of confidence in institutions, demanding that institutions meet high moral standards, and greater pluralism are all excellent signs that the Millennials will help push the overall trend in America towards inclusive ethical humanism and away from segregational denominational orthodoxy. Furthermore, there are good signs that Millennials will gravitate towards strong institutions advancing ethical humanism.
 
From other surveys, we also see how Millennials are very peer-oriented, prefer group effort over lone effort, and they regard morality as what promotes civic welfare (the opposite of the Boomer notion of morality as what promotes personal enlightenment when Boomers were younger).
 
This means that Millennials are now seeking big strong institutions advancing inclusive civic welfare and demanding unified group effort.
 
By the way, American has seen this sort of generation before -- these trends were all in place by 1925 with the young GI generation, the last generation America has seen with such a combination of civic morality and secularity. And when that generation decided to join institutions in young adulthood in the 30s and 40s, they swelled the ranks of the Unitarian/Universalist and Humanistic societies just constructed by the next-older generation of progressive pragmatists .
 
We are now poised right on the cusp of the same generational line-up that produced the rise of 20th century Humanism about 80 years ago. As predicted almost 20 years ago , Boomers have now refocused from their inner perfection to conforming society to their moral vision. A pragmatic and progressive X-er generation is settling into an mid-life admission that it time to rebuild institutions rather than disdain them. The Millennials are fast deciding which civic institutions deserve their allegiance and vast energy. Millennials will go to churches -- churches that are more humanistic. And churches have already noticed the generational differences .

If Humanism wants to be more appealing to many Millennials, these propositions are recommended by the demographic data. (These propositions do NOT equally well apply to "secular humanism" and NOTHING should be interpreted as any recommended policy or agenda for the Center for Inquiry, which represents diverse interests.)
 
1. Humanism has to stop worrying whether it looks religious or churchly, since it must be supportive, principled, communitarian, and offer group projects for the social good.
 
2. Humanism should have plausible answers for the big metaphysical, existential, and ethical questions.

3. Humanism cannot merely encourage nonbelievers to be content to be privately stoic in a personal disdain for religion.
 
4. Humanism must be poised to join alliances with religious groups where common moral and civic aims can be advanced by group effort.
 
5. Humanism should continue to criticize religion where it deserves moral rebuke, but it must be prepared to defend its own moral and political vision.
 
6. Humanism will be rewarded for its tolerance of pluralism and diversity, so long as it also avoids internal contradiction and hypocrisy.

7. Humanism cannot afford the risk of appearing angry, prejudiced, intolerant, divisive, and more interested in tearing down than building up.
 
8. Humanism cannot afford the risk of forming coalitions only with other anti-religious organizations simply to celebrate being "smarter" than religious people.

9. Humanism cannot afford the risk of forming coalitions only with other anti-religious organizations simply to fight anything that religious organizations want.

It’s a familiar phrase. 300 hundred years ago, friends of democracy were taunted by monarchists forecasting how the confused masses would hate freedom and crawl back to God’s enthroned kings. Monarchists argued that a society must have a “decider”, a final authority to silence debate with a loud dictate. No final decider, no civil order. Dictatorial religion aligned with dictatorial politics: the Sky King supported the human king. 

This monarchist argument was completely debunked by some bold experience. In the democratic experience, there is no final decider. There are only temporary majority compromises, formed by long debate and reconciliation. Swirling, ever-changing coalitions gain and lose power in rhythmic pulses of history. Democracy is a political pluralism of many voices, replacing lone dictators. 

Democracies came to understand how people don’t need a king -- people can come to trust their collective wisdom, frail and faulty as it is. Monarchists still complained that a democracy really just consists of the traditional laws and rights after subtracting the king. That thin monarchist argument accused democracy of a self-confessed inadequacy: democracy still relies on belief in a king, since it just deletes the king. But that is a ridiculous argument, and there is no inadequacy. The founders of America admired the rights of British citizenship, and judged that those rights were better protected under a democracy. It is absurd to argue that admiration for rights implies any need for a king -- quite the opposite is true! And then America advanced more inclusive rights in the centuries since. Today, we can believe that all people are equal without having any king around to dictate to us.

America’s founders exercised their “secular” reason -- they judged that they valued their rights more than kings, and they stopped listening to preachers threatening hell for evicting God’s kings. And they valued their rights because they were rational -- wise reason itself can judge, without any scriptural warrant, that it is better to live with rights than without them. (And democratic rights are nowhere endorsed in the Bible, anyways.) America’s founders were suspicious of all kings, earthly or heavenly. That suspicion has only spread, even to most religious people, who prefer both religious pluralism and political pluralism. People like choosing their own church, their political party, and their elected officials. It’s about freedom, remember?

Of course, secular democracy has worked, and the nonreligious have little trouble conforming to common moral decencies and civil laws. In fact, more religious societies tend to be more immoral and uncivil. The eminent researcher Gregory Paul has tracked the positive correlations between greater social disfunction and higher religious belief for years. The moral argument that we need God to be good is thoroughly refuted. As I’ve explained before, it’s really no mystery how nonreligious people are good citizens .

Secular reason has guided America’s progress towards greater freedoms. Secular reason is wise judgment on the best methods for realizing the ideals of freedom. The ideals of freedom are inherited from past experience, to be sure. Concrete protections of freedom ensured in any one era are but little steps beyond the last generation’s reach. But these are real human steps advancing vague human ideals. Secular judgment (no dictator) on realizing freedom (for humans) is precisely the quest for humanistic progress. Secular reason is never reason in a vacuum with nothing to think about. Secular reason thinks about our inherited values, how to advance them, and where necessary to compromise and readjust them. No values are sacred and beyond reevaluation. Everything is up for empirical judgment. While empirical and concrete, secular reason is NOT simply scientific reason (as some rashly suppose), NOR is it any nihilistic denial of values. Secular reason does not ignore scientific knowledge, but it is not a department of natural science. Rather, secular reason is humanistic ethics becoming scientific in this sense: we must take an evidence-based and experimental approach to our inherited values, asking whether social structures in fact advance human freedoms (and changing them when they fail). Democracy, when it works well, is the political realization of this scientific ethics. 

The notion that there are no final dictates over values still frightens some people. Friends of dictatorial religion don’t advocate political monarchy anymore, but they still advocate moral theocracy. Dictatorial religion doesn’t like too much freedom, wishing that God’s moral rules were our civil laws. We now hear the same sort of thin argument: Secular reason must confess inadequacy, because it thinks about values inherited from more religious times. You can read how Stanley Fish is the latest to be fooled by this thin argument , perhaps because he overlooks humanism's secular progress. It’s a thin argument indeed, and just as flawed as the monarchist argument. We admire our shared human values, we use democracy to advance them, and we don't need a Sky King anymore. Besides, the days are long past when religion spoke with a clear and consistent voice. After the vague ethical platitudes, religious people deeply disagree over concrete moral issues as much as anybody. Democracy is the only option left, and friends of democracy try to make it more secularly reasonable and more humanistically ethical.

Secular reason and humanist ethics are well-designed for productive cooperation. Humanist ethics has many debts of inheritance from past and present civilizations all over the world. However, humanist ethics and its use of secular reason liberates the human quest for freedom from any particular religion, and it transcends religion’s dependence on the supernatural. The time of dictators must be put to rest in the history books. The many voices of humanity are not to feared, but celebrated.

Religious people can be racist, and that's not news.  But are they more likely to be racist than non-religious people?  A new study now confirms this hypothesis.

The February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review has published a meta-analysis of 55 independent studies conducted in the United States which considers surveys of over 20,000 mostly Christian participants. Religious congregations generally express more prejudiced views towards other races. Furthermore, the more devout the community, the greater the racism. 

We also read this additional fascinating conclusion from the authors' summary:

"The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant."

Is this a surprising result? Humanistic values, such as equal dignity and rights for all humanity, are often professed by many Christian denominations. But does this preaching make any difference to their members' actual prejudices? Apparently not!

This study finds that a denomination's demand for devout allegiance to its Christian creed overrides any humanistic message. By demanding such devotion to one specific and dogmatic Christianity, a denomination only encourages its members to view outsiders as less worthy.

--- Let's read that conclusion again: "Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant." Why would religious agnostics be more humanistic and less racist?

Religious agnostics would be people who combine a religious/spiritual attitude in living life with a humble admission that they don't know if their approach is the only right way. Religious agnostics are pluralistic -- they have no problem admiring how different people can enjoy different religious paths. And it is precisely this lack of dogmatism which permits humanistic values to shine through. Religious exclusivism defeats humanistic universalism, but religious pluralism enhances humanistic universalism.

The message to humanists? It's not enough to ask religious people to be more humanistic. Humanists must ask for less dogmatism across the board -- if Christians would be more humanistic, they must surrender their conviction that their way is the only way. Humanism does not eliminate reverence, but it asks for a higher perspective -- something like "reverence for reverence." Revere your own religious path, but also respect and revere others' ability to devote themselves to a higher good in their own way. It is precisely that kind of universal respect for all paths which can reduce prejudice.

As for the nonreligious, this "reverence for reverence" is essential to humanism in the first place. We should all be able to create our own way of relating to the wide universe as we learn to understand it. And the humanistic ideal is that everyone can do this together in mutual respect and peace.

Which came first, religion or morality? Listening to religious people, you'd hear how people need religion's instructions, or else we'd be morally clueless. God comes first, then God's Law comes to humanity, and only then can people be good.

But there's no good evidence for any part of this fable. Such a religious fable itself is a relatively recent creation, reduplicated in many forms all over the world. Different religions talk about all manner of strange supernatural agents perpetually obsessed with correct human conduct. (You'd think any actual self-respecting deity would have more interesting things to do.) Yet basic morality itself is remarkably consistent across human societies. Long before humans had language complex enough to spin stories of heaven, our distant ancestors had to deal with their own problems on earth.

We are a highly social species, using social structures like monogamy, family, clan, and tribe. Our ancestors were using these structures at least 500,000 years ago. If you were suddenly plucked from your life and sent back in time to live with people in Indonesia about 15,000 years ago (or even Ethiopia 150,000 years ago), you would be able to figure out what is going on. The basic social roles, responsibilities, and civil rules would seem somewhat familiar to you, and you'd fit in pretty fast. How is that possible?

Cultural anthropologists have long recognized how all human societies have similar basic norms of moral conduct. Marc Hauser, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, has just published a paper about additional studies showing that people’s moral intuitions do not vary much across different religions all around the world. From an evolutionary perspective, that means that human morality is very old -- old enough to pre-date any religion that exists today. Furthermore, basic morality is highly resistant to religious influence -- most people easily reject religious rules that violate their basic moral intuitions. Rather, religions all tend to confirm and support human morality, because that essential morality sustains our schemes of social cooperation.

Hauser concludes that

"... religion cannot be the ultimate source of intra-group cooperation. Cooperation is made possible by a suite of mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion. Moral judgments depend on these mechanisms and appear to operate independently of one's religious background. However, although religion did not originally emerge as a biological adaptation, it can play a role in both facilitating and stabilizing cooperation within groups, and as such, could be the target of cultural selection." [ read the entire article here... ]

The rich diversity of supernatural fantasies hides their common function: to enhance willing obedience. Religion did not evolve independently from, or earlier than, our moral capacities. Morality is independent from religion, while religion is dependent on human morality. And that's a good thing.

Is too much religious freedom a bad thing? Can a liberal democracy really accommodate religious freedom? A long-standing argument that a country must have pretty much the same basic religion surfaces time and time again.

Over at the American Catholic blog , we read that

there is a built in contradiction in the place of religious freedom in classical liberalism: While religious freedom is a central element of classical liberalism, the ability of a state to function as a liberal democracy will collapse if a large majority of the population do not share a common basic moral and philosophical (and thus by implication theological) worldview. Thus, while religious freedom is a foundational element of classical liberalism, only a certain degree of religious conformity makes it possible.

This argument collapses simply by noticing that its author needs you to assume that a moral / philosophical worldview is the same thing as a religion. But that just isn't the case. Morality is not the same as religion -- just ask the many nonreligious people who manage to be quite moral all on their own.

If a democracy's citizens all believe that everyone should have the freedom to practice their own religion, that belief is not a religious belief. It's a moral belief, and if it is enshrined in a country's basic laws, it is also a political belief. No shared theology or religion is implied at all.

The author does make a point that an immense moral chasm between two groups in a country will make governing impossible. The post continues:

If, however, there is fundamental disagreement among the populace about basic issues of right and wrong and what the purpose of the human person is, the victory of the other side will increasingly look to the defeated like an unacceptable tyranny, and the state will risk coming apart at the seams.

But this is just a theoretical point, without any substance. What actual fundamental disagreement is tearing this country apart? The author doesn't say -- yet we might now perceive a clue to what is really going on here.

Is this author speaking on behalf of fellow Christians? Maybe some Christians are feeling like they are suffering under an unacceptable tyranny, because they can't agree with the basic moral and political convictions of a democracy. Such as keeping religion out of public governing, and keeping government out of private religion.

But that just means that such Christians don't like liberal democracy, and not that liberal democracy suffers from some internal contradiction or imminent collapse. We may conclude that the foundations of liberal democracy remain (secularly) firm.

Now that estimates of the Haiti tragedy exceed 150,000 dead , any supernatural God would have a right to be proud of such good work.

For our theist friends out there, let's be reminded about why God deserves praise for this tragedy. A theistic God can supernaturally control everything, and everything is a part of God's wonderful plan for the world. (Note to Christians: If you don't accept both of these notions of God, you are not a theist and you should look into Buddhism or Taoism.) No Christian would judge that God has permitted something to go wrong in Haiti -- so praise God!

The Washington Post's On Faith blog has asked guest bloggers to comment on the Haiti tragedy. You read Dan Dennett's skeptical commentary. One Christian blogger, James Standish , says that modern Christians can make three mistakes when dealing with tragedy.

• Mistake 1: There is no devil.
• Mistake 2: We live in a just world where the good prosper and the wicked suffer.
• Mistake 3: Humans can judge God.

Hmmmm. If Christians steer clear of these mistakes, will Christians praise God for Haiti?  I think so! 

Maybe the Devil caused the earthquake -- but of course, God could prevent or undo anything Satan does. So God permitted the Haiti earthquake.

And maybe we don't live in a just world after all, so that the good often suffer and the wicked often prosper. So God permitted the Haiti earthquake to unjustly kill good people.

And if we can't judge God, then we can only judge that God's earthquake is all for the best. So God permits us to see evil as good.

Praise God for the Haiti earthquake!  And praise God that Christians can't tell the difference between good and evil well enough to know to condemn God.

A United Kingdom anti-homeothaphy group -- which calls itself 10 ²³ (Avogadro's constant) -- is planning a mass protest. This group's website announces:

At 10:23am on January 30th, more than 300 homeopathy sceptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic 'overdose' .

The UK newspaper The Independent reports that

"More than 300 people who style themselves as 'homoeopathy sceptics' will each swallow an entire bottle of homoeopathic pills in protest at the continued marketing of homoeopathic medicines by Boots, the high street chemist chain."

While waiting for any reports of ill-effects from this "overdose", you can read the statement about "Homeothapy, what's the harm?" on 10.23's website .