Planet Atheism

What the Book of Mormon says about the poor (and why Mitt Romney should be concerned about them)

Published

on February 3, 2012

The morning after winning the Florida primary, Mitt Romney said "he wasn't concerned about the very poor" in an interview with Soledad O'Brien of CNN.

The next day at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama expressed just the opposite point of view. Here are some excepts, along with the corresponding bible verses.

... the biblical call [is] to care for the least of these –- for the poor; for those at the margins of our society. To answer the responsibility we’re given in Proverbs to “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.” (Proverbs 31:8-10)
...
John tells us that, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3:17)

There were, of course, some misapplied biblical references to "Am I my brother's keeper" (Genesis 4:9) and "For unto whom much is given, much shall be required." (Luke 12:48). But Obama made his point: he's a better Christian than Romney.

Still if I were writing Obama's speech, I'd have thrown in Proverbs 29:17, just for Mitt "I'm not concerned about the poor" Romney.

The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: but the wicked regardeth not to know it.

So we've pretty well established that Mitt isn't much of a Christian. But we already knew that. He's a Mormon.

And what the does Book of Mormon say about poor people?

Plenty, as it turns out. Here are some excerpts.

Ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish. (Mosiah 4:16)
Ye ought to impart of the substance that ye have one to another. (Mosiah 4:21)
Impart of your substance to the poor, every man according to that which he hath. (Mosiah 4:26)
They did impart of their substance, every man according to that which he had, to the poor, and the needy, and the sick, and the afflicted; and ... they were liberal to all. (Alma 1:27-30)
Yea, he saw great inequality among the people ... turning their backs upon the needy and the naked and those who were hungry, and those who were athirst, and those who were sick and afflicted. (Alma 4:12)
Will you persist in turning your backs upon the poor, and the needy, and in withholding your substance from them? (Alma 5:55)

So I guess Mitt Romney isn't a very good Mormon either.

amazing adjustment layers

Published

helen sotiriadis

on February 3, 2012

a video i made about photoshop's adjustment layers, using the black&white as an example.

©2011 helen sotiriadis

Sam Harris: The Fireplace Delusion

Published

AlwaysQuestionAuthority

on February 3, 2012

. . . I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.”

. . . Of course, if you are anything like my friends, you will refuse to believe this. And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion.

Read more . . .

Komen changes course

Published

PZ Myers

on February 3, 2012

I don’t think it will help, but after the Susan G. Komen foundation cut funding to Planned Parenthood, they’ve now backed down and said they’ll continue existing grants. After the wingnuts were exposed in the Komen leadership, though, I can’t honestly say that I trust them anymore, and I’d be looking for better recipients of my donations (like the BCRF)…and after this reversal, I imagine the fundies who have been slapping each other on the back and congratulating themselves on their influence won’t be so happy, either.

This has been a very bad week for Komen. I would hope that there is some substantial turnover in management, because this has been a case of rank mismanagement of the foundation’s reputation.

Komen Concedes (but it still sucks)

Published

leahlibresco

on February 3, 2012

Komen spent the last two days reaping a financial windfall from pro-life activists, after they pulled their funding for Planned Parenthood. (Planned Parenthood had a funding surge, too, prompting a friend of mine to say the whole thing felt like … Continue reading →

Troll Dad

Published

Daniel Florien

on February 3, 2012

Don’t do this at home.

magic isn't real, grow the fuck up

Magic tricks are real, though… ;)

Friday Cephalopod: Feasibility trial successful

Published

PZ Myers

on February 3, 2012

Next step: lasers mounted on squid mantles.

You puny humans are so screwed.

(Also on Sb)

The Arsenic Affair: No Arsenic in DNA!

Published

Laurence A. Moran

on February 3, 2012

The "arsenic affair" began with a NASA press conference on Dec. 2, 2010 announcing that a new species of bacteria had been discovered. The species was named GFAJ-1 (Get Felisa a Job), by the lead author Felisa Wolfe-Simon. GFAJ-1 was grown in a medium that lacked phosphate and contained high concentrations of arsenic. The paper, published that day on the Science website, claimed that arsenic was replacing phosphorus in many of the cell's molecules, including nucleic acids.

Here's a (bad) video of the press conference. The high quality version from NASA is no longer available and some other YouTube videos don't allow embedding.

Read more »

Making excuses

Published

PZ Myers

on February 3, 2012

The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

In particular, the paper “Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105” was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled “The Origin of Life” in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue “Origin of Life – Feature Papers” for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication.
As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary “origin of life” topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis’s long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author’s and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis’s paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

The “interdisciplinary” excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis’s paper, and Abel’s paper as well, were “off” — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there’s something to them? You’d have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

Also, you don’t need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I’m reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky’s cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

The fact that they’re having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they’re publishing is also ominous. Shouldn’t the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn’t it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It’s a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life “reject many submissions”. I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis’s and Abel’s.

(Also on Sb)

OwlMirror found the quote in Sagan’s Broca’s Brain.

Velikovsky has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing Worlds in Collision with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view.

Low Pay for Teachers is an Example of ‘Biblical Principles’

Published

amanda

on February 3, 2012

If you want an example of the problems of applying a 2,000-3,000-year-old text to modern life, look no further than Alabama State Senator Shadrack McGill.

Alana Horowitz with the Huffington Post reports:

“Teachers need to make the money that they need to make,” McGill said, according to the Times-Journal. “If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach … and these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em.”
McGill’s comments came at a prayer breakfast this week in Fort Payne, Ala.

The best part? The Times-Journal’s David Clemons writes that the quote in question came up while being questioned about the 62% pay raise lawmakers received in 2007.

Of course, this all sort of makes sense when you realize what the guy thinks teaching entails:

“To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”

Let me just clear something up for you, Senator Shadrack –- you are confusing your teachers with your babysitters, and they are two very different things. Teachers are highly qualified, educated individuals who are trained to deliver educational concepts in engaging and meaningful ways as well as the behavioral modification needed to deliver such concepts to upwards of 30 children and teenagers in a single classroom. Even babysitters and professionals in ECE are not really responsible for “raising” someone’s child; if you have children, Senator, I think you may have passed off a pretty important part of your job to entirely the wrong people.

Additionally, I know of a couple of “Biblical principles” which might conflict with your ideology. There was allegedly this guy named Jesus, and he didn’t have much patience for the kind of people who get 62% raises.

In Matthew 19:24, the oft-cited verse says:

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Perhaps this would be easier to understand if I take some liberties with your original statement?

“Politicians need to make the money that they need to make. If you double a politician’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to pander… and these politicians that are called to pander, regardless of the pay scale, they would pander. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em.”

God must be real; it’s the only explanation for such supernatural levels of cognitive dissonance.

Another tooth bites the dust

Published

Db0

on February 3, 2012

So, a few hours ago, I got back from the university dentist clinic…with one tooth less. Finally my odyssey in finding why I’ve been in having pains when chewing with this tooth and lately simply constant extreme pain on it and around its area, are at and end.

You see, this particular molar had been torturing me for years, I initially noticed a few years ago, shortly after I got my wisdom teeth removed, chewing particular foods with it, (especially “chewy” ones like rump steaks and the like) sometimes caused extreme pangs of pain, but it was infrequent enough that I could dismiss it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t dismiss me.

The pains started getting more frequent and later on affecting other kinds of food as well. I mentioned this multiple times to my dentist when I visited for my regular check-ups, but every time he looked at it and said that it doesn’t look as anything more than pressure from my grinding issue. With alarm I kept mentioning that the pain was growing in frequency and intensity as time passed but nothing else came of it.

Eventually, one week ago, things came to a head, ad this tooth simply started hurting constantly one day. It started as a weak pulsing pain but day by day it increased to annoying, then distracting, then intense, then “the painkillers, they do nothing!” to “Gawds please kill me quickly” kind of pain. At around the point where it was just “intense” I decided to get a second opinion, since my regular dentist couldn’t find anything wrong with it (“But it’s a perfectly healthy tooth!” were his words – granted this was before the pain become a constant experience, rather than only present when chewing on this tooth). Frustratingly, this second doctor made the same exact remarks and thought it was simply pressure as well and gave me a small drilling to alleviate it. However to his credit, he did passingly suspect the true cause and said that I should return if the pain persists.

However after the pain didn’t dissipate and one particularly painful night, and a suggestion by liriel and my mother-in-law, I decided to go for the ultimate investigation and visited the university clinic. Unfortunately I didn’t know the correct time, so I ended up in the emergency care, after roughly 3 hours of waiting around, I got to sit on the dentist chair, and the doctor that checked it, announced that I have aggressive periodontitis. She did some cleaning and said that I should visit the clinic again during daylight hours and go see the Periodontology experts.

Fortunately, the cleaning she did seemed to stop the general pain all around the area (until then, the pain was a “throbbing” kind that seemed to move from tooth to tooth, and even reached my ear), which allowed me to sleep easier. Unfortunately, it focused all that pain into the problematic tooth itself which made the pain constant, rather than throbbing and made it so that even the slightest touch hurt like a motherfucker.

So into the periodontology clinic I went, and after significant waiting again, I got looked at by a certain long-haired expert who announced that I definitely do not have aggressive periodontitis. Dismayed I asked “Then what do I have doctor” who then, to my frustration announced “I have no idea, but it looks very healthy, albeit suspicious”. Fortunately he had the good grace to say that a healthy tooth shouldn’t be hurting like this, so he would refer me to some other experts who would drill in to check the nerve itself…next day. I went into the clinic at 1pm and left at 5:30 so they were about closing at that time and I had to practically run to an arranged meeting I had for Mage Knight (Note to self: Not a good idea to try to explain very complex board games while having intense tooth-ache).

Anyway, so next day (i.e. today) I started quite early on and went for a visit to those other experts. Fortunately the waiting time was much less and soon I was in to figure out what the problem was. After a few tests on how alive my tooth was, where I didn’t even neither cold nor electrical shots to it, they declared that I had…aggressive periodontitis. Their suggestion was they should simply clean the area and make me come back next week. Fortunately I managed to convince them that this was definitely not a good idea with the amount of pain I was in, and that they should go and consult with the Periodontology expert who said that I don’t have periodontitis. More specifically, I asked them to look for the long-haired blond dude^[1] and see what he thinks because I damn well was not going home without a definite diagnosis today.

Fortunately the guy was still available so they went to fetch him. After a while however, rather than him, I saw yet another dentist come in, in a rush, wordlessly grab his utensils and start banging on my teeth once more. Once I made it clear that the molar really really fucking hurts when he’s banging on it, he discussed a bit with the others and then got to the anesthetics. At around the time, the long-haired dentist (by now I knew he was dr. Roellke) arrived as well and he got to see them drilling it to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. Fortunately, they suspected correctly this time (I must have got the drilling expert this time) and they saw my tooth had a small fracture right down the middle…vertically.

This kind of fracture was positioned in such a novel way^[2] as to make it invisible to x-rays as well as to the naked eye, which is why my regular dentist as well as everyone else couldn’t see anything wrong with the tooth and announced it as perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, all this time, the fracture as deepening until it eventually reached the nerve area, which allowed germs to pass through and wreak merry hell on my pain receptors. I suspected something was horribly wrong with the tooth for years now, and perhaps if we had caught the fracture when it was still beginning, we might have saved the tooth, but everyone was so focused on my grinding problem that they didn’t believe me that this tooth has a special kind of pain.

Unfortunately this meant that the tooth was unsalvageable, so this time dr. Roellke himself took me to the surgeons who would extract it. 3 different anesthetics and some serious pulling later, I had the bad tooth lying in front of me, looking all ashamed for its act. However, I really don’t care. Testing my teeth now, I finally bit down without any pain, which is something I haven’t had for years no, so one bad tooth is a small price to pay for this.

Time for my first golden tooth methinks!

Insightful? Funny? Informative? Convincing? Helpful?

Notes

I am so fucking lucky he was distinctive like that and I could make them figure out who he was, without remembering his name
seriously, they came and took pictures to teach other students about it

Other similar posts you might also enjoy: 2 little bastards down. 2 little bastards to go | Ouchie | Sore Throat…again

A bureaucracy doing its job

Published

PZ Myers

on February 3, 2012

An organization in Bath called “Healing on the Streets” (HOTS) plastered flyers around town advertising their services.

Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction … Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?

We’d love to pray for your healing right now!

We’re Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.

And then…a miracle happened. It’s utterly unbelievable, at least to an American.

The Advertising Standards Authority declared them to be irresponsible, false advertising and ordered them taken down.

Can we import them over here and put them to work? I’d like to see all the churches shut down. Also, all those annoying advertisements about “natural male enhancement” products.

HOTS Bath is stunned. They don’t understand.

All over the world as part of their normal Christian life, Christians believe in, pray for and experience God’s healing; our ministry, in common with many churches, has been active in praying for God’s healing (of Christians and non Christians) for many years.

That’s a fairly typical Christian response. They always act like they’ve been poleaxed whenever they discover someone who sees through their lies and notices that their claims are bullshit.

One Reason Why Religion Persists…

Published

Bud

on February 3, 2012

... in my not-all-that-humble opinion:

Dead-Logic.com

Why I am an atheist – Stu

Published

PZ Myers

on February 3, 2012

I was born to a liberal Jewish family, and grew up with all the cultural trappings of Judaism…Bar Mitzvah, religious school, and holidays.

During the 60s, which is when I grew out of childhood (I was 12 in 1960) the Temple I belonged to began to deal with the social issues of the time (or, more likely, I became aware of that), most notably the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam War. The theme running through the discussions focused around the rights of other people to freedom…freedom to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and freedom to say and think what they believed.

This is what I grew up with…this is what my parents and the religious tradition to which I belonged taught me. Yet even this open attitude engendered hypocrisy when combined with theism as I learned later.

This social attitude gave me very good feelings about my family, friends, and religious tradition…so much so that I went on to study “religion” in college. In 1970 I graduated with a B.A. in (secular) Religious Studies. However, by the time I got my degree I had learned that theistic religions were all based on varying degress of superstition.

As with so many others who have written on this topic here, one incident stands out in my mind as the point at which I realized that god is a myth…no more valid than Greek or Norse (or any other) myths.

I was home from college and was attending some sort of service at my Temple. At one point a prayer was read, which I had heard all my life. One passage from the prayer jumped out at me. It was a prayer for peace on earth and understanding between governments and people of different cultures and beliefs. The passage prayed for a time when “superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye.”

At that moment I realized the hypocrisy of it all…here we were, praying to a “supernatural” being to end superstition. I don’t think I laughed out loud, but this insight — which now seems so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t see it years before — set me on the road to non-theism.

Other things have added to my understanding…

• I fell in love and married someone who was raised as a Christian and the response from the Rabbi of the Temple I attended was so hurtful that I realized his words throughout my life about openmindedness were just that…words. Nothing else. When faced with the results of what he, himself taught me, he reverted to bigotry.

• I took two science classes in graduate school — botany (which had a very strong genetics focus) and geology. This provided me with information about common anscestors and the age of the earth and piqued my interest in evolution. From there I did a lot of reading on my own.

• My wife was, and still is, a theist. She is very liberal, doesn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus (though she was raised as a Presbyterian) or in heaven and hell. She wanted to have some sort of religious “base” for our family so we went around trying to find a place where we would both fit. We chose the local Unitarian-Universalist congregation in our city. The members of the congregation were a mix of religious and non-religious liberals…theists and non-theists whose philosophy was “the search is the answer.” I did more reading and learning there. One important thing I remember was that we rarely discussed whether “God” existed or not. This was because we were busy discussing things which mattered — social issues such as war, medical ethics, and political rights.

I don’t identify myself as an “atheist.” I spent my professional career as an elementary school teacher in rural Indiana and if I had admitted that I was an atheist I would have been run out of my small town. I still identify culturally with Judaism, so that was my “cover.”

Spending all those years (I’m retired now) as a closet atheist hasn’t always been easy, but there are others here with me. I have a small group of friends who are in the same position. We “share” the closet.

Maybe someday, I’ll find the courage — like Jessica Ahlquist — to “come out” and face the ignorance of family and friends who are still myth-believers. That, I think, is why I’m here…reading this blog every day (and others…Jerry Coyne, Ed Brayton, for example).

I know I didn’t actually explain WHY I’m an atheist…instead I wrote about how I realized I was an atheist…and how I grew into my atheism. The “why” to my atheism is fairly simple: I don’t believe in supernatural myths.

Stu
United States

Life • Thought of the day: Why go to college?

Published

Liv

on February 3, 2012

So I've now been back in college for a few years. Most recently, I'm at a four year university, and I'm finding more and more that there's a implied goal of graduating, finding an awesome paying job, and settling down in the suburbs. Except that's not what I want, that's never what I ever wanted. In fact, I'll be perfectly content with finding an opportunity after college to be in the service of others, and be provided a small stipend to live. There's definitely that American point of view, that education equals riches, and elite status. Of course I'm certain that there are others whom believe as I do, but are also silenced by the perpetual hum of the machine. The machine that wants to chew me into educational byproduct, and form me into a functional "exact-fit" component of American capitalism. When I suggest anything otherwise, I get dirty looks, and confused faces.

Statistics: Posted by Liv — February 3rd, 2012, 11:52 am — Replies 5 — Views 151

Gays and Atheists as "Unacceptable"

Published

Alonzo Fyfe

on February 3, 2012

So far this year, I have been spending my time in this blog going over the elements of Sean Faircloth’s new political strategy for atheists and the specific policy objectives he presents.

Currently, I am looking at Faircloth’s first policy objective, which he stated as:

Our military shall serve and include all Americans, religious and non-religious, with no hint of bias and with no hint of fundamentalist extremism coloring our military decisions at home or abroad.

I objected that it is absurd to have a policy that includes "all Americans". It would have to include the child rapist, the rabid racist, the apostate-murdering islamist, and the atheist attempting to remove religion from the meme pool by killing anybody who is infected with it.

Instead I suggested a policy in which (1) each individual and group has presumption in favor of inclusion - of being on the "accepted" list, (2) evidence beyond a reasonable doubt must be provided for removing any person or group from the "accepted" list, and (3) religious reasons do not provide good reason to move any individual or group to the "unacceptable" list. The types of reasons to be used is the same type that would be legitimate in declaring a person guilty of a crime in a court of law.

The reasons offered for finding gays service personnel "unacceptable", or for holding that atheists are only qualified to receive orders and never qualified to give them, are either (1) religious reasons, or (2) the "bigot’s proof" of absurd and fanciful non-religious reasons that some people embrace only because they offer support for a desired (in this case, religious) conclusion. I call this the "bigot's proof" because they are exemplified by the arguments in favor of slavery and Jim Crow laws as being a benefit to blacks.

On this point I want to look at how gays and atheists made it onto religious lists of "unacceptable" people or groups. What is really going on behind the scenes regarding the religious disapproval of gays and atheists?

Each group actually takes a different route onto that list.

The Situation for Gays

In the case of gays, I would suggest that the following explanation seems most likely:

The major religions were invented by substantially ignorant humans living in ancient primitive tribes. They had the human disposition to fear what they did not understand and to hate anything that was different. They were disposed - by what is normal human psychology - to view gays as demonic, sick, strange, unnatural creatures unfit for civilized society.

Then they invented gods.

When they invented these gods, they assigned these prejudices to their gods.

By this, I do not mean that they were consciously thinking, "I am going to invent a god and assign my prejudices to him." I am saying that they had no idea how to explain things around them in natural terms so they sought supernatural explanations. They invented or "hypothesized" gods. And they asked themselves, "What qualities do these gods have?" As a part of the process, they decided that no god worthy of the name could actually think these disgusting creatures who seek sex with members of the same sex should be treated as human. They are abominations. So, they wrote that their god viewed them as abominations.

They wanted these creatures put to death - to be eliminated from society - so they wrote that their Gods commanded them to kill these creatures.

Through scripture, these bigotries have been brought to the 21st century. People who should have been left to live their lives in peace when thinking humans shook off their ignorance and primitive superstitions are still made to suffer – or denied the full quality of life that they could otherwise have – because people today take the ignorant prejudices of a bunch of primitive tribesmen as the unerring word of a god.

The Situation for Atheists

Atheists took a different road onto the "unaccepted" list.

Here, we must recognize that religious institutions are social and political institutions – and the people at the head of those organizations have a human thirst for social and political power.

They get their power by being the spokesperson for God. They speak. Their congregation listens and obeys. It contributes to building the leader’s home and furnishing it, and providing the leader with political, economic, and social power.

A person can try to gain control over others by saying, "Do as I say or suffer the consequences." Of course, this only works on the person who actually thinks that disobeying actually has consequences. "What the tyrant does not know cannot hurt me." Plus, the tyrant needs power to actually inflict consequences.

Somewhere along the line, the wise tyrant got the idea of saying, "And I have an all-knowing, invisible friend who knows when you disobey who will make you suffer - if not in this lifetime, then for eternity in the next lifetime."

Seriously, the phrase, "Serve God" really translates into "Serve me," spoken by the person claiming to have a personal pipeline to God.

Of course, one of the things that the tyrant needs to worry about is having somebody in the community who dares to day, "Yeah, sure. You do not have an all-knowing invisible friend. You’re just making that stuff up."

That is to say, atheists are a significant threat to the social and political power of religious leaders. Therefore, the religious leader has a strong incentive to tell his congregation, "Atheism is unacceptable. Shun the atheist. He is a fool. He will bring you into ruin. He has no morals. He will destroy your lives and destroy your chance for a happy afterlife."

That is how atheists made it onto the "unacceptable" list.

Once again, I am not talking about religious leaders consciously plotting out the details of this system. Instead, the religious leader likes his power, he feels threatened by the atheist. This makes him uncomfortable. He gets a revelation (which he may well think is an actual revelation - even though it comes in fact from his fear and anxiety) that God does not like atheists, and that is what he tells his audience.

Furthermore, the religion that most effectively neutralizes its opponents is the one that gains power and control. It is to be expected - considering only natural forces - that the religions that dominate the world today have a strong anti-atheist prejudice.

Summary

We see then that gays and atheists have made their way onto religion's "unacceptable" list in two different ways.

Gays are on the list because primitive ancient tribesmen judged "different" as "evil" and sought to destroy what they did not understand. Now, today, they suffer from people foolish enough to think that the prejudices of a group of illiterate goat herders was the infallible word of God. The tragedy is that they are continuing to do real harm to real people.

Atheists are on the list because we threaten the social and political power of religious leaders. People who owe their position in society to the idea that those who disobey face the wrath of their all-knowing, all-powerful enforcer are threatened by those who say that there is no enforcer. They find the atheist presence intolerable. And (not surprisingly) so do the gods they invent.

This is what is really going on when religion puts gays and atheists on the "unacceptable" list. This is what people preserve when they defend these practices.