Christian Puppies?

As many of my faithful readers will recall, our old friend Skittle the Dog passed away last month. But the circle of life goes on, and two weeks ago I was hijacked by my wife to go shopping because she needed to "get something," which turned out to be the cutest little Corgi puppy you've ever seen.


And of course, there is a special-interest web site called MyCorgi.com. But what really startled me was the special-specialty group, Corgis of Christian Owners! With 68 members, they're the second-largest subgroup of MyCorgi.com (only exceeded by the 94 members of the Awkwards Little Sleepers Club, for puppies that "sleep and relax in strange positions!").

Not to be completely left out, there is also a Pagan Corgis Club, with a surprising 10 members.

One of the things that baffles me about Christianity is it's pervasiveness. Christians aren't content to worship Jesus in private – for many of them, their religion has to be "worn on their sleeves," and made a part of everything they do, even irrelevant activities, such as your dog's web site. Why is that?

Out of curiousity, I started googling around for other Christian activities. I quickly found:

  Christian surfers
  Christian sailors
  Christian naturists (nudists)
  Christian dog owners
  Christian skydivers (ok, maybe that one makes sense!)
  Christian scuba divers
  Christian shoppers
  Christian gamers

... the list goes on and on. There is hardly an activity you can think of that doesn't have a Christian subgroup. Ok, there was one search that didn't turn up anything: "Christian wife swappers."

Tags: puppy corgi christian christianity pagan atheist atheism religion

Did Religion exacerbate the Worldwide Financial Meltdown? Surprisingly, Yes.

It may seem like a stretch to blame religion for worsening the world's financial meltdown, but it's not. The entire conservative free-market approach to government is based on a flawed understanding human nature. The Creationist viewpoint is not just a religion, it is also a way of thinking that permits and encourages illogical thinking. Religion teaches people to reject facts in favor of opinion and hearsay.

Worse, the Creationist approach discards the most valuable tool available to an economist: An accurate, scientific understanding of human behavior. An economist who rejects Evolution Science also rejects the profound insights that come with it.

One of the cool things about Evolution Science is that the principles apply to a wide variety of interacting systems, not just biological life. Any time you have competing, mutable entities, whether they are corporations, memes (ideas), nations, or plants and animals, a clear understanding of the principles of evolution can give amazing insight into the way these entities interact.

To those who understand evolution, topics like predation, competition, and especially parasitism, are no mystery at all. When we view banks, brokerages and insurance companies as evolving, mutating memeplexes, that compete with each other in the classic "survival of the fittest" battle, we can predict certain things. We can predict that, in an unregulated marketplace, unethical (but successful) memeplexes will evolve. We can predict that "parasitic" (but successful) memeplexes such as "derivative funds" that are nothing more than quasi-legal casinos, will evolve. We can predict that the "tragedy of the commons," where each individual makes decisions that, collectively, hurt everyone, will be an everyday occurance.

By contrast, a Creationist rejects this sort of thinking. Or perhaps a better way to say it: A Creationist is incapable of this deep and profound insight into the financial world. By rejecting evolution, they reject the insights that go with it. The religious explanation of nature is simplistic: God created the world and its plants and creatures, and created humans to look over everything. Evil was introduced when Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent's temptation. Morals are God-given, and are enumerated in the scriptures.

Religion offers no insight into human behavior, and even less into the behavior of complex social structures such as banks, insurance companies and stock brokerages. It is worse than silent ... it offers only ineffective solutions, such as prayer and wishful thinking.

Any useful model of the world economy must be based on an understanding of evolutionary systems. Anything else is just a fairy tale. Given that the Republican Bush Administration is filled with Creationists, is it any surprise that they can't understand the economy?

So, as you look in dismay at your stock portfolio, our the declining value of your home, or maybe you even lost your job, you can chalk up one more way that Creationists are damaging society.

Atheists: Teach the Children

vjack over at Atheist Revolution wrote an excellent challenge that we should all heed: Be an Atheist Activist in 30 Minutes a Week. If you care about the world you live in, I hope you'll read it and take it to heart.

But, I would add my own suggestion to his: Focus on children.

This is one of the best "tricks" that The Religion Virus has evolved in its arsenal of memes. In virtually every major religion in the world, religious training starts almost in infancy, as soon as a child learns to speak. Most religions advocate immersion of the child in a religious culture, such that religion permeates school, home, work, and even play.

And with good reason: Religions that have evolved this teach-our-children-young idea are immensely more successful than those that don't. Children's minds are highly evolved to soak up information, to take in all the lessons possible from their parents, because human survival relies on our incredible ability to pass vast amounts of information to our children via language. If a religion misses the opportunity of youth, it usually will miss completely.

This is borne out by the facts: Most children follow the religion of their parents, or one very closely related to it. It is rare for, say, a Jew to become a Baptist, or a Muslim to become a Hindu. If religion were truly a rational, logical choice that people made, based on an objective analysis of each religion's teachings, then one would expect that Christians would have Muslim children, Jews would have Baptist children, and Atheists would have Hindu children. But this rarely happens. Teaching religion to children is one of the most important memes in the arsenal of every major religion.

We Atheists need to adopt this same meme. Over and over, I see bloggers and authors (including me!) aiming their blogs and books at adults. But adults rarely change their beliefs, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their religion is without factual foundation and full of contradictions. When we argue with them, we're mostly wasting our time.

It's the children that are important. "Give me the boy, and I'll give you the man," is the famous quote by St. Ignatius, way back in the sixteenth century, and is more true today than when he said it.

Religions know this, apparently far better than atheists. What is the biggest battle they're fighting in America today? To keep secular teaching away from their children (and yours). Religious parents of all faiths know all too well that if their children are exposed to modern science, accurate history lessons, psychology and sociology, the child is far more likely to become a deist, agnostic or atheist.

Atheist activists need to adopt this same meme. Children must be shown, beginning as early as possible, that the world is not a mysterious, magical place full of angels and demons, with a voyeuristic god that watches your every move, but rather is a wonderful result of physical processes that are well understood. Children need to be taught the beauty of physics, the "magic" of chemistry, the vastness of the universe, and the wonderful insights of psychology and sociology.

Children also need to learn about natural ethics. They need to know there is a real philosophical foundation for humanist morals, rather than some god who merely dictates obsolete, contradictory and even horrifying laws that we're expected to obey without question.

So, take vjack's advice: Become an activist for thirty minutes a day. But focus your efforts on our children, where the future lies. Redouble your efforts to fight the teaching of creationism in school. Write letters to your newspaper in support of a modern science curriculum. When you talk to your children's friends, don't be afraid to tell them you're an atheist, in a frank and matter-of-fact manner, and be ready to answer their questions.

Greenland Ice Cores: Let's See Creationists Explain This One!

Ice cores drilled from Greenland's glaciers provide amazing, direct, obvious, and seemingly irrefutable evidence that Creationists are just plain wrong. It's one of the coolest, and simplest, bits of evidence I've ever seen, and it utterly refutes Creationist's claims. It's hard to imagine a Creationist explanation of Greenland's ice cores that isn't an obvious farce.

Each year, a new layer of snow falls on Greenland, and the weight of the upper layers slowly compresses the lower layers into dense snow, hard-pack, and finally at a depth of 50 to 150 meters, into solid ice. These layers of ice are like a tree's rings, one layer per year. And here's the good part: The Greenland ice sheet is 2,000 to 3,000 meters thick and records almost 110,000 years of snowfall!

If that isn't enough, the first 12,000 years are visible to the naked eye, and beyond 12,000 years the annual layers are easily detectable by analytical tests.

GISP2 ice core at 1837 meters depth with clearly visible annual layers.
(From Wikipedia: Ice Core)

Not convinced yet? It gets even better. Humanity's written history goes back a few thousand years, and records events like volcanic eruptions, dust storms and big climate changes. These events are captured in the ice as dust, pollen, and changes in oxygen isotope ratios (which are proportional to global temperatures). When we compare the story told by the ice, it matches our historical records exactly. In other words, there is independent proof that the Greenland ice sheet accurately records the Earth's history for thousands of years.

STILL not convinced? Well consider this: The only way the ice sheet's record could be interrupted is by gaps, not by insertions. You could imagine, for example, that a really warm summer melted a bunch of the snow, erasing the top layers. But if that happened, the bottom layers would be older, not younger, that an ice sheet without gaps.

And one last nail in the coffin of a Creationist explanation: Greenland's ice cores match Antarctica exactly. If you want to explain the layers as some sort of weird weather or catastrophic event, you have to claim that the exact same event happened in two places, almost half way around the world from each other, at the exact same times, over and over again to create 110,000 layers of ice that exactly match.

Ok, creationists, how do you explain 110,000 years of ice accumulation in Greenland?