More Questions from a Teenaged Modern Orthodox Skeptic

Previously.

Hey, its me XXXXX again, that 16 year old kid. I emailed you a little while ago and I have a few more things that I would like to ask you. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read and answer my questions as I am trying to find my way in life.

1. Is there a particular reason you believe there is no god? Obviously there is a lack of evidence, but is there something in particular that makes you sure that he does not exist?


2. Why do you prefer the term atheist over agnostic? About a week ago I told a friend of mine in yeshiva in Isreal that I am about "75% percent atheist." He responded, "You're not an atheist only tards are atheist, you're agnostic. No one can be 100% sure that god exists or does not exist." I guess he does have a point. Obviously it is impossible to prove or disprove god 100% so why do you (I guess make the leap of faith is the proper term here, how ironic) and say that god definitely does not exist and therefore identify as an atheist, over agnostic?


3. This is something i struggle with a little. I even went ahead and made a list of my 5 commandments and mission statement to help guide me if I decide atheism is the way to go. In Orthodox Judaism your goals and ways of achieving them are very clear-cut: daven, learn, give tzedaka, and worship god etc. However atheism has no doctrine of faith, and therefore, correct me if I'm wrong, you really have nothing to guide you. From an atheist perspective life must not have meaning (this is not necessarily a bad thing, this is just what I see when I look at it objectively.) Do you have a purpose in life? I figure mine would just be to get rich, be happy, and help people. Is there anything that can really drive an atheist? Maybe there does not have to be, but coming from my perspective a life without god seems very meaningless. Any of your thoughts on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Also you mentioned last time that I should pay attention to the comments. I did and they were great. It's awesome to see so many different perspectives on the subject. If you want to answer my questions on the blog, that would be great just so I could see what others have to say about them, but obviously it's your call.

Thank you so much for reading this and I eagerly await your response.

Hey, thanks for writing again. I'll take my swings at answering your questions and hopefully the commenters will chime in as well.

Why don't I use the term agnostic?

I would not say I am "sure" God doesn't exist. When I say I'm an atheist, I mean only that I don't believe that God exists. I recognize that I could be wrong, and I'm prepared to change my mind if confronted with new evidence or new arguments, but having spent a lot of time reading, writing, thinking, and arguing about the matter, I just don't believe that God exists. As an analogy, I don't believe that the Loch Ness monster exists, but if someone went out and captured it tomorrow and showed it to me (and convinced various kinds of experts that it was genuine) I would suddenly believe in the Loch Ness monster. Does that mean I'm agnostic on the subject of the Loch Ness monster? I don't think so.

Your friend's definition of agnostic is way too broad and would necessarily include 99% of humanity. Believe in God, don't believe in God, nobody except the mentally ill are 100% sure, even if they say they are. Does he consider himself an agnostic, by his own argument?

Why am I an atheist?

I would say that the lack of evidence for gods opened up the possibility but after that it's pretty much what seems more reasonable. As I've mentioned in the past, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time convinced me that the universe could have been "created" without any god's intervention and Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker convinced me that humans and all other living things could have evolved without any "Watchmaker."

At that point, I just kind of asked myself, well, does the universe make more sense with gods or without them? (Imagine being at the optometrist -- does this lens look more clear or does that one?) And to me, it just makes more sense without one. It explains why bad things happen to good people, why innocent infants are born with horrible diseases, why the universe appears to be vast and indifferent, etc. etc.

There's a philosophical principle called Occam's Razor that sort of formalizes one good argument for why an absence of evidence should make us work with the assumption that God does not exist. It exists in many forms, but perhaps the most concise is "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." That means that if A could have caused something to happen by itself, in the absence of evidence ("necessity") it's kind of silly to believe that A+B caused it. Another version that is perhaps a little misleading but in some ways more clear is "The simplest explanation is usually the best."

So if you take something like the Holocaust and look at it through this lens, it becomes pretty clear which explanation is more simple. On the one hand, we have an indifferent universe so we shouldn't expect it to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening. On the other hand, we have God and have to come up with all sorts of additional explanations -- that he's allowing man to have free will, that he was punishing us, that it's all part of his mysterious plan, etc. -- to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the horrific reality of the Holocaust.

Or let's take a scientific example. In ancient Greece, they didn't know that the earth was a globe that is tilted on its axis and that's why we have seasons. So instead, they made up this story:

Persephone's mother, Demeter, found out that her daughter was in the underworld. She was terribly upset by this news. She was so distraught over losing her daughter that she withdrew her usual blessing from the Earth. She refused to provide for the harvest until her daughter was brought back to her. This resulted in droughts on the Earth. A famine soon began.

Realizing that humankind would perish without crops, Zeus ordered Hades to free Persephone. But there was one condition… Persephone could be freed as long as she hadn't eaten any food in Hades. Just before he set her free, Hades tempted Persephone to eat a few pomegranate seeds from his garden. Because Persephone had eaten while in the underworld, she could not be freed. But without Demeter's attention to the earth, all of humankind would die.

Zeus was forced to negotiate with Hades about where Persephone would live. It was decided that Persephone would stay with Hades in the underworld for four months every year. During the other months, she would return to Earth to be with her mother. Every time that Persephone left her mother to live in the underworld, Demeter grieved. She withdrew her blessing of a good harvest on the Earth. Thus, the four months of separation caused cold, barren winters. When Persephone was returned to her mother, Demeter would be so glad that she would be kind to the Earth again. This would lead to spring, and then summer, followed by fall. In this way, the seasons were established.

When people found out about the fact that summer happens when your hemisphere of the globe is closer to the sun, they could have said well that's true, but it's also because of Persephone. That's where Occam's Razor comes in. We no longer need the Persephone story to explain the seasons -- the Earth's tilt is quite sufficient -- so out goes the story (and others like it.)

(Of course, I'm sure that if there were Modern Orthodox Greek Polytheists running around today, many would insist that this story is obviously allegorical and that the ancient Greek myths are perfectly compatible with modern science. Others would explain that the tilt of the Earth explanation is actually coded within the Persephone story.)

On meaning

This is a big question and something that many atheists wrestle with for a long time. In fact, I think it's one of the primary (unconscious?) motives for people to become or to stay religious in the first place. If you're religious (at least in fundamentalist religions like OJ) then you are told what the purpose is and given explicit rules and guidelines for how to live your life. Many people find that very comforting. (Of course it also causes problems for people who don't exactly fit into the rules, like gay people or those who care about them, like people who care more about what's true than what they're supposed to believe, etc. For that reason and others, it only kind of works if you're good at not asking questions, not thinking about certain things, living in denial, or engaging in compartmentalization.)

As you allude to, there are no rules and guidelines for being an atheist. Atheism is not a religion or even a philosophy, it's a simple lack of belief in one particular thing. Just as not-believing-in-astrology doesn't give your life meaning or specific rules, not-believing-in-god doesn't either. So there are as many approaches to these questions as there are atheists.

Some atheists (and some theists) are existentialists. They believe that you are responsible for creating your own meaning and examine the best ways of doing that and living that meaning passionately. Other atheists are nihilists who agree with the existentialists that there is no objective meaning, but don't necessarily take it any further than that. Others are hedonists. Others don't really think about it.

As for me, I think it's actually kind of a silly question. I'm not saying you're silly for asking it -- we all ask it -- but that if you think about it, it's kind of a strange way to look at things. Do we ask what the meaning of a summer afternoon is? Or what's the purpose of Tuesday? The question to me reflects some kind of internalized Protestant work ethic that implies that things are only worthwhile if they are productive in some way. I think it's worth really examining that piece of cultural indoctrination.

I try to just live my life as I see fit. I want to be comfortable, so I went into a career where I could make decent money doing something I like, but I didn't care enough about being rich that I was willing to do something I didn't like or to work many more hours in order to achieve great wealth. I love my wife and I want a family, so I got married. I care about other people, so I help them when I can and try to avoid causing them harm. I have various hobbies I enjoy, so I engage in them often. Etc. And again, I have seen and continue to see a psychologist to help me kind of examine myself, recognize and dismantle some of my internalized beliefs that aren't necessarily true, and continue to make good choices and improve my life.

I know that someday I'm going to die but that doesn't really bother me -- I figure not being born never bothered me so being dead will probably be about the same. I know that someday the sun is going to gradually become a Red Giant and then a White Dwarf and that someday long after that the whole universe will meet some kind of end in which no thing could live, too. But that's just how it is. It's sad and tragic like death is sad and tragic, but what are you gonna do? Enjoy it while you can.

Advice for a Teenaged Modern Orthodox Skeptic

I am a 16 year old boy who goes to a modern orthodox high school. I have been religious my whole life but am very skeptical about Judaism and God's existence as a whole. A few months ago, I hit the breaking point and for a few weeks I did not keep kosher or shabbos. I spoke with my parents about it and they were heartbroken.

I thought about it for a while and I decided that I will finish up high school and go to my Israel year and then if I am still not satisfied with Judaism I will just live my life free of overbearing laws that make no sense and just go crazy in college.

This leads to my question. When i learn gemara and chumash and what not I have a hard time taking it seriously. So my question is that what in Judaism is actually real and what is just made up, from an atheist perspective at least. For instance, were the Jews actually ever in the desert? Did the forefathers really exist? What about more modern things like the Channukah and Purim story and the wars in the times of navi'im?

The 2nd part of my question is, so lets say there is no god, were the prophets and rabbis like rashi and rambam just delusional old men?

thank you for taking time to read and i eagerly await your response by email or maybe a post on the blog.

Sincerely,
biding my time

Hi "biding",

I'll respond by blog so that other people can contribute answers as well and so that other kids in your situation might be able to read it.

I sympathize with your situation -- that sounds hard. I personally didn't start being really skeptical until college, when I was already out of the house. My parents were also heartbroken, but since I wasn't living under their roof, there were fewer complications. We do have a pretty good relationship to this day, though. I'm sure they'd still prefer I be religious, but it's not really an issue between us anymore. We just don't really talk about it.

It sounds reasonable to finish up high school where you are if that's what you want to do. As for Israel, I'd do some thinking about what you're trying to get out of it. Some yeshivas are intellectual, some are for partying, and some specialize in making people frum out. It can be pretty tough I think if you go to one that doesn't fit. A lot of people end up just hanging out with friends or partying, so if that's what you're into it might not matter that much. I was kind of introverted and not so into partying, so even though my yeshiva wasn't a good fit for me (too right-wing) I mostly just kept to myself and read books all year. It kind of sucked. Something I wish I'd considered more seriously was doing some kind of joint program like the one at Bar-Ilan, which is coed. You can still do some Orthodox stuff for your own sake or your parents', and you get the experience of living in Israel (based in secular Tel Aviv instead of Jerusalem) but you also get more of a college-like experience. Or, of course, you could just head straight to college.

As for "going crazy" in college, if that's what you decide to do, try to be smart about it. :-) Just because you don't believe in Orthodoxy's rules doesn't mean that you have to be some kind of crazy hedonist. Just look at Charlie Sheen to see where that gets you -- it looks fun, but it's probably not the best way to lasting happiness and healthiness. I think some level of experimentation is probably a good idea for most people, but just be smart about it. If you go that route, educate yourself about safe sex, try to have some real relationships, don't kill yourself with alcohol, and try to use other drugs responsibly if you choose to use them.

Onto the questions. I don't think there's a singular "atheist perspective," so I just try to go with what the actual experts on a subject believe. You can usually just look something up on Wikipedia for some pointers.

For example, on the "Were the Jews ever in the desert?" question, Wikipedia offers:

While a Moses-like figure may have existed in Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century BCE, archaeology cannot prove or disprove his existence, and the "overwhelming" archaeological evidence of the largely indigenous origins of Israel "leaves no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness."[20] For this reason, most archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit."[21] A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness,[16] and it has become increasingly clear that Iron Age Israel - the kingdoms of Judah and Israel - has its origins in Canaan, not Egypt:[22][23]

If you're really interested, of course, you won't stop at Wikipedia but will follow the references to primary sources.

It's really not possible to rule out the existence of, for example, the forefathers, but suffice it to say there doesn't seem to be a good secular reason to believe that they are anything more than literary/mythical creations. The important thing to realize is that the majority of secular scholars believe the chumash was written by multiple authors over a long period of time and put together somewhere around 600-450 BCE, over 500 years after Moses would have existed. So the validity of the text as a historical document has to be understood in that context.

The story of Chanukkah seems to be at least "based on a true story" in that the Temple obviously existed and there was a war, etc. There is some scholarly disagreement on the nature of that war. See Wikipedia for more information. As for Purim, secular scholars seem to think that Megillat Esther is basically a historical novella and point to various historical inaccuracies in the text.

I think it's possible to continue to study and even enjoy chumash and gemarah on an intellectual level even if you don't think that they represent the truth, but I'm sure it's not for everybody, so I'd just treat it like any other subject I didn't really care about as far as school goes.

The second part of your question asks about the prophets and rabbis. With regard to prophets, some scholars hypothesize that Ezekial, for example, may have suffered from a form of epilepsy, but that's really just guesswork as far as I'm concerned. There are of course many mental illnesses or drug-induced states that we know cause people to act the way the prophets are said to have acted. I have a neighbor, for example, who can talk for hours in a very manic state about all kinds of visions and wild experiences she has had. I'm not a doctor, but she appears to me to be schizophrenic. It could also be that prophets were normal people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and that the stories about them were just exaggerated and embellished.

I don't think it's fair to call rabbis like Rashi or the Rambam delusional, in the sense of the word that implies mental illness. Orthodox Rabbis today aren't delusional, they just believe things that I don't think are true. I assume that the same is true of Rashi and the Rambam, although they at least have the excuse that they lived before the scientific revolution. It's fun to think about if the Rambam, who was obviously a brilliant man interested in philosophy, would have become an atheist if he were born in the last couple of centuries, but there's really no way to know.

Anyway, I hope I've been helpful. Good luck in getting through the next few years and making some big decisions. It might be helpful to see a psychologist to help you think through everything. I advise even adults who become skeptics to consider seeking therapy just because leaving Orthodoxy and all the things that go with that (family issues, big changes in personal philosophy and the meaning of life, etc.) can sometimes be hard to work through on your own. I've found it helpful myself.

Feel free to write to me again if you have any questions, etc.

How Often Are You Wrong?

Many people have said kids should learn how to program. They usually bring up how this helps them think logically. They don't point out that it also helps them fail over and over and over. The failure is unambiguous, and you can't argue with it. Your program doesn't compile. And that's clearly because you were wrong about something. No matter how sure you were that you were right, you were wrong. Day after day after day.

But the thing is, the goals are usually simple and achievable, so you get it right in the end. So it's not soul-crushing failure.

And when I fail, it's not like, "Ho-hum. I failed again. Whatever." Often, my whole world turns upside-down, at least briefly. "I KNOW I did that right! There MUST be something wrong with the compiler!" But, no, I'm wrong again, today. Just like I was yesterday. Just like I will be tomorrow, even though I will think I'm right. --grumblebee, on MetaFilter

One of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately is that I finally started to realize how futile it is to try to convince non-skeptical people they are wrong.

The above quote resonates with me because I am a computer programmer, although my skepticism predates my ability to write code. I've been skeptical as long as I can remember. Maybe it's innate or maybe I picked it up early on.

Either way, I forget that most people aren't skeptical when I'm arguing and it can be frustrating. My opponent will make an argument that's so bad the conclusion isn't even relevant to the argument. The conclusion might be right or it might be wrong, but the argument is so bad it doesn't matter. I think he must be arguing in bad faith and I get angry.

But the truth is most people don't take seriously the possibility that they are wrong, so they don't bother to examine the arguments they make. Whenever I write a post or even just a comment, I pause before submitting it to look at it from my opponent's point of view. Sometimes I see immediately that it's a weak argument that wouldn't have convinced me if I didn't already agree with the conclusion and I don't post it. Most people don't seem to do that.

It's obvious if you think about it that there is a substantial possibility we're wrong any time we disagree with anybody. Even if you're very smart, there are almost always very smart people on the other side of the debate, whatever it is. Popular subjects of debate like religion and politics usually have books and books written by people smarter than all of us arguing all sides.

And yet most people assume they're right most of the time even when there are millions of reasons they should be skeptical. For example, everybody agrees that the overwhelming majority of people born into exclusive religions must be seriously wrong about their religious beliefs, since in general only one (at the most!) of the religions can be true. And yet how many Orthodox Jews have given serious thought to the idea that if they were raised Muslim, they would believe in Islam with the same strength that they currently believe in Orthodox Judaism? That their beliefs are more likely due to an accident of birth than they are true?

They wouldn't be stupider or less educated or less honest, but they would believe something completely incompatible with what they now believe. So, knowing that, how can they have so much confidence in their beliefs? It's crazy!

If you care about being right, then it means you have to think differently than most people. So what do you do to minimize the odds of being wrong?

Many people turn to reason, because when you reason well you feel like you are moving productively towards the truth. And yet it's easy to see that reason alone is insufficient because very smart people on all sides of almost all debates are able to reason in a way that is utterly convincing to themselves and to their allies. Search the web and you'll find very long, reasoned arguments for a 6,000 year-old universe, for 9/11 being an inside job, and for every religion under the sun.

Now you'll just come back and say that those are examples of bad reasoning and that your reasoning is good. But I'll come back and ask, how do you know? Everybody thinks that their reasoning is good. Psychological denial is insidious: by definition you don't know when you're doing it.

Computer programming is one of a few disciplines that force you to test your reasoning against reality constantly. And even in that field, many, many mistakes sneak through because not every line of code can be tested against every possible configuration of variables. It's actually amazingly hard to write code that can stand up against even casual use without turning up bugs. Just imagine how many bugs must be in your reasoning that is never tested even a little bit against reality!

This is why I'll trust a scientist over a theologian any day. Both scientists and theologians make errors in their reasoning, but scientists run experiments. No experiment is perfect, just as no amount of testing can find all the bugs in a significant computer program, but the theologian is like a computer programmer who just writes his code on the blackboard and never even tries to run it. Or worse -- he's like a programmer who writes code on the blackboard that references other code written by older programmers going back generations and generations for thousands of years even though no compiler even exists for the language they're using. There's just no chance that program could be even close to accurate.

Even worse, we know for a fact that theologians in the past were wrong about the issues they touched on that turned out to be testable. Before science, theologians made all sorts of claims about the material world that turned out to be false. The rabbis of the Talmud made all sorts of ridiculous claims about spontaneous generation of maggots in meat. (The proto-scientists of the day made some of the same mistakes, of course, but compare the way today's scientists treat those proto-scientists' ideas to the way today's Orthodox rabbis treat those rabbis' ideas.) Even undisputed geniuses like Plato and Aristotle who relied on reason rather than experimentation made some whoppers about reality. If even Aristotle can be laughably wrong, how stupid for us to think we can reason in a vacuum!

Always remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. In matters like religion that lie far outside of the world of experimentation and empiricism, you're almost certainly wrong about pretty much everything. Not a little wrong, but a LOT wrong. Like Aristotle and his five elements wrong.

In more mundane matters, at least spend some time trying to prove yourself wrong. Never argue one side of an issue only. Read every argument you write before you submit it and try to think about what a smart opponent would make of it. Think of what YOU would make of it, if you happened to have been born in a different country or to a different family or religion. Be especially skeptical of beliefs that are convenient, beliefs that support your lifestyle or your people or your country or your side of anything.

For practice, find a popular argument that is irrelevant to you. For example, some land dispute in a country far away between people who don't share your ethnicity or your religion. Note how fervently each side is sure they are right and the other side is not just wrong, but OBVIOUSLY wrong. Then go back to an argument that is very much relevant to you and try to look at it from the other side, and ask yourself how you can really, really know that you're the one who's not in denial.

The truth of the matter is, unless you're very unusually skeptical and very unusually open to empirical reality, you're almost certainly one of the people in deep denial.

What differentiates you from the great mass of deluded wishful thinkers? What steps are you taking to make sure you aren't deceiving yourself?

Books Which Have Influenced Me the Most

(This meme which nobody is calling a meme was started by Tyler Cowen.)

These are the books, off the top of my head, that influenced me the most. No particular order.

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card.

Ender's Game is the story of a nerdy kid who uses his strategic and tactical genius to defeat the schoolyard bullies and then save the human race. In space. The perfect escapist fantasy for a nerdy kid, in other words. It also introduced me to the idea of blogging. In the 1980s.

Speaker for the Dead is a much different book, less action and more philosophy. The title refers to a priest-like figure, who is invited to learn about and tell the whole truth of someone who has died, as a memorial. I was blown away by the idea of telling the whole truth about someone, the good parts and the bad parts, the parts parents would be proud of and the ones that they would be ashamed of. The idea was that it's impossible to really know somebody, even a horrible somebody, without loving them. That made a big impression on me.

When I grew up, having read all of Card's books, I found out that he is a Mormon and a homophobic bigot. That was an important lesson, too, in that it conflicted so much with the spirit of empathy (and, as an interesting side note, the homoeroticism) that pervades his fiction. I also grew to become horrified by the ruthless and simplistic ideas about fighting and war that are featured in Ender's Game and that I heard Card himself relate to American foreign policy when I attended a book signing as a young adult.


The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, Richard Dawkins.

I'm pretty sure I was headed in that direction already, but I believe that I picked up The Blind Watchmaker a believer and put it down an atheist. It takes on the famed watchmaker argument for God's existence (a.k.a. the argument from design) and not only defeats it but demonstrates the elegant beauty of Darwinian evolution.


Contact, Carl Sagan.

I found Sagan's secular sense of awe exhilarating. Contact introduced me to the idea that science could provide the same sense of transcendence that religion can at its very best without requiring you to believe in the obviously untrue. It also has a great part about what a message from a real Intelligent Designer might look like.


Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins.

A friend turned me on to Still Life with Woodpecker while I was at yeshiva in Israel. When I returned home, I quickly found all of Robbins's other books and read them, too. Collectively, they blew up everything I thought I knew about writing and fiction. Another Roadside Attraction introduced this still-sheltered young man to a host of characters and ideas about society and religion that just about blew my mind. From mocking the Catholic Church's vast stores of obscene wealth at the Vatican to introducing radical hippie ideas like just enjoying the rain to basically advocating psychedelics, it provided a lot of thought-fodder for an Orthodox Jew raised by squares.


A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking.

I read this a couple of years before The Blind Watchmaker and I think it laid the groundwork for my future atheism. Hawking doesn't come out and say that there's no God, but he does argue that there doesn't need to be a God to explain the universe. The cosmology he lays out in the book is so much vaster and more awe inspiring than the one laid out in the Torah that it makes Genesis look like a fairy tale for children.


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.

This book introduced me to Eastern philosophy. It suffers from not being as good as the author thinks it is, but it introduced me to mindfulness and inspired me to learn about the Eastern religions. I don't think I got anything worthwhile from Pirsig's philosophy itself, though.


Feeling Good, David D. Burns.

Having suffered from a chronic, low-grade depression for a few years, I read scores of self-help books. Most make you feel motivated and optimistic for a day or two but don't change your life. Feeling Good is a miracle. Dr. Burns explains the theory behind cognitive-behavioral therapy in a very accessible way and it made me aware for the first time of all the automatic thoughts I had which had until that moment gone completely unexamined. The self-help exercises in this book had immediate, dramatic effects for me in an extremely positive way. It also changed the way I thought about the human mind and the human brain.


My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok.

All of Potok's novels are fantastic, but I think this one had the most effect on me. The story of a young hasid torn between his religion and family on the one hand and his artistic integrity and expression -- one might say his soul -- on the other, it brings the reader into the Asher Lev's turmoil. Although I am not an artist, I too felt the conflict between family and religion on the one side and my own integrity and perhaps my soul on the other. This book made me feel less alone while I was going through that.

A Modern Bookburning

Via XGH.

My Message For A Gay Orthodox Jew

Chana writes about a gay Orthodox YU student with a blog.

Here is my message for him and anyone else in a similar position:

Just read about you on Chana's blog. My heart goes out to people like you who suffer unnecessarily. I grew up Orthodox and it is my honest belief that it is 100% untrue. There is no God and he did not write or dictate or inspire the Torah. The words of Leviticus were written by mere mortals a couple thousand years ago and should no more keep you from finding and experiencing love (and/or sex) than the Book of Mormon should.

I've been around Orthodoxy and Orthodox Jews long enough to know I'm never going to convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced (unless they're unusually intellectually honest AND curious) but I really, truly believe that the case is a slam dunk if you are willing to consider it.

There's just no good reason for you to live a life of suffering and deprivation. I hope you realize that sooner rather than later.

Feel free to email me, and good luck.

In Defense of "Uncivil" Atheists

A reader of The Daily Dish writes:

I understand where you are coming from when you say, "Atheists are much more likely to be ostracized for their beliefs, but that does not excuse incivility on their part." Even as an atheist, I get annoyed by many of the tactics of hardlined atheists and do wish for more civility in the discussion, but one has to realize that its incredibly hard to be an atheist and even the best of us have days where we can't bite our tongues. Surely as a gay person Andrew has had those moments where he just snapped at someone's homophobia.

Most people are aware that admitting to atheism pretty much bars you from political office, immediately makes your patriotism suspect, can ruin friendships, families, and careers. For reasons of self-preservation, we're often compelled to live "in the closet". In some ways, its tempting to make parallels with other minorities that have been discriminated against over the years, be it based on gender, race, sexual preference, etc. But unlike those groups, we're not forbidden to vote, get married, buy houses, eat at the same restaurants, or any of the other rights other groups had to fight for. In some ways, even I, as an atheist that has been discriminated against time and time again feel like maybe I don't really have any right to complain. But I am treated very differently, and very unfairly, and in a country where "all men are created equal" its time we put an end to that. But what is there to end?

There are no real battles to be fought and won other than general acceptance. Laws about religion are already on the books. There are no acts of Congress that can alleviate the acts of discrimination we face. It is almost purely a battle of intangible social constructs. There are no equivalents to the marches against Prop 8 or riots against faulty elections. There are very few ways to channel the anger, sadness, and frustration of our discrimination.

Every atheist is bound to have a day just bad enough where they explode on some poor believer who pushes too hard and every atheist has felt at time that even the most accepting of believers is tacitly agreeing to the discrimination we face. Sure, I disapprove of many of the less civil tactics some of the more well-known atheists engage in, but I can't say that I don't understand what pushed them to that point. But, in the grander scheme of things, as a group we've yet to do anything as "uncivil" as Stonewall, or the riots we saw during the civil rights movement. Many of these acts are not only forgiven, but celebrated as reasonable responses in the face of discrimination, yet we're screamed at any time an atheist acts like a jerk on TV, writes something a bit testy on a website, or files the occasionally dumb lawsuit.

I dare say that in the history of discriminated groups in this country, atheists have been the most civil and with plenty of room to spare, yet still, we're told that its too much and that we need to calm down and scale it back a notch.

So no, I don't like the incivility some bring to the discussion, but if they didn't, would anyone even be talking about this issues? If everyone remained "civil" it'd get swept up under the rug like it always has in the past. Their incivility might not solve the problem, but it sheds enough of a spotlight on the subject to open a door for the civil conversations that need to happen. Without them I strongly believe the conversation would never happen at all.

As someone who has been guilty of incivility more than once, I agree. Growing up in a society that equates religiosity with morality and patriotism and in a community that equates leaving Orthodoxy with disloyalty, dysfunction, and selfish hedonism and essentially pretends that we no longer exist and don't need to be taken seriously, it's hard not to lash out sometimes.

This War Has Nothing To Do With Religion, Part II

Tony Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor:

John Burton, Mr Blair's political agent in his Sedgefield constituency for 24 years, says that Labour's most successful ever leader – in terms of elections won – was driven by the belief that "good should triumph over evil".

"It's very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior," he says. "It was part of Tony living out his faith."

Mr Blair has previously admitted that he was influenced by his Christian faith, but Mr Burton reveals for the first time the strength of his religious zeal...

"But Tony's Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better."

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair's mentor, says that his religion gave him a "total belief in what's right and what's wrong", leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as "a moral cause".

Funny, that's exactly what Random said in response to my claim that religiosity and hawkishness are linked:

Well, if we're going to blunt about it, we could say that the real overlap is between religiosity and a clear and firm sense of right and wrong, and in particular the idea that evil should be fought and not relativised into something acceptable.

Yes, exactly.

And this is an interesting difference between the U.S. and Britain:

Mr Burton makes the comments in a book he has written, and which is published this week, called "We Don't Do God".

In it he portrays a prime minister determined to follow a Christian agenda despite attempts to silence him from talking about his faith.

"While he was at Number 10, Tony was virtually gagged on the whole question of religion," says Mr Burton.

"Alastair [Campbell] was convinced it would get him into trouble with the voters...

Tony Blair complained in 2007 that he had been unable to talk about his faith while in office as he would have been perceived as "a nutter".

"It's difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system," he said. "If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say 'yes, that's fair enough' and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter."

In Britain being a religious nut is a liability while in America it's a requirement. Either way, we ended up with religious nuts in both countries at the same time and, as a result, over a hundred thousand people are dead. Yaaay God!

Reasons To Believe

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away -- Philip K. Dick

Brooklyn Wolf asks, Do You Really Require Proof?

I don't have any absolute proof, and, truth be told, I don't need any. Just by looking at the wonderfulness of nature, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, I am convinced that God exists. When I look at the universe and consider the possibilities that it either sprung into existence by itself or had help, I take "had help." Yes, it's only a gut feeling and yes, it falls far short of proof, but that's all I need to live my life. But I'm also honest about it. I know that it's not proof, and I state the same up front to anyone who asks. I don't require "solid proof" for my beliefs -- and, if you seriously consider what I said, neither do you.

This was my response:

"Proof" is the wrong word. What people need are reasons. For some people, the fact that they like Orthodox Judaism is reason enough to believe. For others, the fact that their parents and ancestors believe is reason enough.

And then some people just want to know what's TRUE, period. We don't want reasons to believe if those reasons don't help us believe what's true. We want to avoid the traps other minds fall into: denial, logical fallacies, and sheltering ourselves from people and ideas that might destroy our beliefs.

We see that people with Muslim parents tend to believe in Allah and people with Jewish parents tend to believe in YHWH and we realize that people who believe for the kinds of reasons that we believed basically believe whatever they want to believe.

So we become skeptics. We set out to find what's true. And we steel ourselves to face the truth even if we have to give up some cherished beliefs and even if accepting the truth means that our families and friends and communities might reject us.

I'm not saying this makes us better people, or more healthy psychologically. I'm sure the psychological reasons for believing what our communities believe evolved for a reason. What I am saying is that we're more likely to believe in what's true.

If you'd rather believe what your loved ones believe and what your parents believed and what lets you live in an Orthodox community, you should probably stick with whatever it is that lets you do that. If you want to know what's true, become a skeptic.

The Pope on Condoms in Africa

Pope Benedict XVI: condoms make Aids crisis worse

While en route from Rome to his first stop, Cameroon, the Pope said that the condition was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems."

Speaking on board his official plane, the pontiff insisted that the Roman Catholic Church is in the forefront of the battle against Aids, advocating sexual abstinence and fidelity within marriage as a way of fighting the disease.

How many additional people are going to get sick and die because of this idiot and his religious dogma? A million?

EDIT: A commenter points me to this article quoting the director of AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies saying that the Pope is right.

I apologize for my questions above if this correction holds up. Can anyone who knows more about the subject weigh in?

How Religion Causes Good Men To Do Evil: Gay Marriage Edition

There's been a lot of talk about how African-Americans disproportionately voted against gay marriage in California while simultaneously voting for Barack Obama. It's true that they did vote against it disproportionately -- 70% to 30% -- but focusing on race misses the point. The driving factor, of course, is religion. African-Americans just happen to be more religious than whites.



84% to 16%. Wow. That beats even the "White Republicans" demographic, which went for prop 8 by 82%-18%.

Previously: How Religion Causes Good Men To Do Evil, Parts One and Two. Mormons Dominating the Fight Against Gay Marriage.

Bill Maher and Mike Huckabee Discuss Religion

Mormons Dominating the Fight Against Gay Marriage in California

Andrew Sullivan's been following the story:

In California, this letter was sent to every congregation in California with direct instructions that it be read last June. Money quote:

The Church’s teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children... Local Church leaders will provide information about how you may become involved in this important cause. We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.

And it's working:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has mobilized followers to give an estimated 77% of donations to support California's proposed marriage ban.

Californians Against Hate released figures Tuesday showing that $17.67 million was contributed by 59,000 Mormon families since August to groups like Yes on 8. Contributions in support of Prop. 8 total $22.88 million. Additionally, the group reports that Mormons have contributed $6.9 million to pass a a similar law, Proposition 102, in Arizona.

"It is a staggering amount of money and an even more staggering percentage of the overall campaign receipts," Fred Karger of Californians Against Hate said in a press release. "The Mormon Church, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has hijacked the campaigns in both California and Arizona, where voters face constitutional amendments to end same-sex marriage."

You can counter a little of this evil by donating to the good guys.

This seems like something we atheists should mobilize on -- and even better if we can get our liberal religious friends to do so as well. Unfortunately, it might already be too late.

Ellen Says Vote No On California Proposition 8

Yom Kippur Thoughts of the Day

Two thoughts:

The Meaning of Yom Kippur

I just had a discussion with a fellow ex-Ortho about what Yom Kippur means to us now. For him, it's an opportunity to act like it's just a normal day and to not let any of the brainwashing he went through as a kid make him feel guilty. For me, it's kind of like a happy day where I get to remember each year where I have come from and what I don't have to do any more.

God as Big Brother

Imagine that we atheists are right that God does not exist.

That means that billions of people all over the world are teaching their children that an imaginary being is following them everywhere they go and watching everything they do, even listening to their thoughts, and he's going to judge them for all of it. And they behave differently because of this belief. They whisper words of thanks and prayer and feel guilty when they have a "bad" thought and try to be good little boys and girls all the time and sometimes they think they hear him talking to them. And most of them go their whole lives believing that. It's an amazingly creepy feat of social engineering and behavior modification.

Religulous: A Review

Religulous was funny and entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying. Like Borat by the same director, most of the humor comes at the expense of the unsuspecting, the unprepared, and the ill-equipped. Maher debates with some people so out of their league that I just felt sorry for them. Rather than being an argument against religion, the movie too often feels like an argument against basic stupidity.

I liked the film better when he chose worthy targets like the Vatican astronomer, who spoke more eloquently against creationism and Biblical literalism than Maher does, and a Catholic priest who as far as I could tell holds approximately the same religious beliefs as I do. His conversation with scientist Francis Collins was far too short and Collins didn't get a fair shake. I would have loved to see a movie that just focused on those people.

Some of the unintelligent people he interviewed did not gain my sympathy, as they are in positions of power and deserve to be exposed. Democratic Senator Mark Pryor of Alabama comes off especially badly, and there are a couple of pastors (and one man who claims to be the Second Coming of Jesus) who seem like they're in it just for the money and prestige.

Maher makes no pretense at being fair or balanced. He selectively edits, adds subtitles, and stitches in funny shots from other movies for maximum effect. His primary tool is ridicule, and while that may be the only reasonable response to something like the tenets of Scientology or the talking snake from Eden, it's a tool he goes to a little too often. The documentary is at its best when he lets the craziness speak for itself, like his tour of the Institute for Science and Halacha in Israel, which creates gadgets to exploit loopholes in the laws of Shabbos.

The section on Islam in this film is not funny or novel. Instead of mocking the ridiculous beliefs as he did with other religions, he focuses on the violence and hatred, which everybody is already aware of. There was only one part of the Islam section that worked -- a conversation with an intelligent and moderate Muslim woman who had some trouble defending the hateful and violence-inciting verses of the Koran. This was the only part of the movie where I thought Maher successfully took down a religious moderate.

The end of the movie is basically a juxtoposition of believers wishing for the end times and a montage of truck bombs and nuclear explosions. I found it unsatisfying and too simplistic, although there is obviously a large grain of truth there.

It is something of a thrill to see an anti-religious movie on the big screen, and to be with an audience that was mostly approving. Only once before, at a Richard Dawkins event, have I been in a room with so many open non-believers. It's a cool feeling.

What if there were no God? Politically conservative and liberal Christians imagine their lives without faith

Interesting:

A sample of devout Christian adults, ranging widely in political orientation, described what their lives (and the world) might be like had they never embraced faith. Politically conservative Christians (also scoring high on right-wing authoritarianism) tended to imagine a life deficient in impulse control, wherein unrestrained sexual and aggressive urges, addictive behaviors, and human selfishness undermined the social good. By contrast, politically liberal Christians (also scoring low on right-wing authoritarianism) imagined an empty and barren world, devoid of the emotional intensity that makes life worth living. Gender differences were also observed, but they did not interfere with the relation between political orientation and the narrative themes. In accord with theoretical writings regarding normative and humanistic ideologies, the findings suggest that, at least among American Christians, political conservatism may entail a fear of, or strong sensitivity to, the prospects of conflict and chaos, whereas political liberalism may entail an equally strong fear of, or sensitivity to, emptiness.

Via Razib.

I've noticed the conservative fear of an anything-goes world without God, but I'd never associated a fear of an empty, meaningless world with liberals in particular.

It does seem to fit nicely into George Lakoff's model (YouTube) of the two parental metaphors that underlie conservatism and liberalism in America: that of the strict-father family and the nurturant-parent family. Take away the strict father for conservatives and we're Sodom and Gomorrah. Take away the nurturant parent for liberals and we're at a loss for what we should do.

David Foster Wallace has Died

My favorite author hanged himself on Friday. I don't even have a second-favorite.

I wrote a review of his book Infinite Jest, which is my favorite book, on my other, long-neglected blog. Excerpt from my review:

It's not a beautiful book; there are no lyric descriptions of love and beauty. It's about addiction and depression and the futility and inadequacy of intelligence and success. It takes place primarily in a tennis academy and a rehab clinic. It's also, in part, a retelling of Hamlet.

His writing was informed by his depression. Excerpt from an interview:

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

(I wrote about how Alcoholics Anonymous is NOT EFFECTIVE compared to many other forms of treatment here.)

DFW attended church, but his writing has a real atheistic feel to it. It's honest and real and unflinching while at the same time imaginative and playful. My guess is that he wanted to believe, that he saw that as perhaps a way out of depression, but that he couldn't really do it. From later in that same interview:

[Interviewer:] The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

[DFW:] It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

I think, and again, I'm guessing here, that DFW saw religion in much the same way -- that there's something real and helpful there and all this intelligence and education and ironical detachment gets in the way of that. I hope he didn't neglect what would most likely have helped -- professional psychological treatment -- for religion.

Religion is somewhat correlated with happiness and longevity, but I suspect that if you're an educated, intelligent depressed non-believer, psychological treatment is more likely to help than attempting to convince yourself to believe.

DFW's essays were perhaps even better than his novels. My favorite is "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness," collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. (His work sounds pretentious, but when you get to know it, you see that he's using literary playfulness as a tool. He's not just showing off.)

DFW was the editor of The Best American Essays 2007, and his introduction to that book is itself a brilliant essay. I was a little underwhelmed by Host, an essay about right-wing talk radio host John Ziegler, but it's worth a read. He also wrote an essay about John McCain in 2000 for Rolling Stone, which has now become a book. Here's an interview with the Wall Street Journal about the book.

Here is David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose. Skip to 23:15:

Fan site The Howling Fantods has everything you'd ever want to know about DFW.

(Public service announcement: If you are depressed or think you might be, please get yourself a good psychologist. It's not something you have to figure out on your own or trust your religious tradition to help you with. I see a psychologist myself. Feel free to email me.)

Update: According to the NY Times obit, Wallace was receiving medical care:

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst...

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Palin's Daughter

Besides the cheap (but truthful) shots about abstinence-only education and the correlation between religious fundamentalism and unwed pregnancy, the latest revelation that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant raises serious questions about Sarah Palin's "family values." She knew that accepting the VP nomination would thrust her daughter, already going through a trying time, into the national news and probably turn her into the butt of late-night television jokes. I have nothing but sympathy for the daughter, who is after all just a kid and not a national political figure, but I can't see how Sarah Palin is okay putting her through all of this.

I guess it does reinforce her anti-abortion cred. It also puts human faces on the abortion debate. Between Palin's new granddaugher and her own recent newborn with Down's, we'll see two adorable (aren't they all?) babies on that national stage that many people would have aborted as fetuses. I'm not sure who that helps, politically, but at least the Palins are wealthy and powerful enough that the children will have all the health care and other services they need. This isn't a 17-year-old who's going to be on her own raising her child, and this won't be a Down's Syndrome baby who wants for all of the various therapies he will need throughout his life.

Quote of the Day: Obama Not the Antichrist

The authors of the Left Behind series say Obama isn't the Anti-Christ.

"I've gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist," says novelist Jenkins. "I tell everyone that I don't think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics."

"I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist," adds LaHaye, "but from my reading of scripture, he doesn't meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American."

Via Andrew Sullivan.