I was thinking about the things that form the basis for who I am. I’m about accepting science, seeking knowledge, rejecting primitive behaviors, and working toward a harmonious civilization. What follows is not all mine; I wrote some commentary, but I’m quoting others where it really matters. Enjoy.

No Special Treatment

Religion has some sort of special place in society. You’re not supposed to question it or oppose it. The United States doesn’t have blasphemy laws, although the way we’re going they might show up soon. Calling out a religion when it’s wrong or terrible is often considered bad form in polite society. But considering it bad form IS bad form! Here’s my favorite passage about that very subject, by British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac at the Solvay Conference on Physics of 1927, as quoted by Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations:

"I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling.

“But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people.

“Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins."

Russell’s Teapot

In 1952, Illustrated magazine commissioned Bertrand Russell to write an article titled “Is There a God?” and then decided not to publish it. Russell succinctly described why he sees no reason to believe in any religion.

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

“But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

“If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time …

“My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.”

Richard Dawkins extended Russell’s argument::

“The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first.”

Playing with Toys

When it came to responding to the ignorance of religionists—or atheists who support them—nobody did it quite like Christopher Hitchens. Hitch was abrasive and often rude, but he wasn’t wrong. The following was at a debate with Al Sharpton. An atheist audience member posed this:

“My question to Christopher is how you can justify wanting to take something away from people, that gives meaning to 95% of the American people, and replace it with something that gives meaning to just 5% of the American people?”

Hitch, of course, began with abrasive rudeness, but as usual he made sense:

“Hah! Well. What an incredibly stupid question.

“First, I've said repeatedly that this stuff cannot be taken away from people, it is their favourite toy and it will remain so, as Freud said with The Future of an Illusion, for as long as we're afraid of death—which I think is likely to be quite a long time.

“Second, I hope I've made it clear that I'm perfectly happy for people to have these toys, and to play with them at home, and hug them to themselves and so on, and share them with other people who come around and play with their toys. So that's absolutely fine.

“They are not to make me play with these toys. Okay? I will not… play… with… the toys. Don't bring the toys to my house. Don't say my children must play with these toys. Don't say my toys—might be a condom, here we go again—are not allowed by their toys. I'm not going to have any of that. Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation! Is that finally clear? Have I got that across? Thank you!”

There is indeed a general belief among religionists (and others) that atheists somehow want to take their religion from them. This is ridiculous. They turn banning required prayer in school into “Atheists don’t want you to pray in school!” They turn retailers saying “Happy holiday!” into “It’s a war on Christmas!” They turn freedom of (and from) religion into “This is a Christian nation!”

We need to end the misinformation. I’d say start by letting every religionist who believes such things into watching Hitch deliver that bit above. Here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2vqwZActbQ

The Dragon in My Garage

Carl Sagan had a softer tone than Hitch when addressing religion. This is one of my favorites, from his book The Demon-Haunted World:

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage."
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.
"Where's the dragon?" you ask.
"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."
Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."
You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."
And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

Pale Blue Dot

I’m not just about combating theocracy. When it comes to science, to me there is no greater observation about how small and insignificant we are than Sagan’s musings on our pale blue dot, from his 1994 book of that name. If this doesn’t make you think, I don’t know what will. Religionists often want to be the center of the universe and believe that life has some purpose or meaning other than what they do with their lives, but Sagan makes us think:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Stardust

Now, if that didn’t stir your emotions, here’s something that should. Lawrence M. Krauss delivered this during a presentation and it’s really astounding.

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.

“It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements — the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution — weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way that they can get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode.

“So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Here’s a YouTube link of Lawrence delivering that gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo#t=16m49s

Complexity!

Religion isn’t the problem. Without religionists, it would be just more mythology. And it’s the religionists who insist on shoving their particular brand of religion down the collective throats of everyone who damage society. Perhaps there is no more pervasive example than the creationist push for “Intelligent Design.” Creationists disbelieve evolution (and most seem to not understand it at all) and loathe it being taught in schools.

Creationists like to call Intelligent Design an alternative to evolution and say that it should be taught in schools alongside evolution. They think that merely calling it something vaguely science-y is all they need to do, because they don’t understand the scientific method and the mountains of evidence for evolution.

PZ Myers nicely sums up how creationists’ inability or unwillingness to understand evolution leads them to dismiss it in favor of ID:

“So I'm going to give you a condensed version of an Intelligent Design creationist lecture. It'll be very entertaining: ‘Complexity, complexity, complexity complexity. Oh look, there's a pathway — it's very complicated. Complexity! Complexity, complexity complexity — complexity. And did you know that cells are really, really complicated? But we're not done — complexity! Complexity (complexity complexity). And you're gonna be blown away by the bacterial flagellum — it's like a little machine! And it's really, really complicated! Complexity-complexity complexity. Complexity. We need more cells, they're really complicated. You just get blown away by these things, they are just so amazingly complicated. Complexity. Therefore: design.’ You've heard it all now — that's the root of their argument.”

This is a great video to watch, but the link I’d saved is no longer on YouTube and I can’t find a clip of it right off.

Dismantling Superstition

It’s not just religion whose illogical and unscientific premises persist. Some people believe in fairies or ghosts, despite zero evidence EVER for anything like that. Some are certain the Earth is flat (it’s not) and that we never went to the Moon (we did). Many believe in all manner of conspiracy theories despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As Gene Weingarten put it, these silly things are slowly going away. It’s taking a while, but they’re fading, and faster all the time.

“If a philosopher or social scientist were to try to encapsulate a single principle that yoked together the intellectual process of civilization, it would be a gradual dismantling of presumptions of magic. Brick by brick, century by century, with occasional burps and hiccups, the wall of superstition has been coming down. Science and medicine and political philosophy have been on a relentless march in one direction only — sometimes slow, sometimes at a gallop, but never reversing course. Never has an empirical scientific discovery been deemed wrong and replaced by a more convincing mystical explanation. (‘Holy cow, Dr. Pasteur! I've examined the pancreas of a diabetic dog, and darned if it's NOT an insulin deficiency, but a little evil goblin dwelling inside. And he seems really pissed!’) Some magical presumptions have stubbornly persisted way longer than others, but have eventually, inexorably fallen to logic, reason and enlightenment, such as the assumption of the divine right of kings and the entitlement of aristocracy. That one took five millennia, but fall it did.”

Here’s his entire column:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/08/14/DI2007081401818.html

The Preamble

Before we get to where society is based on logic, reason, and evidence, and not on fairy tales and mythology, we need to become better people as a whole. It’s OK to believe in fairy tales and mythology, but not to force those beliefs on others, control their bodies or identities, harm them, or even kill them because you don’t approve.

If you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably remember the Schoolhouse Rock! Short cartoons they’d run to educate you about everything from multiplication to history to science. Their America Rocks! shorts were were I learned that women didn’t have the right to vote until 1920, how a bill became a law, and what the Declaration of Independence was all about.

But it was “The Preamble,” written and performed by Lynn Ahrens, that made the deepest impression on me. She sang the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and it was embedded in my brain I heard Captain Kirk recite it in the Star Trek episode “The Omega Glory.”
I still sing it, 45 years later. The words are powerful, but we need to put aside our hatred and intolerance and believe in those words.

The entire song goes like this:

Hey, do you know about the U.S.A.?
Do you know about the government?
Can you tell me about the Constitution?
Hey, learn about the U.S.A

In 1787 I'm told
Our founding fathers did agree
To write a list of principles
For keepin' people free

The U.S.A. was just startin' out
A whole brand-new country
And so our people spelled it out
The things that we should be

[Spoken] And they put those principles down on paper and called it the Constitution, and it's been helping us run our country ever since then. The first part of the Constitution is called the preamble and tells what those founding fathers set out to do

We the People
In Order to form a more perfect Union
Establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility
Provide for the common defense
Promote the general Welfare, and
Secure the Blessings of Liberty
To ourselves and our Posterity
Do ordain and establish this Constitution
For the United States of America

In 1787 I'm told
Our founding fathers all sat down
And wrote a list of principles
That's known the world around

The U.S.A. was just starting out
A whole brand-new country
And so our people spelled it out
They wanted a land of liberty

[Spoken]: And the Preamble goes like this:

We the People
In Order to form a more perfect Union
Establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility
Provide for the common defense
Promote the general Welfare, and
Secure the Blessings of Liberty
To ourselves and our Posterity
Do ordain and establish this Constitution
For the United States of America

For the United States of America…

We haven’t always executed our society well, but for me, forget the Pledge of Allegiance; schoolchildren should sing this every day. Nothing humanity has devised to civilize itself has been perfect, but the Preamble to the Constitution is a pretty good start.

Here’s one of many YouTube videos of the entire three-minute short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqvLi7qZ_yU

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.