Category: secularism

Ingersoll’s Thanksgiving Sermon

November 27, 2025 • 11:30 am

Robert G. Ingersoll was known as “The Great Agnostic,” but today they’d call him “The Great Atheist.” He was the Christopher Hitchens of his time: a great orator, thinker, and eraser of religion, and, unlike Hitchens, uniformly kind.  He was also a lawyer and the Attorney General of Illinois.  D. J. Grothe reproduced one of his writings, “A Thanksgiving Sermon” on Grothe’s public Facebook page, and I reproduce it here from the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association.  It could be renamed “Enlightenment Now”!

Notice that several scientists, including Darwin, get the nod.

A Thanksgiving Sermon

 Whom shall we thank? Standing here at the close of the 19th century — amid the trophies of thought — the triumphs of genius — here under the flag of the Great Republic — knowing something of the history of man — here on this day that has been set apart for thanksgiving, I most reverently thank the good men. the good women of the past, I thank the kind fathers, the loving mothers of the savage days. I thank the father who spoke the first gentle word, the mother who first smiled upon her babe. I thank the first true friend. I thank the savages who hunted and fished that they and their babes might live. I thank those who cultivated the ground and changed the forests into farms — those who built rude homes and watched the faces of their happy children in the glow of fireside flames — those who domesticated horses, cattle and sheep — those who invented wheels and looms and taught us to spin and weave — those who by cultivation changed wild grasses into wheat and corn, changed bitter things to fruit, and worthless weeds to flowers, that sowed within our souls the seeds of art. I thank the poets of the dawn — the tellers of legends — the makers of myths — the singers of joy and grief, of hope and love. I thank the artists who chiseled forms in stone and wrought with light and shade the face of man. I thank the philosophers, the thinkers, who taught us how to use our minds in the great search for truth. I thank the astronomers who explored the heavens, told us the secrets of the stars, the glories of the constellations — the geologists who found the story of the world in fossil forms, in memoranda kept in ancient rocks, in lines written by waves, by frost and fire — the anatomists who sought in muscle, nerve and bone for all the mysteries of life — the chemists who unraveled Nature’s work that they might learn her art — the physicians who have laid the hand of science on the brow of pain, the hand whose magic touch restores — the surgeons who have defeated Nature’s self and forced her to preserve the lives of those she labored to destroy.

I thank the discoverers of chloroform and ether, the two angels who give to their beloved sleep, and wrap the throbbing brain in the soft robes of dreams. I thank the great inventors — those who gave us movable type and the press, by means of which great thoughts and all discovered facts are made immortal — the inventors of engines, of the great ships, of the railways, the cables and telegraphs. I thank the great mechanics, the workers in iron and steel, in wood and stone. I thank the inventors and makers of the numberless things of use and luxury.
I thank the industrious men, the loving mothers, the useful women. They are the benefactors of our race.

The inventor of pins did a thousand times more good than all the popes and cardinals, the bishops and priests — than all the clergymen and parsons, exhorters and theologians that ever lived.

The inventor of matches did more for the comfort and convenience of mankind than all the founders of religions and the makers of all creeds — than all malicious monks and selfish saints.

I thank the honest men and women who have expressed their sincere thoughts, who have been true to themselves and have preserved the veracity of their souls.

I thank the thinkers of Greece and Rome. Zeno and Epicurus, Cicero and Lucretius. I thank Bruno, the bravest, and Spinoza, the subtlest of men.

I thank Voltaire, whose thought lighted a flame in the brain of man, unlocked the doors of superstition’s cells and gave liberty to many millions of his fellow-men. Voltaire — a name that sheds light. Voltaire — a star that superstition’s darkness cannot quench.

I thank the great poets — the dramatists. I thank Homer and Aeschylus, and I thank Shakespeare above them all. I thank Burns for the heart-throbs he changed into songs. for his lyrics of flame. I thank Shelley for his Skylark, Keats for his Grecian Urn and Byron for his Prisoner of Chillon. I thank the great novelists. I thank the great sculptors. I thank the unknown man who molded and chiseled the Venus de Milo. I thank the great painters. I thank Rembrandt and Corot. I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life — all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.

I thank the statesmen who have preserved the rights of man. I thank Paine whose genius sowed the seeds of independence in the hearts of ’76. I thank Jefferson whose mighty words for liberty have made the circuit of the globe. I thank the founders, the defenders, the saviors of the Republic. I thank Ericsson, the greatest mechanic of his century, for the monitor. I thank Lincoln for the Proclamation. I thank Grant for his victories and the vast host that fought for the right, — for the freedom of man. I thank them all — the living and the dead.

I thank the great scientists — those who have reached the foundation, the bed-rock — who have built upon facts — the great scientists, in whose presence theologians look silly and feel malicious.

The scientists never persecuted, never imprisoned their fellow-men. They forged no chains, built no dungeons, erected no scaffolds — tore no flesh with red hot pincers — dislocated no joints on racks, crushed no hones in iron boots — extinguished no eyes — tore out no tongues and lighted no fagots. They did not pretend to be inspired — did not claim to be prophets or saints or to have been born again. They were only intelligent and honest men. They did not appeal to force or fear. They did not regard men as slaves to be ruled by torture, by lash and chain, nor as children to be cheated with illusions, rocked in the cradle of an idiot creed and soothed by a lullaby of lies.

They did not wound — they healed. They did not kill — they lengthened life. They did not enslave — they broke the chains and made men free. They sowed the seeds of knowledge, and many millions have reaped, are reaping, and will reap the harvest: of joy.

I thank Humboldt and Helmholtz and Haeckel and Buchner. I thank Lamarck and Darwin — Darwin who revolutionized the thought of the intellectual world. I thank Huxley and Spencer. I thank the scientists one and all.

I thank the heroes, the destroyers of prejudice and fear — the dethroners of savage gods — the extinguishers of hate’s eternal fire — the heroes, the breakers of chains — the founders of free states — the makers of just laws — the heroes who fought and fell on countless fields — the heroes whose dungeons became shrines — the heroes whose blood made scaffolds sacred — the heroes, the apostles of reason, the disciples of truth, the soldiers of freedom — the heroes who held high the holy torch and filled the world with light.

With all my heart I thank them all.

Here’s Ingersoll photographed by Mathew Benjamin Brady, (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons):

New Louisiana law requires display of Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms

June 21, 2024 • 9:30 am

There is a new law in the benighted state of Louisiana requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, including colleges. It is an arrant violation of the First Amendment—indeed, it was intended to test whether it comports with the First Amendment—and it is motivated by religion.  The fact that the law is admittedly religious in origin and nature is pathetically masked by saying that the Commandments are really an important part of American history, and that three other secular documents like the Declaration of Independence may also be displayed alongside Moses’s Laws.

Click below to read, or find it archived here:

The NYT article above has a brief summary of the law and the motivations of its promoters, which I’ve excerpted below.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, vowed a legal fight against the law they deemed “blatantly unconstitutional.” But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.

“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.

“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

The legislation is part of a broader campaign by conservative Christian groups to amplify public expressions of faith, and provoke lawsuits that could reach the Supreme Court, where they expect a friendlier reception than in years past. That presumption is rooted in recent rulings, particularly one in 2022 in which the court sided with a high school football coach who argued that he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

. . .The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”

It will also include a three-paragraph statement asserting that the Ten Commandments were a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”

That reflects the contention by supporters that the Ten Commandments are not purely a religious text but also a historical document, arguing that the instructions handed down by God to Moses in the Book of Exodus are a major influence on United States law.

I’ve put the bill that became law below, and there’s a lot to unpack in it. But read for yourself; I’ll simply single out the highlights.

Click to read:

The bill begins with a long rationale trying to show that the Ten Commandments are an important part of American history, and therefore should be displayed because it’s not really promoting religion, but recounting our history. After all, some of the Founders mentioned God!  But doesn’t explain why, say, the Constitution or Declaration of Independence are NOT required to be displayed. No, the Ten Commandments is the only historical document required to be displayed; other documents are optional.  Here’s some of the rationale for making that display mandatory—the “historical context” argument that Christians use to push religion into schools (and put “In God We Trust” on our money):

Recognizing the historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our 9 nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government. History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States ofAmerica, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon  the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

. . .  The text of the Ten Commandments set forth in Subsection B of this 17 Section is identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 688 19 (2005).  Including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was America’s first written constitution and made a Covenant with Almighty God to “form a civil body politic”. This was the first purely American document of self-government and affirmed the link between civil society and God.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided a method of admitting new states to the Union from the territory as the country expanded to the Pacific. The Ordinance “extended the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty” to the territories and stated that “(r)eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

. . . .The Supreme Court of the United States acknowledged that the Ten Commandments may be displayed on local government property when a private donation is made for the purchase of the historical monument. Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summan, 555 U.S. 460 (2006).

The bill cites other religious statements by the founders, but of course the word “God,” while appearing in the Declaration of Independence, does not appear at all in the Constitution. The Founders barely believed in God, were not very religious at all, and it’s misleading to suggest that this nation was founded on the rules adumbrated in the Ten Commandments. (Or were there Eleven Commandments? See below.)

Note too that the Supreme Court ruled—and this too seems a First Amendment violation—that one could display the Ten Commandments on government property if the money for the display did not come from the public.  This, I suppose, is a lame attempt to avoid excessive entanglement of the government and religion vis-à-vis the Lemon Test, and, indeed, this bill requires that the money for the many classroom copies of the Ten Commandments must come from “donations”. That tells you right away that something fishy is going on.

Display of other documents is optional:

A public school may also display the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance, as provided in R.S. 26 25:1282, along with the Ten Commandments.

The Northwest Ordinance? What about the fricking Constitution?

There is another requirement: the Ten Commandments must be displayed along with a “context” statement, to wit:

The History of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments were also included in public school textbooks published by educator William McGuffey, a noted university president and professor. A version of his famous McGuffey Readers was written in the early 1800s and became one of the most popular textbooks in the history of American education, selling more than one hundred million copies. Copies of the McGuffey Readers are still available today.

The Ten Commandments also appeared in textbooks published by Noah Webster in which were widely used in American public schools along with America’s first comprehensive dictionary that Webster also published. His textbook, The American Spelling Book, contained the Ten Commandments and sold more than one hundred million copies for use by public school children all across the nation and was still available for use in American public schools in the year 1975.

This is all more striving by the sweating lawmakers to show that, because the Ten Commandments were mentioned in early textbooks, they have become an integral part of American education and thus should remain so today. But since then the courts have tried erect and maintain a “wall of separation between church and state”, a metaphor used by Jefferson, who drew on earlier ideas of Roger Williams.

The enforcement of the Establishment Clause hasn’t been perfect: as I said, we have “In God We Trust” on our money; the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “0ne nation, under God”; and the Supreme court has allowed various First Amendment violations to slip through, including, as the NYT mentions, affirming a “Constitutional right” of a football coach to kneel on school property and publicly say a Christian prayer after football games.  Christians, it seems, cannot seem to keep their religion out of public schools. (That is, of course, why we have to eternally battle against creationism, which comes from the fictional narrative of Genesis 1 and 2.

Will this law stand?  It’s certainly going to be challenged by the ACLU and FFRF, and I’ve no doubt that these and other groups will take the law all the way to the Supreme Court. What happens then? The answer is murky. The court has allowed public prayer after public-school games, and a display of the Ten Commandments on public property if it’s funded privately.  The latter ruling may provide a precedent to uphold this law as well.

And we all know that the court is largely religious: 7 of the 9 justices are Catholic (I’m counting Gorsuch, who is “Anglican Catholic”), Jackson is a Protestant, and Kagan is the lone Jew. It’s not hard to imagine that most of the Supremes will be sympathetic to this law. And then. . . I’m worried about the resurgence of creationism.

By the way, as Steve Orzack pointed out, somehow the bill lists not ten but eleven commandments, to wit:

I count ELEVEN, right?  The authors of the bill have some revision to do!

Robyn Blumner on truth and humanism

December 3, 2022 • 12:00 pm

I didn’t know that the Center for Inquiry (CFI) magazine Free Inquiry was online, but it is. And reader Nicole sent me a link to this article by Robyn Blumner, CEO of the CFI—an institution with a long history of fighting for humanism and secularism—as well executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Each of those organizations is a rara avis: a liberal organization that has not caved in to the woke “progressives”. (I keep getting tsouris, in the form of chastising emails, for using the word “woke”.)  Here we see Robyn taking out after the tendency of some Leftists to efface or hide the truth, and explaining why humanists above all should care about the truth.

Click on the screenshot to read (there are footnotes and references in the original text):

I’ll give a few quotes, but realize that I’m not scratching Robyn’s back because she scratched mine. It’s a good piece, and counteracts the woke “progressive” excesses of organizations like the ACLU (which Robyn used to work for).  Excuse my blushing here.

But the truth is under a sustained assault right now, and secular humanists need to stand up for it, even when that is hard.

It was relatively easy for most of us to condemn the allergic-to-truth rantings of former President Donald Trump. His lies were so transparent and prodigious that anyone outside the MAGA-verse could easily see through them. Many of us collectively recoiled at the reality-distortions he spun and how they were lapped up with religious-like zeal by his followers.

There are plenty of examples of how America’s right wing is a danger to truth-seeking institutions and standards. That is not what I want to focus on.

Because there is also truth-slaying happening in progressive circles generally in the name of social justice. And because so many secular humanists lean toward liberalism, it is here that we need to shine a light and, frankly, stop the insanity.

Agreed. So don’t give me tsouris for calling out the Left! Read on, though I’ve redacted one word in the first sentence below.

I commend to everyone Jerry Coyne’s terrific blog website Why Evolution Is True (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/), which you can subscribe to for free. An emeritus biology professor at the University of Chicago and a classical liberal himself, Coyne has been closely following the excesses and illiberalism of the woke Left.

There is no more stark example than the ways science has been twisted to conform to a social justice agenda.

Coyne describes the controversy in New Zealand where there is an official government effort underway to equate the indigenous Maori system of knowledge called “Matauranga” with the scientific methods of conventional Western science and that this different way of knowing be taught in science classes.

An appalled biology colleague of Coyne’s in New Zealand described some of the god stories of the Matauranga: “Tane the god of the forest is said to be the creator of humans, and of all plants and creatures of the forest. Rain happens when the goddess Papatuanuku sheds tears.”

There is some practical knowledge as part of the Matauranga, but much of its “science” is laden with superstitions, story-telling, and myths.

An obvious parallel is the teaching of creationism in science classes in the United States, which humanists reasonably decry as the injection of religion into a secular subject. As Richard Dawkins bluntly stated in a tweet on the issue: “Equally daft case for teaching Viking ‘ways of knowing’ in Norwegian science classes, Druid ‘ways of knowing’ in British science classes … Navajo, Kikuyu, Yanomamo ‘ways of knowing’ etc. All different. Truths about the universe don’t depend on which country you are in.”

Truth must be of higher value for secular humanists than acceding to equity demands from a minority group, no matter how sympathetic to them we may be.

Note that Richard will be visiting New Zealand last year, and the “other-ways-of-knowing” people are already sharpening their knives, for he enraged them by weighing in when the spineless Royal Society of New Zealand defended Matauranga Māori as being a valid “way of knowing”. Richard sent them an excoriating letter and also wrote to “New Zealand friends of science and reason.” It will be a magnificent clash between the eloquence of Dawkins and the determination of those who want to valorize an indigenous “way of knowing” that is largely legend, superstition, and religion.

But wait! There’s more from Robyn:

A prime [example] of science under siege by the social justice police—those who seek to impose their own view of social justice at the expense of free inquiry and the open-ended search for the truth—is in behavioral genetics. It’s a field that could not be more fraught. Any scientist who chooses to enter it risks being called a eugenicist or racist.

She goes on to praise Kathryn Paige Harden’s book on behavioral genetics, a book I praised in the WaPo for taking on the subject, but also criticized for not specifying how we can use genetics to achieve “equity”.

And one more bit. How often do you read stuff like this in the newsletter of a liberal humanist organization? I can’t think of any group, including the FFRF, that would say stuff like this (Blumner even goes after her old organization, the ACLU):

Then there is the current most radioactive subject of all: What medical interventions are appropriate for minors who may be suffering from gender dysphoria? This is a medical question with immense consequences, and the correct answer may depend on a range of individualized factors, making this highly politicized issue a medical quagmire.

Politics has elbowed in in disgraceful ways such as the order by Texas Governor Greg Abbott sending state investigators to inspect homes where minors are receiving gender affirming medical treatment, equating it with child abuse. As if these families aren’t facing challenges enough.

But the political Left has also gotten ahead of the science in ways that could be seriously harmful for children. For instance, James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, promotes puberty blockers for children as a hormonal way to pause puberty while a minor is gaining clarity on their condition. He calls the intervention “completely safe and totally reversible.”

Unfortunately, that’s not a scientifically supportable statement. The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom says there is not enough data to draw that conclusion. The NHS website on treatment for gender dysphoria says “little is known” of the long-term side effects of puberty blockers and it is “not known” whether puberty blockers “affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”

Legitimate questions have been raised not only about the appropriate age of medical interventions but whether young girls are at risk of being unduly influenced by social pressure to claim transgender status. This is not a big deal if all we are talking about is pronouns, but it is a very big deal once medical science is employed. Statistics from the United Kingdom indicate that 70 percent of those seeking to transition in the past decade are girls wanting to become boys, which is significantly different from the past when by large margins males wanted to transition to female.

These questions are about getting at the truth. Yet just raising them is enough to bring down the wrath of the political Left and get you labeled a transphobe.

A recent column by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, said he warned back in 2016 that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.” Well, that time has come.

Indeed it has, indeed it has.

Oh, and Robyn recommends a book that deserves its encomiums:

Finally, I urge every secular humanist to read Jonathan Rauch’s important book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. In clear terms, Rauch explains the dangers to our social order of abandoning not only the truth but the objective rules we use to test whether a claim is valid.

The end:

. . .choking off dissent damages the essential underpinnings of a reality-based community. These actions, no matter how good the intentions, are helping to dismantle the knowledge-based world. The world that secular humanists are committed to supporting and protecting, and most importantly the world we need for all of us to continue to thrive.

I like that phrase: “reality-based community”. For that what secular humanists are, and what believers are not. I suppose you could call the religious (and many Republicans) “the fantasy-based community.”

It’s official: England and Wales are no longer Christian countries

November 29, 2022 • 11:30 am

Thanks to the many readers (probably atheist Brits) who sent me the links to these articles.

Of course England and Wales will still consider themselves Christian countries, but they have to do some fast stepping to justify it, for the 2021 government census (conducted once per decade) shows that people who identify as Christian no longer form a majority of the populations. They’re “Christian” only in the sense that Christianity is the faith of a plurality of people. (Scotland apparently wasn’t part of this survey.)

The decline in Christianity, which has been breathtakingly fast over the last decade, is the good news.  More good news is that, as expected, the proportion of people saying they had “no religion” has risen as steeply as Christianity has fallen.

The bad news is that Islam is growing, though that’s probably via immigration, not, like Christianity, via (de) conversion or death. And it’s still a tiny fraction of British faith.

Here are two articles; quotes from both are indented below with “G” for the Guardian and “B” for the BBC. Click on the screenshots to read.  The articles also discuss the growth in England’s ethnic minority population, but I’m dwelling on religion here.

From the Guardian:

And the BBC:

G:

The census revealed a 5.5 million (17%) fall in the number of people who describe themselves as Christian and a 1.2 million (43%) rise in the number of people who say they follow Islam, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million. In percentage-point terms, the number of Christians has dropped by 13.1, and the number of Muslims has risen by 1.7.

It is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian.

Meanwhile, 37.2% of people – 22.2 million – declared they had “no religion”, the second most common response after Christian. It means that over the past 20 years the proportion of people reporting no religion has soared from 14.8% – a rise of more than 22 percentage points.

B:

The proportion of people who said they were Christian was 46.2%, down from 59.3% in the last census in 2011.

Note that the 13% fall in the proportion of Christians (these include Catholics, Anglicans, and assorted followers of Jesus) took place in only a decade. Likewise the 22.4% increase in those espousing “no religion” also occurred within the last decade. If this goes on, in the next census more than 50% of Welsh and English will be nonbelievers, and the proportion of Christians will be about 33%. As you can see from the BBC graph below, the decrease in faith and increase in unbelief over two decades have followed a nearly straight-line plot, making extrapolation easy (and probably unreliable).

Muslims are still a small minority of the population, so we don’t have to worry about a big increase of Islam in the UK.

More data from the Beeb.

The hotspots for nonbelief from the Guardian:

The places with the highest numbers of people saying they had no religion were Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Rhondda Cynon Taf, all in south Wales, and Brighton and Hove and Norwich in England. They were among 11 areas where more than half the population are not religious, including Bristol, Hastings in East Sussex and Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, most of which had relatively low ethnic minority populations.

The places with the lowest number of non-believers were Harrow, Redbridge and Slough, where close to two-thirds of the populations are from minority ethnic backgrounds.

There is a correlation, with areas having the highest minority populations also being the most religious, surely because ethnic minorities are more religious than Indigenous Welsh and Brits.

Below you can see hotspots of nonbelief—the darker ones. Ceiling Cat bless the Welsh! London is a hotbed of Christianity, possibly because it has a high proportion of minorities (are they less frequent in the tony area of Islington?):

And while the atheists and humanists are making hay, the distressed Archbishops are kvetching hard (G):

The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said the census result “throws down a challenge to us not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known”.

He added: “We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by.”

But why do humans have to make Christ known when Christ could make himself known—simply by returning? He won’t return, of course, because a divine Jesus (and perhaps no Jesus person) ever existed.

The good folk weigh in:

The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said: “One of the most striking things about these census results is how at odds the population is from the state itself. No state in Europe has such a religious setup as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”

. . .Humanists and secularists seized on the figures as proof of the need for an overhaul of religion’s role in a society that has bishops of the established Church of England voting on laws and compulsory Christian worship in all schools that are not of a designated religious character.

“It’s official – we are no longer a Christian country,” said Stephen Evans, the chief executive of the National Secular Society. “The census figures paint a picture of a population that has dramatically moved away from Christianity – and from religion as a whole. The current status quo, in which the Church of England is deeply embedded in the UK state, is unfair and undemocratic – and looking increasingly absurd and unsustainable.”

I didn’t know about that “compulsory Christian worship” in non-religious schools, but it’s ridiculous. (I presume that Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers can opt out.) Remember that the Church of England is the official National Church, and the King is the head of the Church. That has to go, too. It’s time for England to join Scandinavia in pervasive nonbelief.

Finally, Adam Rutherford said the obvious, but it needs repeated saying:

Dr Adam Rutherford, the president of Humanists UK, said people should not think a decline in religion equated to an “absence in values”.

“We might be living in a more values-driven society than ever before,” he said. “Surveys show, for example, that around three in 10 British adults have humanist beliefs and values, and it’s a trend we’ve seen growing in recent years.”

Humanists say they trust science over the supernatural, base their ethics around reason, empathy and concern for humans and other sentient animals and that in the absence of an afterlife, “human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same”.

The continuing secularization of America: belief in God falls to 81%

June 20, 2022 • 9:15 am

Although prices are rising in America, belief in God is falling. The good news is that this appears to be part of a consistent trend of secularization.  The bad news is that 81% of Americans still believe in God, and a bit more than half of those (42% overall) think that God hears prayers and can intervene to answer them (28% think God hears prayers but does nothing about then, while 11% think God doesn’t do either).

This is good news, and is detailed in a short article from Gallup. You can see it by clicking below, or going to the complete document, including methodology and the questions asked, at this pdf download site.

Here’s the trend since 1945. As Gallup notes,

Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year’s drop to 81%.

The fall from 92% in 2011 to 81% this year is pretty large.  Since there appear to be no data between the late 1960s and 2011, the slow decrease shown in the line is just an interpolation. But there’s no doubt that the long-term drop is a real drop, and goes along with a lot of data showing that Americans are, as REM sang, “losing their religion.” Perhaps some day we’ll be as areligious as northern Europe.

Here are the data on whether God hears/answers prayers (as we’ll see below, conservatives and liberals give very different data). But the idea that God hears prayers and intervenes leads to immense theological difficulties.  Does God refuse to answer some perfectly good prayers, like those of parents beseeching Him for the survival of their cancer-stricken child? There are many questions one could ask this 42% of Americans! Indeed, if you have the idea of God as a Man in the Sky with a Plan, one might think that a special request from someone for God to attend to their personal desires is trivial and solipsistic. So it goes.

Gallup broke the answers down by political party identification, ideological identification, frequency of going to church, and age. Here are those statistics (click to enlarge):

Of course those who go to church more often are more religious, with 99% of those who go to church weekly saying that they believe in God, and 74% saying that God hears prayers and intervenes.  Republicans are more religious than Democrats, with independents pretty much smack in the middle. For overall atheism, the percentage is 7% for Republicans, 26% of Democrats, and 18% for independents. The same trend holds if you divide people by “conservative, moderate, or liberal” instead of political party, except that the percentage of atheists rises to 35%. (Remember, these aren’t “nones,” some of whom are religious, but people who don’t believe in God at all. Those are atheists.

Finally, younger folk tend to believe in God less than older folk, though there’s not much difference on the prayer issue. There’s another figure for the changes in these data since 2013-2017, but you can see that for yourself.

Gallup’s conclusion:

Fewer Americans today than five years ago believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God, whether that means they believe a higher power hears prayers and can intervene or not. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

Whatever.  The fact is that many measures of religiosity show that America is becoming more secular, and that can only be to the good.  Just for fun, if you extrapolate a fall of 98% to 81% belief in 57 years, then America will become completely atheistic in about 270 years, or in 2293!

h/t: Barry

A secular case for Christianity?

April 17, 2022 • 11:15 am

One problem with Bari Weiss and some of her acolytes is that they’re religious. I don’t hold that too strongly against them, but a journalist believing in religious dictates is a journalist who doesn’t care about evidence. It’s a journalist who falls prey to the bane of journalism—confirmation bias.

But a secular case for Christianity? Why not a secular case for Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism? It turns out that you could make a similar argument for all religions, but it’s an argument that involves gutting Christianity of everything that characterizes it: in particular, the belief that Jesus came to earth as God/The Son of God, was crucified and resurrected, and this story, taken as true, affords all who believe it the chance for eternal life. Author Tim DeRoche, instead, makes the “little people” argument for Christianity: he avers that even if the story isn’t true, the myth is good for the well being of yourself and society.

Click to read (if you subscribe; it may be paywalled otherwise):

DeRoche is described on the site this way:

Tim DeRoche is the bestselling author of Huck & Miguel, a modern-day retelling of Huck Finn set on the LA River. He is also the author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools. His third book publishes in 2022.

I won’t dwell on his piece very long. DeRoche was brought up religious, drifted away from Christianity, and then returned to the faith when he married a “devout Christian”. That got him thinking about the religion and whether he was, indeed a true Christian, especially because that he didn’t fully buy into the Christian myths of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation. But he was married to a Christian and going to church. What could he do?

He joined online communities that call themselves Christians, but not because they accept the Christian mythology. Rather, they are “Christian” for three reasons:

a.) Christianity helps you find meaning in your life.  I won’t deny that this is true for many; it’s just that I prefer to find meaning without relying on stories whose veracity I doubt. And of course there are the downsides of religion, too numerous to mention.

DeRoche:

This community is where you’ll find the parkour artist Rafe Kelley, an avowed rationalist, interviewing Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox icon carver, talking about “bridging the mythological and scientific worldviews.”

It’s where Paul Vander Klay, the pastor of a dwindling Dutch Reform congregation in Sacramento, amassed over 20,000 YouTube subscribers by doing hours and hours of commentary on the biblical lectures of nonbeliever Jordan Peterson—much to the chagrin of some leaders of his denomination.

It’s where the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron engages with the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on the failure of our institutions—including our Catholic ones—to help people find meaning in their lives.

Lots of folks in the Meaning Crisis community do not believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on this day, Easter Sunday. But everyone is willing to listen across the chasm of faith and try to understand the root causes of our current discontent: the political rancor, the economic insecurity, the lack of trust in institutions, the mental health crisis, the collapse of the birth rate.

But the root causes of our current discontent are secular ones. It’s not clear to me how Christianity (or faith itself) can deal with those “root causes”, much less the discontent they produce.   It might make you forget them, or, as Marx posited, help the desperate and downtrodden find solace in the presence of a heavenly father and the promise of better life to come (“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”). But if, like DeRoche, you don’t believe in that stuff—in heaven or maybe not even in God—what solace do you get?

b.) Christianity helps you live a better life. 

Just as any serious Christian thinker must contend with the dark history of Christians persecuting others in the name of their faith, every serious secular thinker has to contend with the fact that these stories—from the Hebrew Bible on through the New Testament—seem to contain a tremendous store of wisdom about how to live a good life and build a healthy society.

Two responses:  The Bible also contains a lot of stuff that would worsen life: like the need to leave one’s family to follow Christ, or about how not to strike your slaves the wrong way, or about how women should not speak. To pick and choose the “wisdom” you use to lead a better life requires a winnowing process that, as we all know, presupposes a non-Biblical and secular point of view.

Second: secular humanism contains a lot more wisdom about how to life a good life and build a healthy society. If you want to do those things, don’t read the Bible, read the great secular ethical philosophers of the past and present, whose views are based not on superstition but cogitation and reason.

I needn’t point out the divisiveness of Christianity or of other religions, for DeRoche does that above. The question is whether the world would be better off now had religions never existed. I can’t prove that it would be—though that’s what I think—but neither can DeRoche prove that it wouldn’t be.

c.) Christianity’s rise is correlated with moral improvement in the world. 

And most everyone, Christian and secular, is willing to contend with realities that our modern culture has chosen to ignore. Namely, that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the most successful meme in the history of the world. And the spread of that meme over the last 2,000 years has largely been correlated with decreasing levels of slavery, war, crime, poverty, and general suffering.

Of course, the spread of the “Islamic meme” over the last 1500 years has also been correlated with moral improvement, though most of that moral improvement, as Steve Pinker documents, has actually taken place in the last couple centuries.

But do I really have to inform DeRoche that correlation is not causation, and a lot of things have happened in the last several millennia? The rise of rationality, science, transportation, commerce, democracy, and communication have also been correlated with moral improvement, an indeed, those features might indicate a genuine causal relationship. This is the case that Steve Pinker makes in his two books The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now. (For a short read on his case for reason and secularism as pivotal in morality’s advance, go here or here.) Pinker makes the opposite case from DeRoche, and Steve actually has data and arguments, not just correlations.

I won’t go on, but I will say that I’d love to hear Pinker debate DeRoche on the subject: “Resolved: Christianity is the main cause of moral improvement in humanity.”

Sarah Haider on why you shouldn’t emphasize your liberal bona fides

February 11, 2022 • 9:45 am

I’m busy today with paperwork, letters of recommendations, and winter ducks, so I’ll probably just highlight some articles that you might want to read. Who cares if I didn’t write them?—I’m professor, not a professional writer.

Sarah Haider‘s new Substack column, “Hold that thought“, promises to be a place to bookmark, as she’s published two good pieces in a row. Like many of us, Haider won’t embrace the full-on principles of “progressive” liberalism, but remains a liberal nonetheless. She is, of course, an ex-Muslim, co-founder of the Ex-Muslims of North America, and is quite critical of her old faith. That alone makes her unacceptable to the Woke, who valorize Islam in the face of its extreme regressive principles, ignoring this regressivism because Muslims are seen as People of Color.

Well, so is Haider, so she has both the ethnic and political bona fides (she’s a Democrat) to give her credibility. But of course she hasn’t accrued as much as she deserves simply because she’s an apostate.  To counteract this, Haider has, in the past, peppered her talks with those bona fides: “I’m a liberal so you can take what you’re about to read or hear seriously.”

In this new piece she’s decided to give up this “throat-clearing”, as she calls it, and will just give her argument.

I, too, have been wont to “clear my throat” here and in talks, but Haider’s piece makes a convincing case that it’s useless to try to get on the liberal audience’s good side by touting your liberal views and accomplishments. In fact, I’m going to stop doing that myself because her piece is so persuasive.  I think this would be a good policy for readers, too, and I especially urge them to work on creating an atmosphere here where you don’t need to tout your background before advancing an idea. One thing I will no longer tolerate is people who dismiss an argument or an article simply because of where it appeared (usually in a Jewish or conservative publication) or who makes it. That is the equivalent of an ad hominem argument. I can’t stand hearing words like “I’m not going to read this because it’s from the National Review, and the whole enterprise is garbage.” That’s the sign of a closed mind.

Click the screenshot below to read, and subscribe if you like it. I have a feeling she’s going to develop well as a “blogger”:

Here’s her version of throat clearing:

Before touching on any perspective that I knew to not be kosher among other Leftists, I tended to precede with some version of throat-clearing: “I’m on the left” or “I’ve voted Democrat my whole life.”

I told myself that this was a distinction worth insisting on because 1) it was the truth and 2) because it helped frame the discussion properly – making clear that the argument is coming from someone who values what they value.

But there was another reason too. My political identity reminders were a plea to be considered fully and charitably, to not be villainized and presumed to be motivated by “hate”.

The precursor belief to this, of course, is that actual conservatives should not be taken charitably, are rightfully villainized, and really are motivated by “hate”.

But I’m done sputtering indignantly about being mischaracterized as “conservative”, or going out of my way to remind the audience that I really am a good little liberal.

Here is why.

She then gives four reasons, explaining each, but you can read the explanations for yourself (indented stuff is hers):

1.) It doesn’t work

2.) Throat-clearing is a tax on energy and attention. 

3)  Throat-clearing is bad for you

4.) It is bad for the causes you care about

So I’ll join Haider in a resolution to stop doing this stuff; let’s see if I can stick to it.

At the end of her piece she decries the secular community’s embrace of Islam, and also criticizes in the American Civil Liberties Union’s conversion to a “progressive outlet” that’s “surrendering its once most cherished  cause–free speech.”

Which brings us to the next reading. .