Think Humanely

Below you’ll find a recent speech given by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation, as well as co-founder of Project Reason, a non-profit organization “devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.”

I’ll have more to say about the relationship between science and morality (and religion and morality) in the coming days. In the meantime, enjoy the roughly 22-minute talk.

From an AP story earlier today:

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, Warren announced to cheers during a sermon at the church on Saturday.

Warren said the amount raised after the appeal was posted online Wednesday included only money parishioners brought in person to Saddleback Church by New Year’s Eve. More was arriving by hand and by mail, he said.

“This is pretty amazing,” said Warren, who made the announcement by bringing out 24 volunteers each holding a sign for $100,000. “I don’t think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter.”

Rick Warren is a disgusting human being, one who preaches extreme hate and intolerance while simulatenously taking advantage of thousands of people by preaching about fairy tales and the “wisdom” of backward, ignorant people from 2,000 years ago. Imagine going into a hospital for a much-needed surgery and your doctor pulling out the writings of Hippocrates for reference on how to best perform the procedure. Sure, Hippocrates was inventive and intelligent relative to how little everyone else knew and understood at the time. Today, however, even children know more about medicine. Here are some of the jewels of wisdom spouted by this fat bastard:

“Every obstacle is an opportunity. Every problem has potential. Every crisis is an opportunity for ministry.”

“”Now let me say this really clearly: We support Proposition 8. And if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues, I come out very clear.”

This particularly vile line of preaching comes with video:

Here is an interview with the religious-friendly BeliefNet:

“WARREN: The issue to me, I’m not opposed to that [some partnership rights] as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

BELIEFNET: Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do. For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman.”

This absurd, despicable thinking helps explain this :

“We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Dr Warren said.

Warren was speaking in support of Ugandan Anglicans who intend to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference, and this harsh rejection of tolerance for gays and lesbians may have serious consequences in a country where homosexuals face harrassment and and the threat of imprisonment.

Warren’s comment is of a piece with his support for Martin Ssempa, the Ugandan evangelist who has been a keynote speaker at a Warren conference, and who has received US global AIDS prevention funds. As I wrote in August, Ssempa wants to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and that gays and lesbians are identified in the public mind as sexual abusers. Ssempa calls for media censorship against opposing views and the dismissal of dissenting academics, and last summer he organised a rally with the theme “A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality”, at which he railed against “molestation and sodomy.”

He doesn’t believe in evolution; he compared those who thought that a husband should be allowed to let a comatose wife (whose brain had literally turned to mush) die and the husband’s supporters to Nazis; he thinks that the government should take away the right of a women to decide for herself what medical procedures she needs to have – having compared anything other than a complete anti-choice stance to a holocaust. There’s also this excerpted passage about Warren the tax-evader:

The California megachurch minister and opponent of gay marriage who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration had his income tax returns audited in 1996. When the IRS tried to collect the taxes it claimed he owed, Warren went to court. Congress then passed a law granting Warren’s tax deduction, pre-empting the US Court of Appeals from even taking up the case against him. The votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren’s audit the amount claimed had to be “reasonable”–it shouldn’t exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that–the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.

The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense–and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses–even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns.

Warren spent four years defending his housing deduction in tax court

And as a preemptive counter to those who can’t get enough of this self-serving, ludicrous figure, don’t bother citing some of the “good” things he has done. I’m not arguing that he is evil incarnate, only that he is a bigoted, destructive, hateful, delusional charlatan who preys on other people’s emotional, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings and manipulates, takes advantage of, and exploits them in order to aggregate additional power, wealth, and fame – fundamentally no different than Kenneth Hagin, Rodney Howard-Browne, Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc. He is a malignancy masquerading as a cure.

It only seems appropriate to end one one more quote by the good reverend, arguably his most intellectually dishonest and telling quote I’ve been able to find:

“We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position. If you can demand service from others, you’ve arrived. In our self-serving culture with its me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept.”

And Rick Warren has plenty of servants.

Below you’ll find a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who, because he is logically consistent, is also an atheist. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium, and he was appointed by President Bush in 2001 and 2004 to commissions on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry and the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, respectively.

The speech, which is split into two separate segments, was given in 2006 at the Beyond Belief conference. Tyson addresses the role that religion plays in not only obfuscating the truth but in completely retarding the progress of humanity and its understanding of the universe:

“Some of our greatest minds have done just this.” Imagine if Newton didn’t have the lazy construct that is god to fall back on. Imagine if he didn’t have the option of solving a problem by invoking the grand magician. Where could we be? Historians, philosophers, and scientists sometimes speculate how much more advanced we would be as a people if it weren’t for such destructive acts and periods as the burning of the great library in Alexandria and the Dark Ages. The better question is this: How much more advanced would we be, how much more enlightened, if religion were never allowed to infect society ab ovo?

Pharmacists are allowed to refuse to fulfill prescriptions for birth control pills because it offends their sexist, arcane belief system. Stem cell research was significantly held back after President Bush “prayed” on it and came to the belief that this scientific pursuit would offend his god. Members of the ultra-secretive religious group, The Family, stripped away funding for legal medical procedures in the House health care reform bill because their pastor, priest, etc. told them that a few cells are more important than a woman’s health and rights.

Religion and faith, by their very nature, look backwards. They are restrictive, regressive, and stagnant. Science, inquiry, and critical thought are a means of looking forward, a means of discovering new possibilities and truths, of coming to a better, more honest, and more useful understanding of reality. And religion, especially in America, does everything it can to molest these goals. We are not better off for it and we never will be. To the contrary, religion has only made life dramatically worse.

Lawrence Krauss, an award-winning physicist and best-selling author, recently gave an impressive talk at the Atheist Alliance International 2009 convention. His Hiding in the Mirror dealt with the possibility of multiple dimensions (beyond space and time) and parallel universes. In the video below, Dr. Krauss addresses, amongst several fascinating subjects, how the universe could have come into existence out of “nothing.” Enjoy:

Nota bene: Religious folk may prefer to plug their ears or, as can usually be expected, ignore the video altogether and continue reveling in their steaming ignorance, akin to a pig rolling blissfully in its own feces.