freeinfidel

The religious have long claimed Albert Einstein as one of their own. It’s always been a lie, and now there is further proof.

Einstein did have an unfortunate habit of using the word ‘god’. It has always been clear - not least from Einstein’s own writings - that his definition of ‘god’ was more in line with what the rest of us might call ‘nature’ or ‘the mysterious forces of the universe’ than the all-powerful imaginary friend of religion. Nevertheless, the religious have continued to claim that the famous physicist - a man who practically defines the concept of the rational thinker - was actually one of the mindless faithful.

One of the comments they cling to is:

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

That blinkered (and dishonest) view has taken a major blow. A previously unknown letter written by Einstein in 1954 to philosopher Eric Gutkind, and which is now up for auction, includes the passages:

“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

And while Einstein was culturally Jewish (and had both Catholic and Jewish education), he clearly had little time for the idea of the Jews as god’s chosen people:

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

As a boy, Einstein was given a religious upbringing by his largely non-religious parents. Throughout his life, he retained a respect for the cultural traditions provided by religion. But that is not the same as being religious. By the age of 12, he was questioning Biblical stories, and would later write about this awakening:

“The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”

Einstein was clearly a spiritual person, in a generalised sense. He was moved and inspired by a sense of mystery. But to suggest that he believed in god, as most people understand that term, is now (and actually always has been) completely insupportable.

There are many assertions that the religious make - either in defence of their faith or as an attack against atheism - that have been so thoroughly discredited that they amount to bald-faced lies. This random and sporadic series of posts will look at some of the most popular.

One of the problems with those infected by religion is that their faith often takes the place of research, a willingness to learn and - yes, it has to be said - intellect. That’s why many of these untruths remain in circulation. The faithful never question them, never learn the truth, because religion deals in unquestioning belief, not logical debate or rational enquiry. And so the same old platitudes and myths get trotted out time after time.

I thought I would collect together responses to these lies as a resource for atheists and rationalists. Some of those I intend to deal with over the next few months include:

• Darwin embraced Jesus and recanted evolution on his deathbed.
• Atheism is a religion.
• Only religion can provide a basis for morality.
• Evolution is just a theory.
• Atheists are believers in denial.
• The worst wars and acts of genocide were caused by atheism.
• Atheism is the cause of social decline.

I would greatly welcome suggestions for other subjects, other myths. I will also update each post in the light of any suggestions or comments. Stay tuned…

Spiritualists, psychics and other frauds are up in arms about a proposed change to UK law that will make them prove their claims (how did they not see that coming?). But the law doesn’t go far enough: it’s time to extend it to all religion.

According to the report on the BBC website, ‘There may be trouble ahead’, the change to consumer laws will generally tighten up the need for suppliers of services to show that they do what they say they can do. The rules will apply to all areas of commerce that fall under the Consumer Protection Regulations. By including spiritualists, mediums and the like, the rules will also replace the rarely used Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951.

Most sane and intelligent people will applaud this. Psychics, mediums and spiritualists prey on the weak and vulnerable. They exploit grief, fear and uncertainty to fill their pockets or exert their influence.

The Office of Fair Trading has said it won’t target seances or services at spiritualist churches - it is more concerned about out-and-out scams (although telling the difference could be tricky). Nevertheless, it’s a useful precedent.

A real paranoid might see darker forces at work here. Psychics and other fringe practitioners are often sought out by people who feel they have been failed by the more conventional religions, but who still have a weakness for spiritual solutions. Criminalising such practices would be a first step to forcing people back into the main faiths where they are more easily controlled. That would be the preferred totalitarian solution.

I don’t see that happening here, though. This seems more like a rational and socially beneficial acknowledgment that these practices are fraudulent and should be treated accordingly.

Apparently, some spiritualists have complained that they are being victimised, that they are not being treated on an equal footing with other religions. And I agree. They have a very good point. Let’s face it, all religions are fraudulent: not one of them can substantiate its claims. So why not push this law to its logical conclusion? Let’s have all religions either put up or shut up.

The next time someone tells you that religion is a “force for good”, remind them of the Oregon fundamentalist Christian couple currently under indictment for the death of their 15-month old daughter. And, sadly, this looks like it’s not an isolated case. It’s time people were held fully responsible for their strange, and sometimes dangerous, beliefs.

According to press reports, Carl and Raylene Worthington have been indicted by a grand jury in Oregon’s Clackamas county following the death of their daughter Ava. She succumbed to bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection - conditions that could have been treated easily and effectively with antibiotics. The parents chose faith healing.

At the very least, entrusting the wellbeing of your child to supernatural forces is criminal neglect - child abuse of an extreme form. In this case it led to death, so the charge - quite rightly - is manslaughter.

If this were an isolated case, it would be easy to dismiss it as another instance of poor parenting. It is a sad fact that too many children suffer from the stupidity, ignorance, mental illness or inadequacy of their parents. Religion does not have a monopoly when it comes to dumb ideas that lead to bad parenting. Certainly, it doesn’t make the parents any the less culpable, but we would have no need to worry about a larger issue.

But that’s not quite the case here.

The Followers of Christ fundamentalist church, which boasts 1,500 members, has a worrying record. Back in the 1990s, the deaths of several children prompted the Oregon authorities to enact a 1999 law that removes a ‘religious defence’ in cases of murder, manslaughter and child abuse.

Some of us might see it as bizarre that it took that long. Why should we have ever considered strange and insupportable beliefs in supernatural forces to be a reasonable excuse for child neglect or worse? Would courts have ever considered belief in UFOs, CIA mind control or vampires as valid defences (other than proof of possible insanity)?

While this fundamentalist community has had an apparently clean record since the law was passed (an investigation into the 2001 death of the same couple’s son was dropped), there are now some concerns about an allegedly high infant mortality rate among families belonging to the church.

If you choose to turn your back on the immeasurable benefits given to mankind by science and rational progress and put your life in the hands of some imagined superbeing - well, that’s your funeral. When you make that decision on behalf of those in your care, innocent children dependent on your ability to make decisions critical to their wellbeing, then you carry a great responsibility. Rejecting life-saving treatment in favour of medieval superstition is a gross dereliction of that duty. At the very least, it makes you an incompetent parent. At worst, it makes you a child killer.

The announcement by a Vatican official of ‘new’ mortal sins is further proof of religion’s man-made origins. It also shows that, whenever the Roman Catholic church tries to be hip, it reveals itself as painfully out-of-date.

Speaking in an interview with the Vatican daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti listed among the new breed of deadly sin a number of modern ills including illicit drugs, pollution, genetic manipulation and social injustices that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

And he should know. Girotti heads the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican department that concerns itself with sin, conscience and redemption.

Mortal sins are the type that send you straight to hell unless you obtain the most stringent form of absolution, which requires profound levels of penitence. Traditionally, there were seven, familiar to any fan of the Brad Pitt movie of the same name. But self-indulgences like gluttony, lust, sloth, greed, wrath, envy and pride were all personal matters. This original litany of bad behaviour was clearly an attempt to control personal attitudes and activities - partly so that the church could exert its control. Forcing people to conform to unnaturally strict rules is a fundamental mechanism of totalitarianism. It makes people fearful of transgressing: at the same time, it virtually ensures that they do transgress at some time, in some way, thus cranking up the fear and providing the regime with a means to punish, demonstrating its power and superiority.

In addition, these rules had a beneficial effect, that of controlling behaviour perceived as anti-social that might otherwise threaten social cohesion and stability - arguably a key role for religion before secular laws took over that function. Of course, given that most religions are still mired in the concepts and outlook of the Middle Ages (at best) it is a sheer anachronism for the church to attempt to fulfill this function today.

Clearly, the Roman Catholic church is feeling somewhat sidelined in the world. The number of its adherents is falling. It no longer has the political clout it once enjoyed. The majority of the world’s population regards it as either irrelevant or comically archaic. Something needs to be done.

Concerns about social inequality, pollution, the environment, genetic modification are part of today’s zeitgeist. The Roman Catholic church has thus far shown itself inadequate in dealing with these issues. So this is the response - a new breed of social or corporate sins, shared by many.

It is a sad sight. There were times, in past centuries, when the church led in matters of moral issues. Now we see it pedalling furiously to catch up with the rest of the world.

Quite what burden each of us carries for, say, air pollution, isn’t clear. Given that these are mortal sins, presumably we should all be desperately worried. Personally, I think I can cope. I am already concerned with many of these issues and try to do what I can - not because of the threat of eternal torment in some supernatural world, but because it is self-evidently the right thing to do. I don’t need some self-appointed moralist in a frock to wave a big stick at me.

And there’s another problem here. How come the Vatican has only just noticed?

Pollution isn’t new. Some of the worst pollution the planet has ever seen occurred back in the Industrial Revolution.

Social injustice and the gap between rich and poor is hardly an innovation either. And there were times when the Vatican was firmly on the side of kings. In fact, it has never appeared particularly averse to building up considerable wealth itself. So there’s a deep hypocrisy at work here.

Even genetic manipulation is as old as farming itself. For centuries, farmers and horticulturalists have used selective breeding to create new or more robust species of plants and animals. And much important early work in genetics was carried out by the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel, who published his results in 1865.

One has to assume that god, being omniscient, knew that these things were sins all along, even if the Vatican has come to the realisation somewhat late (indeed, after pretty much the entire rest of the world). Presumably, the industrialists, farmers, rose breeders, kings, popes and at least one Moravian monk are now burning in hell while bemoaning, “We didn’t know it was a sin!”

This attempt to update its image and get on board with issues that have been concerning the rest of us for some time simply highlights two rather pathetic characteristics of the Roman Catholic church (though ones it shares with many other religions).

First, it is desperately and unfailingly behind the times. It is a dinosaur, but one deserving of extinction. Its effort to grasp the nettle of contemporary issues is hilariously anachronistic because it can do so only by framing them in concepts that belong to the fourth century.

Second, by delineating ‘new’ sins, the Roman Catholic church demonstrates that religion is a man-made construct. We’ve seen this before with limbo and other bizarre fantasies of the faith. And the more nonsense they make up, the more the rest of us will feel justified in ignoring the church and getting on with our real lives.

Scientific materialism is often condemned by religious believers as being reductionist, as though perceiving the essential truth of something were a bad thing. But does it justify this pejorative abuse of the term?

What do people of a scientific inclination see when they look at the world? They see the complex bonding of elements. They see the intricate play of physical forces. They see the comprehensible strangeness of the quantum realm, the staggering immensity of the universe, the eternal truth of natural laws, the sublime irrationality of pi.

Our accumulated scientific wisdom is vast - so huge, in fact, that no-one today can simply be a ’scientist’, not even just a physicist, chemist, biologist. To have any chance of fully comprehending and utilising any branch of science means specialising.

But this enormous treasury of knowledge is not enough for scientists. They want more. Every true scientist is driven by what he or she does not know. The existence of science as a discipline is an acknowledgment of our ignorance, but also our desire to leave that condition. It is an assertion that ignorance is undesirable, a form of failure, a primitive state that we, as evolved life forms, should leave behind. All true knowledge is valuable, even if we can’t put it to use immediately. Talking about the curiosity that motivates mathematicians, E C Titchmarsh said:

It can be of no practical use to know that pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

Scientists are explorers, constantly expanding our horizons. So how can a discipline that is almost incomprehensibly vast and complex, and to which we are adding every day, be reductionist? Such an accusation is oxymoronic at best. In fact, you can probably drop the ‘oxy’.

What does the believer comprehend while gazing on the magnificence of nature, with all its complexity?

God did it.

This, surely, is the ultimate in reductionist thinking. As an explanation for the world and all it contains, it is disappointingly banal, feeble, simple-minded, crude, unimaginative. Frankly, it’s a bit silly.

The faithful complain when rationalists ‘explain away’ the mysteries of the spiritual realm - when they provide logical, supportable, real-world mechanisms by which apparent visions or miracles come about. But these explanations are made possible by that accumulated wisdom, acquired painstakingly by innumerable explorers after truth, collected and refined over centuries. Even the simplest assertion in science is built on a sophisticated foundation of knowledge that was hard won and required vast effort.

In this sense, no rational explanation of a supernatural phenomenon is ever ’simple’, however easy our fund of knowledge has made it. Flying from Paris to New York is simple. All you do is sit on a plane for several hours. What could be easier? But start thinking about the effort and knowledge required to build a flying machine, jet engines, the seat-back video, and you will understand that there is nothing simple about it.

On the other hand, the believer would ‘explain away’ the miraculous (and even those things that scientists already understand) with nothing more than “it’s god’s will” or worse, “we can never understand this. It’s not for us to know”.

The so-called ‘mystery’ of religion is nothing more than glorified ignorance. Can anyone explain the benefit of not knowing something?

If you enjoy the experience of standing in awe and wonder at the magnificence of the universe, try learning some science. There is nothing so splendid as the complex truth of nature.

Religions demand a special status for themselves - the right to practise a profound hypocrisy. They squeal ‘persecution’ whenever they feel they are not being shown due respect, yet at the same time show themselves ready to employ the methods of persecution in prosecuting their own aims.

The ugly side of religion has revealed itself again in the renewed controversy over the Mohammed cartoons. A Danish newspaper has reprinted the cartoon of the prophet wearing a bomb-like turban. This time, the inevitable outrage has been somewhat more muted, but one can expect the usual death threats from extremist Muslims.

Moderate Muslims and many non-Muslims have also condemned the publication of these cartoons as being disrespectful. The irony of that position is that it is itself highly disrespectful - of people’s right to free speech. In most advanced societies, such free speech is regarded as a cornerstone of civilisation.

Indeed, while we might all agree that mutual respect is desirable as a general rule, it is also essential that when some of us find the beliefs and actions of others to be risible and worthy of contempt, we must have the right to voice our opinions. And the law agrees. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, which makes it an offence to stir up hate and incite others to violence, also takes pain to spell out:

“Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.”

Not that laws are always perfect. In Brazil, the evangelical Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is abusing the legal process by overwhelming journalists with legal actions, in an attempt to stifle criticism. Again, freedom of speech and journalistic freedom are regarded as dispensable in the face of religious beliefs.

And let’s take another example in the UK. Hindus who felt they should be able to keep a bull infected with TB and to prolong the suffering of an injured cow (which they were treating with acupuncture and massage) have protested about vets stepping in - as they are required to both by law and natural compassion - to put the animals down.

In all cases, and many others, the faithful believe their feel bizarre and insupportable supernatural beliefs not only deserve an exaggerated ‘respect’ but also somehow trump rationality and key rights that affect everyone (rather than a pious minority). They consider themselves entitled - even required - to cast aside the rule of law if their religious doctrines (as they interpret them) say so. In other words, their faith makes them special, above the rules that govern the rest of us.

One incarnation of this belief even has its own name - ’sectarianism’. In the UK, we most commonly associate this with the tiresome and brutal conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. A recent UN Report on freedom of religion or belief in the UK (Word document), by rapporteur Asma Jahangir, also points out that the same conflict is present in Scotland (try attending a Celtic/Rangers match). But I would add that it has a much wider presence: witness the frequent demonising of Jews by Muslims. And as religious extremism increases, one can expect more of this mutual hostility between incompatible faiths.

An article in The Atlantic - ‘And the winner is…‘ - about the worldwide competition between religions, correctly reports that there is a general decline in religious belief. It also suggests that when religions gain a new foothold in a particular society - for example, the burgeoning of Pentecostalism in South America - they tend to do so in a slightly watered-down fashion that more easily slides into the legal, social and political framework of the host nation. However, this ignores the power that extremist elements within a faith can exert, both in terms of influence and direct action. The UK is a case in point: religious belief is waning rapidly, but those who do still believe seem to be moving towards the more extreme margins of strict Catholicism, fundamentalism or radical Islam.

The UN report suggests that members of all major religions in the UK feel they are being persecuted. But with one exception, this translates into them saying they are not being given enough special privileges, or they covet the perceived privileges of the other faiths. That exception is the belief by Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted both by anti-terrorism laws and the authorities’ application of those laws. They probably have a point, although whether the solution is actually in their own hands is a debate for another time.

Hypocrisy is defined as ‘the pretence of virtue or piety’ (Collins English Dictionary). Virtue and piety are qualities that the religious like to reserve to themselves. For example, a belief still persists among the religious that you cannot be ethical or moral without religion - specifically, without their brand of religion. They like to reserve a few other things to themselves, too. Anglicans still get to have 26 seats in the House of Lords, for instance: tough luck for the other faiths, but then that’s the nature of privilege, isn’t it? It’s about excluding the others, about having more power and fewer responsibilities to society as a whole than your rival belief systems.

The sheer arrogance and hubris of religious people believing they should be special cases, that they are exempt from the laws and requirements that govern the rest of us, has no place in modern society. That’s why our laws should not be founded on, nor adjusted to, the doctrines or requirements of faith. Our society is for all of us. Your religion is your business.

Once programmed by the self-loathing rituals of religion, can you ever be truly happy? Guilt, low self-esteem and a permanent sense of inadequacy are integral components of many religions. And maybe when they’ve got you, they’ve got you for ever.

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A murderer, who may have eaten part of his victim, now says that god told him to do it. How do we know whether this is true? And if he’s lying, why does he think this is a good thing to say?

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It seems as though another miracle worker may turn out to be nothing but a fraud. We all long for the fantastic in our lives, but attributing events to miracles is self-deluding and often dangerous. The rational mind is a better defence against life’s dangers, and when it’s applied, miracles appear to dissolve away.

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