I try to present facts and logic and solutions rather than just opinions.

Please send any reasoned disagreements to me.

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These things are fakes and delusions:

• God (and most religions, and life beyond death).
• UFO's.
• Extra-sensory perception (most kinds).
• Horoscopes and the Zodiac.
• Bigfoot and Yeti.
• Ghosts.

There are common threads to many examples of these things:

• Someone trying to make a buck:
  • Support your church: donate money.
  • Buy UFO dolls in the Roswell gift shops.
  • Pay me to read your palm or write your horoscope.
  • I can talk to the dead; watch my TV show.
  • Come visit our area and see Bigfoot or the crop-circles or the Loch Ness monster.


• Someone enjoying publicity / power trip / making their life more exciting:
  • Obey me: I'm a priest.
  • I'm special: God speaks to me.
  • I'm not just an ordinary Joe living in a trailer: I saw a UFO.
  • I'm special: I can predict earthquakes.
  • I'm special: I have ESP.
  • I'm special: I have "the healing touch".
  • I'm special: I'm a big "scientist" announcing thatss Cleo.

These delusions are not just "fun" and harmless:

• They can cost the rest of us money:
  • The government gives tax breaks to churches.
  • Various congressmen have forced the government to spend money searching for UFO's and investigating paranormal stuff.
  • The USA government supports Israel financially and otherwise partly because of religious beliefs.


• Religion can cause pain and violence:
  • The Crusades.
  • The Inquisition.
  • Spaniards exterminating or enslaving the natives of South America.
  • Witch-hunts and witch-burnings.
  • Pogroms against Jews and Gypsies.
  • Bombings of abortion clinics.
  • Faith-based terrorism (such as the 9/11 attacks).
  • Faith-based violence against gays.
  • Partly-religious wars: Israel/Palestinian, Northern Ireland, Pakistan/India, etc.
  • Faith-based suicide/murder (Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinriko).
  • And it is becoming clear that Islam is a religion of violence. What other religion kills people who draw cartoons or make movies it doesn't like, or has priests advocating violence from the pulpit, preaching hatred and jihad ? Sure, the Koran may say lots of peaceful things, but look how the religion is actually practiced.
  [Although it is true that the worst modern violence has been non-religious: WW I, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Korea, Viet Nam, Pol Pot, Rwanda, etc.]
  


• Religion can cause dangerous behavior:
  • People who go to faith healers first, then to a doctor when it's too late.
  • People who refuse medical treatment for themselves or their children on religious grounds.
  • Women who get back-alley abortions because the church has convinced the government to ban birth-control and legal abortion.
  • We had a president (Reagan) whose influential wife believed in horoscopes and consulted an astrologer. What if there had been a serious crisis and the horoscope said "do X" ? George W. Bush says God talks to him.
  • Christian evangelicals in the USA are saying the Second Coming is near, so we need not bother to do anything about global warming.


• Religion makes people waste their time:
  • At various jobs, I've known several young black women who spent every free minute reading the Bible. Imagine the improvements in their lives if they'd been reading useful things such as "how to write better", "how to handle your money", "how to get out of debt", "how to use Excel", "how to be better organized", or whatever.

Why do people believe in God ? Possibilities:

• Fear of Death.
  
  Death is bad, mysterious, often painful, nasty, ugly. So people have chosen to deny that it really occurs (by believing in an afterlife).



• Desire for Parent.
  
  Our early childhood is fixated on parents who nurture and protect us. They provide wonderful food, shelter, clothing, love, teaching. When we grow up, we miss that feeling of security. So we create a "super-parent" who nurtures and protects our entire universe (God).



• Desire for Control / Patterns.
  
  We like to see simple patterns and know what the rules are; it is comforting to live in a simple and rational world (there's less to know and think about, and thinking hurts). But as we learn more about it, we find that the real world is more complex and confusing and uncertain and scary than we'd like. So we invent a God who enforces a set of rules (10 Commandments; do this and you'll go to heaven; obey me and everything will be great; worship the sun and the crops will grow; become a martyr and have 70 virgins in paradise).
  
  From Mother Jones interview of Bill Maher:
  "MJ: Why do you think Americans cling so loyally to conspiracy theories? Is it the hope that there is planning mastery behind what is actually chaos and madness?
  BM: Exactly. Many people can't deal with unanswered questions, which, of course, religion exploits by providing answers, even if they are just made up by someone. This is also why we love TV shows and movies that neatly wrap up everything in exactly an hour or two."



• Inertia / Peer Pressure.
  
  If all of your family and friends and community believe strongly, and you've been instructed firmly since birth, of course you'll believe too. The penalties for un-belief are large (disapproval, ostracism, sometimes persecution or expulsion or death).

How do such elaborate, widely-believed religions get created ?

• The people who create and foster them (priests, politicos) have strong motives to do so.
  
  They get power, they get money, they get respect, they move society in the direction they want.



• Many of people who believe them have strong motives to do so.
  
  See above: fear of death, desire for parent, desire for control/patterns.



• Religions have ways to encourage parents to indoctrinate their children.
  
  Most religions incorporate commands to obey your parents, respect them, support them, etc.



• Religions use the carrot (heaven) and the stick (hell) to cajol and threaten people into obeying.

How exactly do religions get created, if not by witnessing amazing miracles ?

• Many build upon other religions, older superstitions or practices.
  Most of the Jesus story comes from the previous Horus story.
  ReligiousTolerance.org's "Parallels between Jesus & Horus, an Egyptian God"



• Many include and incorporate a people's history and politics, building on those.



• Religions probably don't spring up fully-formed in a short time. Long periods of mutation, through oral transmission, with mistakes and multiple interpretations thrown in. Stories may start as "God could have", change to "God might have", then to "God did", then to "God did, and we all saw it".

The Bible:

• People have written books to "prove" the Bible is fact. They love to say it's been "proven" to be historically, medically, scientifically, geographically true. But they're (deliberately) confusing "accurate in some places" with "proven to be entirely true". Just because the Bible is sprinkled with true facts of various kinds doesn't make the whole thing true. I could write a book and mention in it that the sky is blue; that doesn't make my book "scientifically proven to be true".



• The Bible was put together from writings created at various times, by various authors, often written long after the events involved. And the various religions have different Bibles, choosing to include or exclude various pieces. And then it went through translations, from oral-tradition Aramaic to Greek to Latin to modern languages. And some of the translations of well-known verses are wrong (for example, John 21: 15-18, according to "Not Everyone Calls Me Father" by Edwin Daschbach SVD).
  From "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins:
  "To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries."



• Some religious people seem to pick and choose which pieces of the Bible to take literally or symbolicly. If a piece makes sense, it's the literal word of God. If another piece clearly conflicts with logic or reality, they say that piece must be symbolic. But maybe it's just wrong !
  
  For example, most of what the Bible says about astronomy (including the shape of the Earth) clearly is wrong; it reflects everyday beliefs of the time it was written, which were wrong. How can it be the literal word of God and be so wrong ?



• Some religious people seem to pick and choose which pieces of the Bible they'll obey. Part of the Bible says you should be put to death if you curse your father; another says death for working on the Sabbath; another forbids wearing clothes using "mixed fibers". Lots of American slave-owners thought of themselves as perfectly good Christians; they found no contradiction between the Bible and slavery.



• Some parts of the Bible clearly contradict other parts (e.g. the sequences of events given in the various Gospels). So some of these must be wrong; they can't all be right.



• Some well-known parts of Roman Catholicism appear nowhere in the Bible: the Pope, the Trinity.



• For the first hundred years or more after the death of Jesus, there were many different sects of Christianity, with widely varying doctrines and numbers of gods, each believing they were the one true faith and all others were heresies.

Haven't religions caused lots of good things to happen ?

• Beautiful cathedrals.
  
  Maybe religion is the only way to make the sustained 50-year effort needed to build these. But probably it could be done cheaper and simpler without all of the religious baggage.
  
  And what if the effort put into building cathedrals had been put into something else, such as sewer systems or water systems ? Maybe Europe would have been spared all those plagues.



• Religious art.
  
  In Italy, I saw at least a hundred versions of the "Assumption". All conforming to the same mold, all stuck in the same subject-matter and stylistic rut. I guess religious money helped support artists, but its effect is mixed.



• Made lots of people happy, stable, law-abiding.
  
  Yes, except when they felt guilty about sin or worried about hell, went broke giving their money to the church or paying taxes to support it, or slaughtered their infidel neighbors in a righteous war.



• Done charity work.
  
  Yes, no doubt about it, this is a very good thing.

But it's entirely possible to be a good person and do good things, without being religious (e.g., see What's an Ethical Atheist ?).

From interview of Marc Hauser in ??/2007 issue of Discover magazine:
"I think that for many who come from a religious background, religion is synonymous with morality. Some people think that if you're an atheist, you simply have no morals. That is just wrong. There are an awful lot of people who are atheists who do very, very wonderful things. As an objective question, do people who have religious backgrounds show different patterns of moral judgements than people who are atheists ? So far, the answer is a resounding no."

Some people think the government or "scientists" are conspiring to hide UFO's or to ignore ESP. But:

• Our government has proved itself totally incompetent at keeping it's biggest secrets (atom bomb secrets, names of agents in Russia, etc). Why should it be amazingly competent at hiding UFO's ? In the last 60 years this is supposed to have gone on, at least one minimum-wage security guard or dirt-poor enlisted man would have sold some real, testable evidence to a tabloid.



• If our government really had amazing secret technologies, would't it have used them against our enemies ? Don't you think our government and military used every tool they had against North Vietnam, or the Soviet Union, or Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden ?



• "Scientists" are not a monolithic organization; they fight among themselves constantly, compete with each other for money and positions and lab space, and pride themselves on being mavericks and independents. Besides, there are thousands of graduate students and associate professors desperately looking for something new that would make them famous; they'd love to get a Nobel prize for being the first to prove ESP or UFO's are real. If they were real.



• It doesn't help their credibility that many people who claim to know the "real truth" about UFO's, for example, also claim to know the "real truth" about the Kennedy assassination, Roswell, Area 51, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and every other possible conspiracy. Not likely.

A simple test of horoscopes: go to a big library and read your horoscope for last month in every magazine you can find. Write down the major points of each one. Then look at the whole list; are there contradictions ? Why ? And why do some of your horoscopes mention one thing strongly while others don't mention it at all ?

A simple test of premonitions: every single time you have a premonition that something will happen, write it down immediately, with the date and as many specifics as you can. Keep the list of them for a while (maybe a year), and see how many have come true.

Some people say "how sad, don't you believe in anything ?"
Yes, I "believe in" reality. It's beautiful, ugly, exciting, boring, simple, complicated, pleasant, painful. People are sexy, disgusting, friendly, infuriating, stimulating, predictable. Music, books, movies, exercise, work, play, emotion, choice. What an amazing world we live in ! Why would we have to believe fake stuff ? Oh, it's fine to let go and immerse yourself in a made-up book or movie or TV show for a while, but to really believe something false for your whole life ? Why ?

A common gambit: "The human body (or the eye, or the cell) is so amazing that it had to be created by God".
But scientists have discovered simpler organisms that form all the steps between raw elements and the complete human body. From elements in "primordial soup", someone has done experiments that show how electricity through the "soup" can create amino acids. Algae and amoebae show simple molecules and amino acids combining to form very simple life, with reproduction and inheritance. Simple cells combine and evolve and aggregate to form multi-cellular organisms. Addition of a single light-sensitive cell to such an organism gives it a tremendous advantage over its totally blind competitors, an advantage which tends to improve its chances of surviving (leading to evolution). Although many details are still fuzzy, science can show how the human body evolved from lower life forms over stunningly large periods of time. It only seems impossible if you don't know about the scientific data.

Elements of a religion:

• Theology: no god, one god, many gods ? How was the universe created and how is it run ? Afterlife ? Does god intervene in human affairs ?
• Morals: rules for human behavior and interactions.
• Organization: do believers have to obey and fund priests ? Relationships among god, scripture, liturgy, believers, priests.
• Practices: interactions between the religion and politics and society and non-believers.

Religions are so un-American ! Think of most of the great American principles: freedom, individuality, democracy, tolerance, diversity, ingenuity, self-made success. These qualities are anathema inside most religions; most churches are rigid hierarchies where you must adhere strictly to doctrine and obey the priesthood. They have no tolerance for other viewpoints. They try to crush individuality and diversity; they want everyone to think alike and not question the church.

If you are just absolutely sure your religion is the true one, it's just completely obvious, think of this:
Suppose you had happened to be born into a different religion, and brought up with your parents and family and friends and community all believing and instructing you in that other religion all your life. Wouldn't you be just as absolutely sure today that that other religion was the true one ?

Questions for God
An Atheist Debate Reference

Many religious people say the end of the world is near, mainly because "things are worse now than they've ever been". But are things really worse now than they were when the Goths were overrunning the entire civilized (Roman) world, when the Mongols owned all of Asia, when the Black Plague had killed 1/3 of the population of Europe, when the Nazis had conquered all of Europe and the Japanese much of the Pacific ? I think the world is better off now, in terms of medicine and science-provided comforts and democracy, than it's ever been. One exception is our ability to damage the world with nuclear or biological weapons. And of course the world still has plenty of war and poverty and disease; it's far from perfect.

"Intelligent Design" versus Evolution:

Proponents of "Intelligent Design" try to seem reasonable, saying "oh, Evolution is just a theory, so let's give equal weight to another theory, Intelligent Design". But we could come up with lots of other possible theories. For example: (1) that life on Earth was created by aliens who are still here and controlling us, or (2) that the non-living parts of the world were created by intelligence and life is an unintended parasite. Both of these additional theories have just as much evidence in their favor (zero) as "Intelligent Design" does, so why shouldn't we present them also ? I'm sure we could come up with another dozen theories. But so far Evolution is the theory that has the facts supporting it. And it has far more facts than just the fossil record supporting it: commonality and increasing complexity of DNA and cellular structure across animals from viruses and bacteria up to humans, for example. Continuing evolution in modern times, such as the appearance of antibiotic-resistant germs. A few points summarized from terrific article by H. Allen Orr in 5/30/2005 issue of The New Yorker magazine: Biology is full of examples of parts/proteins/structures that have been re-used or modified to serve other purposes, sometimes leaving behind vestigial or degenerate pieces or duplicate or competing mechanisms. This is far more consistent with evolution than some sort of direct design. Just because biologists can not explain every detail of some organism or part or how or in what order it evolved does not mean that evolution is wrong. Can we explain every detail of how some city grew, or some war started, well after the fact ? Intelligent Design advocates are completely focused on tearing down evolution, instead of building a positive case in favor of Intelligent Design. There is no positive case, except religious faith. Intelligent Design is a political movement masquerading as a scientific theory. What other "theory" has laws forcing its teaching ? What other "theory" produces no avenues for experimentation or confirmation or contradiction ? "Evolution" does not equal "atheism". Perhaps God decided to use evolution to create everything. Many scientists who accept evolution believe in God. A few points from article by Neil deGrasse Tyson in 11/2005 issue of Natural History magazine: The human body has lots of examples of bad design. Breathing and eating through the same orifice is a bad design: lots of people choke to death every year because of it. Having the reproductive and excretory organs share a lot of plumbing is a questionable idea. Our backs are not designed well for our upright posture. Small design additions could have made the human body far better: the ability to see many more wavelengths of light, the addition of gills so we wouldn't drown and could live underwater, feedback that could tell us about the health of our arteries and heart and blood pressure and so on. Embracing ignorance is fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence. What do you do with that line of reasoning ? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human ? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers ? From a show on NPR 2/2007: Apparently, Intelligent Design proponents have been forced to acknowledge that evolution occurs in just about every species except the human species. They still maintain it doesn't occur there. [But since humans have lots of symbiosis in them, such as the bacteria in the intestines, and our cell structures show direct lineage from other organisms, this stance isn't very tenable.] Botanical Society of America's Statement on Evolution

Richard Dawkins says interesting things about religion and science:
Interview by Laura Sheahen
Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion
Interview by Gordy Slack
Wikipedia's "The God Delusion"







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