Vera Verba

One of the central themes of the book “God Wants You Dead” that Paul and I wrote, concerns the conflict between new medical technology and the belief in GOD and a promised afterlife. This is probably why a friend of mine who has read the book (or at least skimmed it - I’m not sure anyone has actually read the whole thing yet ;-) forwarded this article to me:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080327/ap_on_re_us/daughter_s_death_prayer

It’s about a young girl who recently died from a very treatable condition because her parents chose to pray for her to get better rather than take her to a doctor.

While this is a tragedy, and certainly no laughing matter, it reminds me of an old joke:

A man is caught in a flood and ends up sitting on the roof of his house.

Eventually a boat comes along and he is offered a ride to dry land, but he replies “Thanks, but I have faith that GOD will save me.” The boat leaves to rescue others.

The water rises higher and another boat comes along. Again the man rejects the offer of aid saying “I have faith that GOD will save me,” and that boat also leaves to rescue others.

The water rises to the point that the man is barely able to stay on the roof, clinging to his chimney. A helicopter flies overhead and lowers down a ladder, but the man again insists “I have faith that GOD will save me,” and does not climb the ladder.

Finally the man is swept away by the flood waters and drowns. When he gets to heaven he confronts GOD and asks “I had faith! Why didn’t you save me?”

To which GOD replies “I don’t know what more you wanted - I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

The deaths of those who, because of their faith, refuse to accept physical help are easy to notice and criticize, but there is almost certainly a lot more damage that happens for similar reasons but goes unnoticed. Whether it is a belief in mind over matter, spiritual energy, or prayer to GOD or gods, any sort of appeal to the metaphysical can be harmful. How many people die because they wait too long to get that lump looked at by a doctor, thinking that if they refuse to acknowledge it as a real problem it will magically go away on its own?

And this is not just a problem with medical issues. How many people wait for the right opportunity to present itself in life rather than going out and making things happen for themselves? Belief in destiny can certainly energize people, but it can also hold people back until “the signs are right,” which they might never be.

If you believe in the help and guidance of some Higher Power or have faith in some cosmic destiny, it removes from you a lot of the responsibility for the way things actually turn out. And perhaps that makes the world feel easier to cope with. But there is good reason to believe that choosing to rely on such things can cost you a lot of value in situations that you could have made better if you had only chosen to take responsibility for the direction of your own life.

There is no real evidence for anything beyond the physical here and now. There might or might not exist a benevolent creator of the universe. But even if GOD does exist, there is no reason to believe that HE ever intervenes in the physical world at all, and certainly a lot of reason to believe that HE does not - or only does so in very very rare circumstances.

Think about it this way: Praying to GOD - asking that he should cause reality to deviate from the course of events that it would otherwise follow, based on the established physical laws of the universe - is like asking HIM to cheat - asking him to break the rules HE created.

Do you have enough integrity not to cheat when you play Solitaire? Even if you don’t, GOD probably does…

Or putting this all yet another way: “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

Today is a special day for the adherents of Christianity. Today is the Saturday between Good Friday (celebrating the day Christ died) and Easter Sunday (celebrating the day Christ rose from the dead.) Saturday is the day that Christ spent dead, and I would therefor humbly submit that this day should be celebrated by all Christians as “God Is Dead Day.”

This may seem a strange thing to ask Christians to celebrate, but please allow me to continue and explain my thinking.

If GOD is spending today dead - then he is not watching. Today is a day free from divine punishment or reward. Today you can behave as you would regularly choose to behave, if no GOD in heaven was watching you. Today is not only a holiday where you get the day off work, but one in which you also get a break from external moral judgment.

Today you, and you alone, will be responsible for the morality of your own freely chosen actions.

Regardless of your belief, “God Is Dead Day” is an excellent day to think about your own code of behavior. What if no one but you would judge your actions - would your personal code of morality be different than it is now? Given a day free from judgment by others, would you act differently? And if so, then are you really a moral person the other 364.2425 days a year?

If your moral behavior stems only from a fear of divine punishment, or even just what other people might think, is it really morality or is it just fear?

Give this some thought, and then spend today doing all the things you would like to do, safe in the knowledge that no one is watching, and your only judge today will be yourself.

Have a happy GIDD everyone!

In the book, “God Wants You Dead,” Paul and I talk about the nature of various religious and political philosophies and conclude that they are all examples of the same sort of ideological beast. Our “proof” for this comes from the ways that such entities compete with each other to occupy the same niches in the human psyche - the way the rise of a secular “ism” can drive out a religious “ism” and vice versa. We have also noted, both in the aforementioned book and in various blog posts, that a new hybrid of Socialism and Environmentalism is on the rise in the ongoing contest to be the world’s most powerful religion.

This new ideological organism, that I sometimes refer to as “Envirofundamentalism,” has many parallels to other religions. It has multiple Hell/Armageddon scenarios of global warming, ozone layer depletion, poisoned seas, genetically modified food monsters, etc. It has its own versions of a kosher diet with organic produce, free range meat, vegetarianism, and the like. It requires its sacrifices of time and energy to various odd rituals such as separating your trash into multiple categories. It even has its own version of Pascal’s Wager called the “Precautionary Principle.”

One of the advantages that this new religion currently has, is that it is not generally recognized as a religion. It is therefor more successful at influencing even those governments that are trying hard to maintain a separation of church and state. It has succeeded best so far in Europe where its biggest competitor, Christianity, had been previously weakened by the various “isms” clashing in World War II, but it has since spread to every other continent and is doing quite well.

In a previous blog post entitled “Pope Blasts Marx - Misses Gore,” I talked about a letter written by the Pope that showed his recognition of the way in which supposedly secular philosophies can compete directly with Christianity. However, I noted that he seemed to be missing the biggest threat of Environmentalism being such a competitor. But perhaps my criticism of his strategy came too soon. A new development has just occurred indicating that maybe the Pope recognized this competition but had another strategy in mind all along. (Either that or His Holiness reads this blog and I was the one that tipped him off :-)

What I am referring to is a recent news stories that the Catholic church is planning on increasing the number of deadly sins:

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=4424390

Three of the new “sins” to make the short list should be quite familiar to any faithful believer in the tenants of this new hybrid socialist/environmentalist religion:

• Environmental Irresponsibility
• Genetic Engineering
• Inequality of Wealth

So it is looking very much like the Catholic Church has decided to follow a strategy of “If you can’t beat ‘em - join ‘em.”

This is by no means a new way to go for a religion that started out as an offshoot of Judaism, granted divinity to its prophet to compete with the divinity granted to the Roman Emperor by his followers, folded its prophet/god back into its monotheistic GOD as well as an all encompassing over-soul by borrowing from Eastern religious ideas, co-opted other European religions by adopting their icons in the form of various angels and demons while stealing all of their high holidays and renaming them, drifted far into the secular world of bloody warfare and political machinations, and returned to the spirit of the recorded words of its prophet only when too many translations of those words into languages people could actually read finally existed for the discrepancies to continue to be ignored.

While it is certainly a long strange road from Genesis 9:2-3

And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

to a Catholic church that may learn to embrace animal rights - stranger things have certainly happened in the world of Collective Idea-Organisms.

This is a very interesting play for Catholicism to make and it will be fun to see how it plays out.

Well, perhaps “fun” is not the right word. Western civilization has made great progress through a delicate trick of balancing religious and secular powers against each other and leaving space for individual freedom and innovation in between. If this new attempt at an alliance between Catholicism and Envirofundamentalism makes more people notice the similarities between the two, it could produce more resistance to the influences of such idea-organisms on secular governments - and that would be a good thing. However, it could just as easily be a path back to the bad old days of people being ruled by a single united idea-organism - a church/state combination that called for the death of all unbelievers. The balance that we have achieved may be much more precarious than people realize.

It remains to be seen whether or not we can continue down the path of progress that western civilization has only relatively recently learned to tread, or if we will return to the big old sins of waging collective war on individual liberty and achievement. The unification of a powerful old icon for enslaving minds and the hottest new “up and comer” among such icons is a prospect to be greatly feared by those who believe in individualism.

It is often said that the The Holy Bible is the “best selling book of all time” but is this the gospel truth, or just mythology? In the spirit of the TV show “MythBusters” (one of our favorites) we set up an arbitrary pseudo-scientific experiment to evaluate this claim. Half way through that experiment, it is not looking good for Jesus.

Our first task was to decide exactly what was meant by “all time best selling.” Was it just a claim that the Bible has sold more copies than any other book? Or that the Bible still sells better than any other book? And which version of the Bible? Many of the same biblical texts appear in holy books of many religions, and many different publishers print many different versions of the Christian Bible. Deciding on the exact proper definition of this claim was a very hard problem, so in true MythBusters style, we just opted for an experiment we thought would be fun.

We decided that the most fun would be to test the sale of biblical content against atheistic content. We set up an ongoing experiment involving a new translation of the Bible offered for sale by a new publisher, and a new atheist book from the same publisher. To be fair to both books, we decided to make them as similar as possible in all ways other than their content - size, shape, number of pages, price - and a marketing budget of as close to zero as we could manage.

Step 1. Create the Books

It was our assumption that “The Bible” meant the Christian Holy Text, so to remove the issue of the same texts appearing in the books of other religions, we chose to re-publish just the content that gave birth to Christianity - the New Testament. Additionally, we wanted it to be as readable as our competing book, so we chose to remove all the verse numbers and put it in an easy to read paragraph form. (The way it was originally written before in became important to add verse numbers so people could hold them up on large cardboard signs at major sporting events.)

Our title for our bible translation: Jesus - The New Testament.

To compete with Jesus, we wrote a brand new over the top atheist book that not only slams organized religion, but also takes on just about anything that anyone, anywhere, anytime, has ever thought to be sacred.

Our title for this ultimate atheist’s handbook: God Wants You Dead.

Writing one book, translating another, and formating both for printing was about a one year task, so the total time for this experiment is about 2 years. (Don’t try this at home kids, we are professionals with too much time on our hands!)

Step 2. Create the Publishing Company and Start Marketing the Books

Having finished creating the two books, we incorporated, arranged to be able to process credit card orders, and set up a website with Zen Cart shopping cart software and the WordPress blog you are reading now. We arranged a printer, secured ISBN numbers, and got our books listed for sale on Amazon.com in addition to our own website. We also included several other books of different sizes and prices that seemed worth publishing. (These might be thought of as the control group if we were actually being scientific here.)

In keeping with our almost zero dollar budget target, we kept our marketing to a minimum, just sending out emails to various people and publications we thought might be interested in religious and/or anti-religious books.

Results:

Six months into the trial, this myth is well on its way to being busted.

“God Wants You Dead” is currently outselling “Jesus - The new Testament” by a considerable margin. But perhaps it is still too early to call it. Jesus may yet have some big sales over the months to come. The Bible might just be a slow starter.

To view the current rankings for yourself, and maybe even cast your own vote by buying a book, visit our online bookstore at: http://www.veravera.com/

Cartoon from the book “God Wants You Dead” by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg.

Merry X-mas to all…

I am pretty sure that I came up with this image myself, based purely on random collisions of ideas in my skull, in the mid 1990s - but the urban legend of the “Santa Cross” may be older. See Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/cross.asp