Thanks to San Diego Humanist Book Club!

Thanks to the San Diego Humanist Book club for a very pleasant evening last night discussing The Religion Virus. It was a real pleasure to hear everyone's thoughts on such a wide-ranging set of topics.

It's always surprising to me which chapters and stories in the book appeal to different people. A number of people really liked the story of "William and Ruth." Several people mentioned how much the story of my father's motorcycle accident affected them. And I had the pleasure of retelling the story of Aunt Carolyn's "unbaptism" to the whole group in greater detail.

But the best part of the evening was the wide-ranging discussion about religion, its peculiar history and how it's still affecting us today. I spend far too much time reading the dogma and irrational faith-based arguments from "the other side," and sometimes I feel submerged. Last night was a refreshing change. It renewed my hope that humanism and rational thinking will prevail some day.

Interviewed by Turkish Newspaper!

Apparently I'm getting my fifteen minutes of fame in Istanbul! I was interviewed last week by Radikal Daily, one of the country's liberal news sources that's fighting the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. Here's a link to the article:

Din ve bilim arasında 'güçlü olan kazanır'

Unfortunately I don't speak the language. But the Google Translation is pretty funny and seems to have some relationship to what I said. (But I don't recall being asked, "What is breast?" Machine translation still has a long way to go!)

If anyone speaks Turkish and has an hour to spare, it would be fun to see a real translation of the article.

For those of you who don't speak Turkish, the article was in response to a survey that came out recently claiming that 91% of the people in Turkey are religious. There is a big movement in Turkey to get rid of the secular government and turn it into an Islamic republic. The survey is being used as justification: since the overwhelming majority of Turks are religious, shouldn't the government be religious?

It's the same argument we hear in America all the time, and it's a flawed argument. If Turkey adopts an Islamic government, its progress forward into the technology age will come to a screeching halt. Instead of becoming a full member of the European Union, it will join the ranks of Middle Eastern Islamic theocracies.

Radikal is fighting for political and religious freedom so that all Turks can worship as they please. If Turkey's citizens can resist the Islamic forces and keep their secular government, Turkey can become a full member of the modern world of science and technology.

Best of Religion Virus: Mardi Gras Riot!

Dear Faithful Readers ... you may have noticed that my posts have been more sparse than normal. A couple weeks ago I was alarmed to discover that I'm approaching my 500th blog. I was actually amazed by this. I just sit down a few times a week and offer my thoughts, and it never occurred to me that I'd written so much!

Just for fun, I started looking back through my old blogs, and was sort of surprised to find that I really enjoyed reading some of them. I'm not bragging or anything, but I do believe that you can't be a really good writer unless you get pleasure from your own work. Self-congratulations aside, I realized that there are some real gems in my old blogs, but they're buried in a huge pile of less-than-stellar blogs that will fade into well-deserved obscurity in the dustbins of the internet. It would be a shame to lose the good ones along with the rest.

So I decided to put together a new Kindle e-book, a "Best of Religion Virus." It's nothing you couldn't get if you had the patience

Talking at UC San Diego Rational Thought on Wednesday

For all of my faithful Southern California readers, I've been invited to speak at Rational Thought at UCSD on Wednesday.

Title:	Is Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity Predictable?
Speaker:	Craig A. James, author of The Religion Virus
Date:	Wednesday, Feb 16th at 6:00 PM
Location:	2nd floor of Price Center West Eleanor Roosevelt Room University of California, San Diego (near intersection of Gilman Drive and Myers Drive)

It's a concept I've been developing for the last few months: the rise of religion isn't surprising at all. Once we understand the basic tenets of cultural evolution, how ideas form, evolve and spread, we discover that religion is an inevitable side-effect of human civilization. It would be surprising to find a society that wasn't religious.

What's more, religion, like all evolving entities, has a tendency to become better and better adapted to its environment – your brain – to the point where it's become very tenacious indeed. Most of the mysteries of the world that first inspired religion have long since been demystified by science and technology, and yet the religious beliefs persist.

I look forward to seeing you there. UCSD rules don't allow me to sell books on campus, but I'll be happy to autograph copies that you bring with you.

See you there!

The Religion Virus gets Cred: The First Real Attack!

The worst insult one can get is to be ignored. When they can't ignore you any more, it's time to celebrate!

A few weeks back, Dr. R. Joseph Hoffmann, who teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston, published a scathing "review" of both my book and The God Virus by Darrell Ray. I was excited ... perhaps this would be a chance to face a real opponent, one with a doctoral degree in philosophy and several books to his name!

Sadly, I was disappointed. It was a complete hack job, unworthy of such a well-educated opponent.

Hoffmann starts out with a cutesy poem, followed by three or four wandering paragraphs that question Dr. Ray's education as well as mine. Nothing like an irrelevant ad hominem attack to set the tone. Throw mud on the messenger; maybe it will stick to the message. (Just to set the record straight, I'm not a systems engineer; that's some other guy with the same name, and

Finally, a Kindle Edition of The Religion Virus!

Hey everyone, if you've been waiting for the Kindle edition of The Religion Virus it's finally here!

I'm excite – I sold a number of copies the very first day, before I even started serious advertising. If you've been thinking of buying, now is the time. Help me get my Amazon Kindle ranking up where it will start to cascade!

You can click here to go directly to the Kindle edition.

And if you're not a Kindle fan, here's a link to the good ol' paperback edition that feels nice in your hands as you turn the pages in the shade sipping your iced tea.

Thanks everyone, and enjoy!

The Religion Virus is Finally Available!

Dear Faithful Readers,

The longest wait of an author's lifetime starts the day the last period is typed at the end of the final chapter. For me, it's been over two long years ... finding an agent, getting a publisher, then almost a full year waiting through the trade-show, marketing, sales, book design and printing cycle.

And now it's here! The Religion Virus is now for sale through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other locations, or you can order it through your local bookstore if they don't carry it. Click Here to learn more.

I'm very excited today. It's been a lot of work, but I think we have a message that's important, one that may nudge us one more step towards a more rational, healthy society and world. If you've enjoyed my blogs, I hope you'll consider buying my book, and pass the word to your friends.

Best wishes to all of you, and thanks for reading! We're just getting started!

The Religion Virus: Is it Incurable?

Today I had an email exchange with my publisher, in which we decided to revert back to the original title, The Religion Virus. We'd decided a while back to change it to The Evolution of Religion, because in addition to atheists, we'd like to appeal to people who are still religious but seeking new answers. Our thinking was that The Religion Virus was a bit too in-your-face, a bit too much of a direct affront to people's religion. But several people, including some friends of my mother, who are exactly the demographic we're hoping to find (religious but inquisitive), said they very much liked The Religion Virus as a title, and that they were much more likely to pick up a book with that title than one called The Evolution of Religion, which sounds like a history book or something.

Then, coincidentally, I was accosted on the beach by two Christian women during my evening bike ride, when I paused to enjoy the sunset. I made the mistake of letting them engage me in a dialog, but quickly realized it was hopeless. They were so thoroughly infected with the virus, their condition is "terminal." In the span of a few minutes, they used practically every meme that I discuss in depth in my book: Biblical inerrancy, Heaven and Hell, the fatherly loving God, ... one after the other, in just a few minutes, they demonstrated in very vivid terms, that they were thoroughly infected with these powerful ideas.

It was very discouraging for me to see the religion virus in action in such stark reality; sometimes I feel like it's hopeless, that irrationality and superstition will be with us forever. But then I remembered: That's why I wrote the book. If I can help just a few people, then it will have been worth it. If it becomes popular and helps a lot of people, then I'll have contributed, in my small way, to a better world.

How Many Died from Religion's Opposition to Stem Cell Research?

European news is carrying a wonderful story about the first woman to receive a new organ made from her own stem cells. The woman's bronchus (part of her windpipe/trachea) was destroyed by tuberculosis, and without the transplant, doctors would have had to remove her lung entirely.

Our scientist colleagues in the UK deserve our congratulations for this wonderful achievement &ndash Well done! – but it also reminds us Americans of yet another sad example of religion impeding scientific progress.

Anti-abortionists brought stem-cell research in the United States to a virtual halt. Who knows what lifesaving discoveries might have been made in the last decade? Who knows what crippling diseases, painful disabilities, disfiguring conditions, and dementia that robs us of our loved ones, might have been cured?

Religion has, once again, shown that it is the enemy of science, knowledge, and progress. The religious zealots (a minority, by the way) whose disproportionate political power forced this policy on America, directly caused thousands of deaths, and many times that many people to live in misery, of people who might have been cured, if stem-cell research hadn't been stopped.

Why does it have to be this way? Why is religion so consistently the enemy of knowledge and progress?

The answer is plain when you view religion from an evolutionary, memetic viewpoint. Education and science are not the friends of religion, especially dogmatic religions that cling to ancient ideas. Science has a way of undermining religious scriptures, of proving that biblical "facts" are in fact wrong.

Religion memeplexes always evolve toward survivors, the "fittest" ideas, and the memes that encapsulate anti-science and anti-rationalism ideas are very beneficial to the religious memeplexes. They keep believers from learning the facts and logic that would undermine the foundations of these dogmatic religions.

So, while we can lament the unconscionable setbacks that religion has caused, in this case by delaying medical progress, we shouldn't be surprised. A memetic point of view actually predicts that this will always be the way religious memeplexes – and the people who believe them – will respond to science and rational thought.

Tags: abortion christian christianity memeplex memes organ transplant religion science stem cell

An Atheist in the Land of Mormons, part 2

Breakfast today was a really bad dream come to life!

In the nine film festivals where we've shown our film, we had the pleasure of discovering that filmmakers are, as a group, one of the most congenial, open-minded group of people you'll ever meet. We became friends with filmmakers who made documentaries about Autism, Zen meditation, travel, war, about our veterans, about the environment, films showing the virtues of religions, exposing the abuses of religion, silly films, fun films, serious films, masterpieces, and awful films. But the common thread is that these are people who care, and even more important, people who are open minded and love to hear one another's ideas.

That's why I was really looking forward to the filmmaker's breakfast and awards ceremony this morning. We piled into our little RV, headed west from the beautiful Zion National Park, and enjoyed a lovely drive in the morning sun down to Virgin, Utah, where breakfast was to be served at the Buffalo Trails Trading Company. As we walked into the restaurant, I saw a table with an older couple, both dressed very nicely in their Sunday best. He looked like a man with some stories to tell, not the usual fire-breathing young filmmaker. So we sat down, introduced ourselves, and started asking questions.

What a mistake. First, his main claim to fame was that he produce a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Not an objective documentary, but rather, the worst sort of pseudo-scientific religious BS. And even worse, the man was completely oblivious to his audience – he didn't even bother to ask us about our religious beliefs, but like a typical religious zealot, just assumed that his point of view is self-evident and shared by all. He was oblivious to the fact that I know a bit about the shroud's sordid history, that it has been thoroughly discredited, that no major church accepts its authenticity, and on and on. Once he got started, the man couldn't shut up, and started spewing the faux science that plagues real scientific progress. He went on and on about how many different ways they'd proved the shroud's authenticity, how its miraculous nature was irrefutable, how hundreds and hundreds of the worlds best scientists had confirmed its authenticity.

Within two minutes of him launching into this, my wife was squeezing my knee under the table with a clear message: Keep your mouth shut! But it wasn't necessary – arguing with this guy would have been a hopeless waste of time, and would have embarassed everyone. His claims were so outrageous I couldn't even look the guy in the eye, I had to stare at his hands, the wall, other people in the room, and deliberately ignore him. He went on – I kid you not – for forty five minutes nonstop, without even once asking us about our film.

But it gets worse! One of the finest films at the Red Rock Film Festival, which in fact won "Best Documentary," was David Lebrun's amazing film, Breaking the Maya Code, inspired by the book of the same name. Eleven years in the making, it documents the two hundred year battle to rediscover the meaning of the Mayan hieroglyphs, knowledge that was lost when the Catholic priest Landa (later Bishop Landa) carried out a one-man Inquisition in the Yucatan and destroyed all knowledge of Mayan writing (the subject of an upcoming blog).

Finally, to my great relief, the man's wife saw my discomfort, very abruptly interrupted her husband, and asked about our film. The man, having talked about his film for forty five minutes, gave my wife a full thirty seconds before he lost interest and changed the subject again to one of his other films. Then, another catastrophe: We asked if they'd seen Lebrun's Breaking the Maya Code. Alas, the man was a Mormon. We should have guessed, since we'd learned he was raised in Utah.

For those of you who don't know, the Book of the Mormon has a huge section describing how Jesus, after his resurrection, came to the New World and preached, and asserts that the Mayan hieroglyphic language is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and many other outrageous claims about the Americas.

Unfortunately, like all religious beliefs, the Book of the Mormon is believed by Mormons to be infallable, so rather than looking at all the scientific evidence objectively, the Mormons' only goal is to find scientific "proof" that confirm their preconceived notion of truth. It's anti-science.

We had to listen to another ten minutes of anti-science, all about how the archeologists and other scientists are proving that the Book of the Mormon's account of the New World is correct. Mercifully, the awards ceremony began, and put an end to the man's unpleasant and embarassing conversation. We didn't win an award at this festival, but I almost didn't care, just getting the man silenced was reward enough for me.

After we thanked the festival organizers and headed west across the beautiful Utah desert, my wife and I both agreed: One of the worst aspects of religion is that it forces its believers to reject rational thinking and accept as truth things that are plainly false. It requires believers to put faith over logic, to accept what they're taught rather than what they can see with their own eyes.

Once they're taught to ignore rational thinking, it seems to be impossible for them to distinguish real science from pseudo science. They're able to believe (contrary to all real science) that Jesus was wrapped in the Turin Shroud, and to believe that Jesus preached in the New World, and that (contrary to overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that the Mayan script is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Tags: mormon utah maya mayan yucatan christian christianity turin shroud atheist atheism

Atheism's Toxic Effects in the Abortion Debate

Ok, I admit it, the headline is deliberately provocative to get your attention. Vjack over at Atheist Revolution wrote an excellent blog, Religion's Toxis Effects in the Abortion Controversy, in which he demonstrates that religion turns honest discourse about an important controversy into black-and-white good-versus-evil mudslinging.

But my provocative title is apropos to my thesis: There is a solution to the Abortion controversy, but we'll never reach it until we stop trying to debate the abortion issue. It's hopeless. Atheists tend to dismiss the legitimate and heartfelt beliefs of religious people in the abortion debate. These are not a bunch of nut cases with silly beliefs; they are our friends and neighbors, and they honestly believe that abortion is murder. As Atheists, we can see that life and the human "soul" are purely physical phenomena, and it's hard for us to take the religious position seriously. But if we aren't careful, we risk getting into a pointless debate that will distract us from real progress.

The only solution to the abortion controversy is to eliminate the need for abortion completely. Years ago, I heard Professor Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth-control pill, interviewed on the radio, and he put it best: "Wouldn't it be better if we lived in a world where women have full access to birth control, where no woman ever needs to seek an abortion again?" (Paraphrased, it was probably 25 years ago!)

Almost everyone in the United States, Atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Baha'i, you name it, agrees to a remarkable extent on one topic: Birth control is moral, and is a woman's right. Even the majority of Roman Catholics agree; they think the Pope and official Catholic ban on birth control is simply wrong, and that the Pope is out of touch with reality.

I propose that Atheists, and religious people of a more liberal nature who accept that abortion isn't murder, should stop engaging in the futile debate about when the human soul is created, and instead focus on birth control.

A tiny minority of ultra-conservative religious leaders have a monsterous influence on United States domestic and foreign policy. Their conservative views are preventing distribution of birth-control pills, condoms, medication, education and many other services that are desperately needed, here and abroad.

Right now, regions of Africa have stunnning and horrifying rates of AIDS infections, in some cases 25% of the population is infected and will die. These are poor countries to start with; the cost of caring for these people as they sicken and die, and the resulting explosion of orphans, will overwhelm all economic and social progress for decades. It is a tragedy greater than most of the greatest plagues in human history.

And it could have been prevented with an aggresive campaign that included sex education, condom distribution, and medical aid. Sociologists warned of this impending disaster years before it happened, but because the solution included birth control and abortion rights, the funds for birth control, condoms and education were withheld. This completely preventable plague was left to run wild, and will ultimately result in hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide.

So, let's start engaging our religious friends (and those we may not consider friends, too) in a debate about birth control and sex education. Let's break the stranglehold the ultraconservative churches, led by the Pope himself, have on American and world politics. Let's make it so that every woman in Africa has access to condoms, so that we can stop the AIDS epidemic. Let's give every teenager in the world a reality-based sex education (to use vjack's term), so that no girl ever has to have an abortion again. Let's teach young couples everywhere how to be responsible, and plan their families, so that every child born will be greeting by happy, excited parents who planned the event and look forward to raising a happy and healthy family.

The abortion debate is a dead end. We have to hold the line, keep abortion rights from being eroded, but that's it. But the birth-control debate can be meaningful, productive, and have a far greater impact on the health and well being of everyone in the world.

Tags: abortion birth-control aids religion christian christianity atheist atheism africa epidemic

When Gay Marriage Was a Christian Rite

It turns out the Roman Catholic church has, once again, ignored the historical evidence and censored history, in order to support its current homophobic and hypocritical stance on gay marriage. A family member forwarded this fascinating article to me:

When Same-Sex Marriage Was a Christian Rite

The article describes how down through most of the history of the Roman Catholic Church, there were many instances of church-sanctioned homosexual marriages, including a marriage between two Roman saints, St Sergius and Saint Bacchus.

Contrary to the Church's revised version of history, the truth is that the Roman Catholic church has a long history of tolerance and even celebration of homosexual love and marriage. Records of same-sex marriages have been discovered throughout the Christian world, including in the records of the Vatican itself.

Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church, and Christian denominations in general, have a long history of revising the facts, and an amazing ability to get people to swallow their altered history as truth.

Tags: gay homosexual marriage catholic history christian christianity atheist atheism religion virus

Most Atheists are RIGHT: Religion really does cause violence

Having spent two blogs (part 1, part 2) explaining why religion doesn't cause violence, it's time to refute that statement.

More exactly, I'm going to refine it: Religion isn't at the root of violence (evolution is), but religion greatly amplifies violence.

A huge portion of the "laws" laid down in the Bible are, by today's standards, barbaric and primitive. If a priest's daughter becomes a prostitute, the Bible says she should be burned at the stake (Leviticus 21:9). The penalty for blasphemy is death (Leviticus 23:10-24). Adultery, incest, and homosexuality, any of these and more call for the death penalty, often by stoning.

Even people who claim to follow the Bible's laws, and believe the Bible's inerrancy, can't stomach these laws today. We've evolved, we now know better, but the Bible is frozen in time.

Should we accept these millenia-old rules as our laws, just because two thousand years ago, a group of Jewish scholars declared that these were God's own words?

My primary thesis is not wrong, quite the contrary: Violence is part of our genetic makeup (our instincts), and religious memes that support violence are just an example of memetic evolution at work, shaping the religious memeplex to fit well into its environment (our brains).

But we're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to move beyond our primitive animal instincts that make us fight and kill one another. We've evolved brains that are powerful enough to understand good and evil. We've evolved culture, and empathy, and the concepts of right and wrong. We understand that sometimes the individual has to subjugate his/her own raw desires for the good of the family, the village, or the world.

Unfortunately, some religions are holding us back from these achievements.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of parables, historical "tall tales," and good advice, got converted into the inerrant Word of God, purportedly correct in every respect and for all time. The Inerrancy Meme, one of the evolved tricks that religion uses to defend itself from criticism, arose in the Jewish culture a few hundred years before the time of Christ. Since then, it's become a huge barrier to progress in human ethics: If we left it to religions that follow the Inerrance Meme, human ethical advancement would be frozen in time forever.

Religion is not the root of violence and war; that distinction goes to evolution, keeping us in keen competition with one another for survival of the fittest. But religion is holding us back, exacerbating and amplifying the worst parts of our animal nature, and preventing us from evolving to the next level of ethical achievement.

Tags: atheism atheist religion morals ethics evolution memes virus christian jew memes memeplex dawkin harris hitchens

Praying to Legalize Discrimination?

The bad news: Hundreds of pastors in California are calling on their congregations to help pass a ban on gay marriage in California.

The good news: Their main weapon is prayer!

(I'm breaking from my "ethics" series to bring you this breaking story...)

Prayer gives many people comfort and strength, and unlike many Atheists, I have no problem with people who pray in times of trouble. They see it as a connection to God, I see it as meditation, and drawing on their own inner strength. I wish people who get strength from prayer could give themselves more credit for their accomplishments, but if prayer is their way of drawing on that inner strength, what's wrong with that?

On the other hand, I'm offended when people pray for God to intervene, to take sides in our worldly affairs. The idea that God, the purported creator of the Universe, really cares whether the home team wins the football game, is ludicrous. Asking God for help in a war against a Muslim country on trumped-up charges of having weapons of mass destruction is so offensive it's hard to know where to begin.

But when hundreds of pastors advocate prayer as their main tool in a campaign to legalize discrimination against gay couples, I'll encourage them to pray, and pray, and pray some more! Do it all day and night, and since prayer has obviously been so effective in the past (you know, stopping hurricanes, quenching wildfires, starting wars, or was that ending wars?), it will surely work to legalize discrimination in California. Why, if you pray enough, maybe God Himself will come down and cast his vote in the November election!

By the way, those of you who abhor discrimination of all kinds, including against our gay family members and friends, should buy a pair of Levi's jeans today. The Levis company has donated $25,000 to help defeat this offensive amendment to our state constitution.

Religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Science

Fundamentalism threatens to return America to third-world country status, to make us a third-rate also-ran. If Christian fundamentalists have their way, in fifty years, China and Europe will be the world's centers of scientific leadership and economic power, and America will be the country that once was great. And by "fundamentalism," I don't mean the American stereotype of some Iraqi waving a rusty old musket, I'm talking about the ultra-right American Christians, who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Science is the opposite of fundamentalism. How can a scientist go to work in the morning, have an open, inquisitive, logical mind all day long, and then go home at the end of the day to then study a religion that contradicts facts s/he knows to be true? Hold beliefs that are plainly wrong? It's impossible. Those who choose a fundamentalist faith cannot be scientists, and those who choose science cannot be fundamentalists.

(Before any of you jump in with Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, don't waste your time. Collins is an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. He may be an expert geneticist, but as a philosopher he'd be sent back to kindergarten. It's a disgrace.)

Fundamentalism wouldn't be a problem if it stayed in the corner, away from politics, where it belongs. As long as fundamentalist ideas are kept away from our schools, and our national public policy, they're harmless. But the fundamentalist religions also have a meme that says, "Spread me!" They don't have a live-and-let-live policy; rather, fundamentalist Christians (and Muslims, but in America it's the Christians that count) believe that we all have to adopt their religions. They want their beliefs to control our society and be enshrined in our laws.

And that's what is starting to drive us back to the dark ages. Religion has been making more and more inroads into American politics, and one of their success stories is that they've severely damaged the science curriculum in American schools. I've been stunned at the ignorance of some of my children's college-age friends in basic scientific principles, stuff that was taught to all kids of my generation.

Fundamentalism begins by teaching anti-rationalism. At an early age, the children of fundamentalists are taught to reject logic, to accept a vast mythology on faith alone, and to ignore glaring flaws and contradictions. Whenever faith contradicts facts, children are told to that faith wins, that they must ignore the evidence that is plainly before their eyes. When the faith contradicts itself (like, why are there two conflicting versions of Genesis??), they are told that their faith isn't strong enough yet.

If they want to believe that stuff, fine. But when they start damaging our schools, and interfering with our public policy, that's where the danger starts.

Today we live in a wonderful world of engineering marvels and medical "miracles." I'm 54 years old, an age that in a Shakespeare play was called an old man, yet I take a vigorous march up the mountain by my home 4-5 times every week. My neighbor drives a gas/electric hybrid car. Yesterday I read about a private company testing a rocket engine for space flight. The CERN Large-Hadron Collider, a true marvel of science, was fired for the first time a couple days ago.

Not one of these marvels could have been invented in a fundamentalist society.

I like living in an America that leads the world in technology and invention. I've devoted my career to science and medicine. It would be a shame if, in fifty years, the America that my grandchildren will inherit is a third-world country, made so by Christian fundamentalists who deny science, and forced their mythology on the rest of us.

Sarah Palin: McCain is Going Down!

I applaud McCain's VP choice, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as his choice for vice president, because she is going guarantee McCain's defeat! Nice work, Senator McCain!

Sarah Palin is the worst vice president candidate in recent memory. We can ignore her utter lack of relevant experience – that's like shooting fish in a barrel. No, the real issues are her opposition to virtually every ethical advance we've made as a society over the last few decades. She opposes gay/lesbian rights, opposes abortion rights, and in spite of heart-wrenching stories last week of starving polar bears swimming 25 miles in the open ocean looking desperately for food, she opposes adding them to the endangered-species list, and instead wants to drill, drill, drill for more of Alaska's oil, so we can melt more polar ice and kill the rest of the bears.

As if that's not enough, Gov. Palin has advocated teaching creationism alongside evolution! George Bush ... well, his IQ is somewhere in the modest double digits, so maybe a basic understanding of obvious scientific facts is just too much for the poor man. But Sarah Palin appears to be an otherwise intelligent woman, in spite of her conservative agenda.

One can only hope that Sarah Palin at least believes in woman's rights and equality for all races. Given the rest of her neocon views, one has to wonder...

(Shameless commercial: It's another example of just how highly evolved and infectious the religion virus is. Only now, after years of research and thought, do I finally understand how intelligent people get infected with these ideas, and why the ideas are so hard to kill.)

As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin is a typical victim of religion's Anti-Rationalism Meme, one of religion's best tricks. The Anti-Rationalism Meme convinces "the faithful" that faith, not logic, is the road to truth. If logic and rational thought lead to a conclusion that disagrees with the Bible, then faith wins.

Anyone with an open, rational mind who visits Alaska can't help but marvel at the raw power of nature, and the overwhelming evidence against creationism. Glacial valleys that took millions of years to form, stately mountains that have stood guard for tens of millions of years, volcanos that laid down layer after layer after layer, recording history in their lava ... the evidence is all there, laid out in its raw beauty. How anyone can live in such magnificence, and still think the Earth was created just 6,000 years ago, staggers the mind.

No, sorry Senator McCain, your "surprise" choice of Sarah Palin, which you hoped would make you look progressive, is going to backfire. Sarah Palin's views on women's reproductive choice, gay/lesbian issues, and the environment, all inspired by her infection with religion virus memes, will be your downfalling.

You'd almost think the Democrats had picked McCain's running mate for him!

Shotguns and Suicide Bombs: Is Life Really so Cheap to the Faithful?

Every Atheist blogger will be writing about this tragic story today, about a man who opened fire with a shotgun in a Unitarian Church because he was frustrated over their "liberal views." And on the same day, we find that four women, in a coordinated suicide bombing, blew themselves up in Iraq, killing at least fifty seven innocent bystanders, all Shiite pilgrims.

Most religious people have swallowed the Godly Origin of Morals Meme, hook, line and sinker. They believe that without God, there can be no morality. Never mind that actual facts don't back this up – sociologist, historians, religious scholars and atheist scholars have done plenty of studies that demonstrate that people are people, and pretty much behave just as well or badly regardless of their religion.

Unfortunately, there is a corollary to the Godly-Origin-of-Morals Meme: Not only do morals come from God, but so too does the very meaning and purpose of our lives. Without God's plan for us, there would be no reason to exist. Or so we're told. To an atheist, this idea is almost laughable, except that it's not funny today. Dozens of people died today, as a direct result of this belief.

To a religious person, life is just the very first step in an infinitely long journey, and death is the doorway to the next step. Death is unpleasant, leaves grieving loved ones behind, and perhaps leaves unfinished business on Earth, but the promise of the afterlife, heaven, and reunion with loved ones when they die, vastly mitigate the pain and sorrow of believers. In God's grand scheme of things, death is more of an inconvenience than a tragedy.

Contrast this with the Atheist's view of life and death. There is no greater gift than life, because you only get one chance, and there is no fate worse than death, because when you're dead, that's it, you are gone forever. Our lives here on Earth last a mere six to ten decades if we're lucky. There is nothing more precious than life, and our husbands, wives and children are worth more to us than anything else in the world. It is only through our children, and our deeds here on Earth, than we can have any legacy to Earth's future.

A religious person can convince himself that murder is justified, because first, the victims aren't following the morals that God explained so plainly in the Bible. (Never mind that this "plain" explanation seems to be different for every person you ask.) But worse, because death is just the doorway to the afterlife, the religious zealot can convince himself or herself that the murders aren't really hurting anyone. If the victims are innocent, but the murder helps restore God's morals to society, then the murders are really OK. It's a case of the greatest good for the greatest number – a few lose their lives (an inconvenience, nothing more), but God's laws are restored.

This sort of logic is unthinkable to an Atheist.