I CHALLENGE RAY COMFORT TO A BLOG DEBATE!

I will pay Ray Comfort two dollars and sixty-three cents, or $2.63 if you prefer, if he will come to this blog post and debate me for about fifteen comments or more if he wishes. Each comment must be under 2,000 words. Once the comment number hits fifteen, I will pay Ray his money no matter what he has said.

No other comments will be allowed in this one post. It waits here for Ray alone. Others can comment here.

I believe that offering Ray $2.63 is equivalent to Ray first offering Dawkins $10,000 if one compares the projected incomes of Ray Comfort to Richard Dawkins based on book sales.

Ray may start the debate on any subject he wishes.

If Ray refuses this offer, at least he'll understand why Dawkins isn't going for Ray's offer.

All Ray has to do is make a comment on this blog post right here. No traveling or other expenses. That's it, and it's far less effort than he is asking of Dawkins.

Please, dear readers, inform Ray Comfort that this challenge has been made.

What's a matter Ray, are you chicken? Afraid I'll defeat you without your editing tricks and censorship?

UPDATE - DAY 2:

It's now the second day after making my challenge to Ray Comfort and the lying chicken shit refuses to even acknowledge that he has been challenged.

The VP debate

Caribou Barbie did better in the VP debate than she did with her interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. Most of the time she managed to put words together in a reasonably coherent manner, but it was still cringe-worthy. It was the follow-up questions from Couric that tripped her up before, and the debate format either didn't allow for that kind of follow-up question, or the moderator didn't want to go there. As a result, there were Republican spin doctors out there calling the debate a win for Palin.

For example, Pat Buchanan said:

"Sarah Palin was sensational tonight. She not only met the expectations, I think she wiped up the floor with Joe Biden, quite frankly. She is personable, she is young. She has got a sense of humor. She looked straight into the camera while Joe is talking to Gwen all evening long. I thought she didn't make a mistake, not a foot fault in the whole thing. ... I was astonished at how well she did. ... There are conservatives and Republicans across America who are ... breathing a sigh of relief. ... She has recaptured that magic she had out there at the convention. ... I think that McCain campaign, given the economic problems, I don't know if they can turn this around, but if it can be turned around, I think she has done it in the sense that of the four debaters we've seen, she was the most interesting, attractive of them all"

Notice how its all superficial stuff that Pat praises, not the substance of the debate. Also, note the reference to the convention because I'll get back to that.

Another example, David Brooks', "The Palin Rebound":

She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.

By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.

A radical alternative? No, I don't think so. In order to be a radical alternative Palin and McCain are going to first have to prove that they actually understand what was wrong with the way the Bush administration governed during these last 8 years.

Remember when Couric asked her what is the "best and worst thing that Dick Cheney has done as Vice President?" Biden talked about shredding the constitution, condoning torture, the idea of a unitary executive where the Congress and the people have no power in a time of war and the President controls everything. However, Palin said the worst thing was the duck hunting accident. Then she praised Cheney for supporting the troops.

You can't be an alternative to Bush and Cheney until you can describe what they've done wrong.

Michelle Malkin wrote:

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

Jay Reding wrote:

Palin is not at all as polished as Biden, but she’s coming off as authentic. She doesn’t have full command of the debate, but she’s not just making things up like Biden has been all night.

Authentic? Really? Let us recall the previous authentic horrors:



I was hoping to see Caribou Barbie deliver another display of inept bullshit as she pretended to answer a question she really didn't have an answer for, which she did, but this time she did it much better. She was still one dimensional and still not really answering the questions. She even said something like, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also." Thus she dodged, picking and choosing her topics. She had studied her talking points and doggedly stuck to them. Toward the end she recycled and repeated a few.

Palin didn't even need to comprehend the questions, she ignored them and went down her checklist of speechifying rhetoric. Of course, this always happens in debates, but usually the politician can do a smoother segue into the point and then customize their stock bit enough to make it seem like an answer. In the end, what she did was work another convention speech into her answers and thus the problem with her answers was the same problem I had with her convention speech. One guy who explained that problem was Matt Taibbi, in his Rolling Stone article, Mad Dog Palin:

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
-- Matt Taibbi, Mad Dog Palin

Matt Taibbi pointed out, in the above article, that we're being asked to judge character, not substance, which is what Jay Reding, Michelle Malkin, and Pat Buchanan were doing, but the character we are given is the product of a script that is designed to massage Republican partisan egos.

I'm not saying Biden was great, both of our master debaters ejaculated their gooey platitudes and sticky talking points all over the audience, but there was more substance to his answers.

UPDATE:
How did I miss Rich Lowry's orgasmic "Little Starbursts"?

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

If you saw any utterly syrupy, iky, Republican spin on Palin that I missed, please share and leave a quote in my comments section.

Call for a Presidential Science Debate

Chris C. Mooney and friends are calling for a debate among the current presidential candidates that is solely devoted to issues in science and technology.

Here's a link to Mooney's blog.

If you agree with this statement:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we, the undersigned, call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy.

Check out Mooney's blog and visit:
http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/

Also, here's a related Seed Magazine article by Chris:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/10/dr_president.php

Chris Hedges: The new face of anti-atheism?

One can only hope, because with enemies like Chris Hedges you don't need friends.

Not that Chris Hedges is doing himself a disservice; he'll sell books because of what he's doing. One good way for a writer to get attention is to get themselves onto the coat-tails of other writers who are getting attention. And getting attention is something that Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have done. The God Delusion is #1 on the Sunday Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list. Christopher Hitchens' book, "God is not Great," is the #5 bestseller on Amazon and #1 in the New York Times Bestseller list where The God Delusion is #18 in its 35th week on the list. Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student in neuroscience until he wrote “The End of Faith” and then “Letter to a Christian Nation” which are still selling well but slipping as more writers jump on the atheist bandwagon and out atheist him.

Chris Hedges, a man with a new book to sell, is making that smart move and he has now debated both Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and I expect he'll get around to Richard Dawkins eventually. It would be smart for both men to debate. Debating Chris Hedges, no matter how vicious Hedges gets, he is ultimately playing good cop in another good-cop/bad-cop tactic where the real loser is fundamentalist religion.

Chris Hedges is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America” which is a book that is even more stridently opposed to James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than Harris' or Hitchens' books have been. According to Chris Hedges' book, Christian dominionists (also called "Christianists" and "Reconstructionists") want absolute power over a Christian state and their political movement is similar to Hitler's early fascist movement in Germany.

If you thought Sam Harris was over the top, you need to read Chris Hedges “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.”

Chris Hedges debated Christopher Hitchens at the King Middle School auditorium in Berkeley, California, not long ago. The topic of the debate was "Is God...Great?" It plays on the title of Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."

Christopher Hitchens' and Chris Hedges' very existence exposes the lies told on the far right about the radical left's rejection of religion. Hitchens is a "semi-neocon" pundit who is loathed by the far left because he does not toe the party line over the Iraq War. And Hedges is a far-left progressive journalist with a kind of hippy-dippy neo-Socialist, radical outlook.

To anyone on the far right, like say Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly or Future Toddler Chopper Vox Day, walking into the debate would have seemed like stepping into some topsy-turvy bizarro world where the defender of religion and the existence of God was a far left Democrat and the atheist was a pro-war neo-con. (Not to say that Hitchens is a neo-con, just that he came off like one this time.)

It would have been interesting to throw Ann Coulter into the middle of that debate and watch her brain melt while everything she thought she knew about the world was proven wrong. This is not a recent re-alignment, it has always been this way. Many atheists have been pro-Iraq war and a lot of Christians have opposed the war for religious reasons.

Chris Hedges has more experience with the Middle East than Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins combined. He was a New York Times Middle East bureau chief, a foreign correspondent and winner of a Pulitzer Prize. He has reported from more than 50 countries over the last 20 years. He speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows Latin and ancient Greek. He has a Master's degree in theology from Harvard and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is also author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" where he described war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind." He was an early and vocal critic of the Iraq war and he questioned the rationale for war put forth by the Bush administration and was critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading."

And I agree with a lot of what Hedges has written. But still, both Hitchens and Harris ripped Hedges' arguments to shreds and left him exposed and bleeding on the floor after their debates. No, no… it's not so much that Hitchens and Harris whipped Hedges in their debates as it is the fact that Hedges arguments self-destructed, crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions as soon as he made his openning statements, long before Hitchens and Harris could say anything and then all they had to do was point this out.

Consider this simple claim made by Hedges during his debate with Hitchens: "biblical literalists do not exist." Doesn't that contradict the premise of Hedges own book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America”? Isn't the Christian Right that Hedges reports on, with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, made up of literal creationists? Does he not report that the very name for the Dominist movement comes from Genesis and God telling Adam you shall have dominion over the Earth?

Hedges also said things like “to argue whether or not God exists is futile,” but that was why Hedges was supposedly there to debate these guys. He had to change the rules because he knew he couldn't win that debate.

And Hedges also said “Jesus never talks about starting a church”, as if churches were just an invention of Constantine. Most atheists know the Bible better than Hedges. Didn't Jesus tell Peter, "and on this rock I shall build my church..." in Matthew 16:18? Aren't the later books of the New Testament Paul's letters to the churches?

Maybe in some context Hedges' claims are not a self-destructing pile of mistakes and contradictions, but I have no idea what that context is and neither do most people I know. It looks to me like a guy who keeps shooting himself in the foot until he hasn't got a leg to stand on.

So, how can a smart guy like Chris Hedges get ripped to shreds by these simple minded atheists? It's because reason and debate work. Hedges' problem is that he essentially agrees that the Christian Right is poisoning everything very much like Hitchens and Harris claim and he has to defend the religion that the Christian Fascist movement sprang out of. It's an untenable position. Hedges' religious stance is rather Orwellian. He cherry-picks his beliefs and thinks that not taking the Bible at face value makes him a smarter person. But if you read Hitchens’ book, you know he thinks that people who do what Hedges does aren’t really thinking that deeply about the Bible and that it is mere egoism to think that your take on “God’s Word” is the one and only take. And as Sam Harris would add, Hedges take isn't necessarily better than the literalists.

When Hedges debated Harris he shot himself in the foot with his opening statement saying:

Sam Harris has conflated faith with tribalism. His book is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society.

Both the words faith and tribalism, when coming out of Hedges mouth, are nothing but Orwellian euphemisms, they're a kind of Doublespeak that attempts to confuse and conceal the truth. The very source of the tribalism that Hedges objects to is the holy books themselves, the Bible and the Koran, the core documents of two major religions. The tribalism and the religion cannot really be separated. Moses and Jesus were tribal leaders.

Hedges isn't wrong to say that Harris' book "is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society," but he is very misleading because both Hedges and Harris are also continually using Faith as a euphemism for some kind of religious belief. If we think of having faith in non-religious things, like a friend or an institution, like government, then Harris has no attack on that. Harris means by Faith; a faith in the dogmas of some ancient religion. But Hedges later, in the same opening remarks, redefines Faith to mean "... not faith in magic, not faith in church doctrine or church hierarchy, but faith in simple human kindness."

What an Orwellian redefinition of faith! That's certainly not what Sam meant, it's not what the word faith actually means, it's not any kind of common usage for faith, it's some euphemism Hedges either invented on the spot or picked up in his reading. But it's Sam Harris' own fault for adopting Christian euphemisms, and even using one for the title of his book, and expecting them to have any kind of consistent meaning, especially the word "faith." Religious language is designed for emotional manipulation and evasion, not communication. The word faith actually means a lot of different things to different people. It's not supposed to communicate anything, it's suppose to hide your meaning. In my post, Brownback Mountain, I showed how Sam Brownback turned faith into a synonym for logical preposterism. Christians like faith, but would they like logical preposterism?

One person can make faith mean different things in the same paragraph and it can get comic, such as when a Christian claims that it takes more faith to be an atheist and then goes on to praise faith rapturously. Hedges himself uses the word faith a lot, and he obviously doesn't always mean the same thing every time he uses it.

Hedges next says:

He [Sam Harris] attacks superstition, a belief in magic and the childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society. He calls this religion. I do not.

But a belief in magic and the childish notion of an anthropomorphic God is a characteristic of the Religious Right Hedges himself railed against. Again, the Bible is about superstitious people who sacrifice animals, it's about magic and miracles and an anthropomorphic God who talks to Moses, gets angry, orders people to kill other people, drowns the world in a great flood, and smashes towers that get too close to heaven because he feels threatened apparently.

If religion isn't that then what is it -- atheism and humanism? Has Hedges redefined religion as atheistic humanism?

I really don't know. I can't make much sense of it. So, here are Chris Hedges opening remarks and you tell me if you can make any sense of it, and if you can explain it in the comments section of this post.

But before I leave you with that task, here's another bit of Hedges openning I want to tell you something about:

the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual. This individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that at times defy the clamor of the tribe or the nation—is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths.

Now, if individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths, then why does the Bible have passages like this, Acts.4.32: "Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common." Is that individualism? Is Islam's (an Abrahamic faith) call for submission individualism? Is any of it it more individualistic than what we see in Roman writers before Christ? Say Titus Lucretius Carus?

Is Chris Hedges dressing up atheistic humanism in religious language and selling it to people who can't stomache blatant atheism?

I wish I had an enemy like Chris Hedges to debate. Even if you lose, you win. If Chris Hedges didn't exist, Christopher Hitchens would have had to invent him -- and one day he'll probably be accused of doing just that.

Andrew Sullivan talks death

Andrew Sullivan's latest reply to Sam Harris is up and it's called, "The Undiscovered Country."

Andrew says:

...I found myself a little embarrassed in retrospect by the forthrightness of my claims to faith. I feel an unworthy apologist for Christianity in many ways. I'm not a trained theologian nor a priest nor even someone who thinks of himself as a good Christian.

That was Andrew surrendering his faith to theologians he doesn't understand very well because of their vagueness, obfuscation and doublespeak. He'd rather do that than thinking for himself.

Sam, according to Andrew, argued that Andrew's:

...notion of God "doesn't have much in the way of specific content (apart from love)." I have indeed held back a little (although God-as-love is no small idea; it is an immense idea).

It's also an immense contradiction considering this God-as-love supposedly damns people to eternal Hell. In the Old Testament God's character is fairly consistent, the Bible portrays Moses as someone who talked God and took orders from him. This God then told Moses to go around and kill people for various absurd reasons, and that's in addition to his own previous terrorist actions like flooding the Earth. This is what the Old Testament tells us about how the Midians are killed, all of them except the virgin girls:

Numbers, Chapter 31


On God's instructions, Moses sent soldiers against the Midianites in response to some of the Israelite men having had sex with some of the Midianite women. Moses then ordered them to slaughter all the captives, saving only female virgins. The latter were apparently kept for purposes of rape. Verse 35 talks about 32,000 virgin captives; this implies that there were probably about 32,000 young boys killed.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2: ... the seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

Joshua 6:21: And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

In the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites, after the walls of the city of Jericho fell, the soldiers ran into the city, and killed every man, women and child, even infants and newborns. Their goal was to entirely wipe out the Canaanite culture by destroying its people. It is, by definition, genocide. When Moses orders the worshippers of the golden calf killed it's an example of murderous religious intolerance:

Exodus, Chapter 32
Exodus 32:26-28: "Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD's side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."

God had responded to the people's desire to change their religious beliefs by killing off thousands of them. This contrasts with the concept of "separation of church and state" in an extreme way. Current laws in most of the civilized world allow individuals full freedom to change their religion. It's only in a few of the Islamic countries where religious beliefs are enforced.

Mass murder of fighters for democracy:
Numbers 16:2-3: "And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown: And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?"

Numbers 16:20-39: "And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, Separate yourselves from among this congregation, that I may consume them in a moment... the ground clave asunder that was under them: And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up..."

Num 16:41-49: "But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the people of the LORD...And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Get you up from among this congregation, that I may consume them as in a moment..."

Fundamentalists don't appear to have a problem with the violence of God, assuming as many do, that God's wrath will not be aimed at them. However, the majority of liberal traditions in all three religions that are rooted in the Old Testament image of God do have a problem with this. They devise all sorts of complex theologies, obfuscations and Orwellian doublespeak trying to contain the poison. Christianity may have been the first attempt to contain the dangerous beliefs in an Old Testament God that lead Jewish zealots to their self-destruction.

Remember "1984" and the Party's slogan: "WAR IS PEACE." Using the term "GOD IS LOVE" is also doublespeak because if we look at God's behavior in the Old Testament he more often acts out of hate, he punishes and destroys. He drowned the world, flamed 2 cities, ordered Moses to kill thousands... He sends non-believers to hell for eternity in the New Testament. What is love if it is not nurturing and helping? What does punishment that last for eternity accomplish in shaping behavior? At the very least God's love is highly conditional. "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY" applies to Christian thinking too. While I might feel free doing what I want, it just makes me a slave of Satan. Believing eventually comes down to obedience out of fear, the same reason a slave obeys, but it is supposed to make us "free." The Old Testament is a record of the horror God supposedly inflicted, the New Testament is a promise of horrors to come when the Jews failed to inflict those horrors on the Romans and then got pushed out of their land in 70 AD.

This Christian doublespeak is used by politicians like George W. Bush now. Consider the way Bush throws around terms like "evil" as in "axis of evil." Like bin Laden he tries to paint a picture of a battle between good and evil. But "good" is NOT the opposite of "evil." The opposite of "good" is "bad." The opposite of "evil" is "'gracious,' 'nuturing,' 'merciful,'" etc.. The opposite of 'that which deprives of benefit' is 'that which shares benefit.' "Nothing is evil lest thinking make it so" and "evil" is simply an ungracious assessment of ungracious acts. Thus good and evil are relativistic unless we clearly defined the terms in ways other than "what God wants" especially if the only people telling us what God wants can't be tested for such communication. If this were not a Christian country more voters would have seen through Bush's Christian doublespeak.

Andrew knows that his...

...refusal to say outright that because I believe that Jesus was and is the Son of God, the tenets of other faiths - Islam, Buddhism, Judaism - must be logically false. Mine, you insist, is a solid truth-claim that requires being addressed, especially because these mutually contradicting truth-claims are the source of so much conflict and dissension. You're right, I think, to judge me "a little evasive" on this score.

That is a remarkable confession Andrew just made about his own evasiveness. Unfortunately when Andrew tries to get a little less evasive this is what he says:

As a Christian, I do deny Islam's claim that Jesus was not actually divine. I deny Judaism's claim that the Messiah has not yet come. I deny any other number of truth-claims held by people of other faiths.

Interesting how he puts it in the negative frame and leaves it as minimal as possible. He doesn't like his Christian dogma, does he?

…nature of the phenomenon we're discussing - faith - has no universal rubric upon which to rationally decide one claim over another.

The idea that faith has no "rubric" is Christian doublespeak. The rubric would be things like trust and promises and duty. The idea that faith and trust between people needs to be earned is somehow left out.

"IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" is a reverse of "Knowledge is power." The New Testament tells you faith is more important than the world's logic or knowledge: 1 Cor.1:19 "For I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent." 1:27 "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;" The dependence on faith and seeing doubt as a sin is an attack on gaining knowledge.

I am very much aware that humans have no common rubric by which to judge these religious truth-claims except their internal coherence, their congruence with historical data, their longevity, and one's own conscience.

Isn't internal coherence and congruence with historical data enough to shoot down biblical claims?

For example, I pointed out in my review of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" how one of Ted Koppel's theologians started arguing for the bodily ascension of Jesus into the sky. So, where did his body go? Does he think heaven is up in the sky? What's up there is 350,000 feet worth of atmosphere and then the vacuum of space and the Van Allen radiation belts. Where did Jesus' body go? Is Heaven hiding behind a cloud?

The idea of the bodily ascension of Jesus into the sky is based on an ancient and very wrong model of our world where they actually thought that heaven was upstairs in the sky, either beyond the crystal spheres or the dome of the sky. It shows up in other biblical stories, like when God comes down to smash the tower of Babel because it's getting too close to heaven.

… a pragmatic and a religious move - pragmatic because I want to live in a peaceful world (I like my iPod and my civil society), and religious because the violence such certainty provokes violates the very teachings of the God I worship. I'm tolerant because I am a Christian.

Does Andrew think he would be less tolerant if he were not a Christian? And where does he get tolerance from his Christianity? From a God who would damn all who don't believe in him? From a God who orders Moses to kill whole nations, including their children?

... all these alternative modes of understanding - science, history, etc - are as contingent in the human mind as faith itself.

No, Andrew, as you know, science is not as contingent in the human mind as faith. That's a bald faced lie. Faith should be earned, honestly earned, by all who ask for it. What other institution and book would you give such faith to in the absence of evidence and with so many overt contradictions and divisions over interpretation?

… some avenues of knowledge are less contingent than others. And you have a point there. The question soon becomes one of relative contingencies. Is scientific thought less contingent than theology?

Yes. Science is remarkably less contingent than theology. That's why it's the same science across the globe, but the religions are different.

I was intrigued, as I'm sure you were, by the recent piece, "Darwin's God," in the New York Times Magazine, that posited an evolutionary origin or a neurological accident for the universal human tendency to believe that something is "out there" when, empirically, it isn't.

Sullivan might be unaware of the debate Scott Atran and Sam Harris have had over at Edge.com.

My own faith came alive most fully when I believed I was going to die young. It came alive as I watched one of my closest friends die in front of me at the age of 31. During that "positive hour," to quote Eliot, I also experienced religious visions, I heard a voice inside of me with a distinct tone that seemed to me divine, I experienced a moment of terrible doubt followed by a moment of complete, unsought-for relief. Maybe all this was a function of fear and existential panic. Maybe it was all a coping mechanism.

A function of fear and existential panic? Andrew seems to admit that it is the fear and denial of death that drives his faith. But what is to fear in death? Death is a reason to be sad, you're saying good-bye to everything or to a loved one, but it is Christianity that has tried to make us fear death with its threats of Hell.

If you read ancient mythology you can see humanity's idea of the afterlife evolving. You can see how the theologians kept simplifying and pumping up the volume on their portrait of the afterlife. The Egyptian afterlife was a complicated mess where kings had multiple souls and multiple afterlives. No other civilization devoted as much attention and resources to their dead as did the ancient Egyptians. Their elaborate funeral rites, their painstaking mummification technology, their vast Necropolis and their huge and complicated literature about the afterlife, all are witness to this fact.

In earlier Egyptian civilization, it seems only the Pharaoh and his family had an afterlife, and they became gods. The massive pyramids constructed during the early dynasties happen here. By the end of the sixth dynasty, the afterlife is expanded to include nobles. Then, with the cult of Osiris, the slain and resurrected god, in many ways a very Christ-like figure, the democratization of the afterlife is completed, and all were given souls.

As Egypt began to decline their view of the afterlife was simplified, the mummification got cheaper and faster, the rituals less involved and less expensive. As this happens the Greeks take over and there is some crossbreeding between the religions. In the ancient Greek religion, Tartarus was the closest thing to Hell and it was only for the especially wicked characters and enemies of the gods. That's where Sisyphus must repeatedly push a boulder up a hill for eternity and where Tantalus is kept just out of reach of cool water and grapes for sharing the secrets of the gods with humans. Tartarus is where enemies were cast after being defeated by the gods, including the Titans and Typhus. Elysium, or the Elysian Fields or Elysian Plain, seems borrowed from Egypt and it was the closest thing to a Heaven in their religion and it was inhabited at first only by the very distinguished, but later by the merely good. There are no streets of gold or pearly gates. Instead the Elysian Fields are characterized by gentle breezes and an easy life like that of the gods.

When Rome takes over, Tartarus became the eternal destination of sinners in general. Then Christianity pumped these threats and promises up to maximum volume with a Heaven and Hell and the ultimate simplification presented in seemingly the vaguest language possible.

Before Christianity we can see that death was not feared as much by how the Romans and Greeks treated death.

Maybe these psychological and spiritual experiences are simply the best way that humans have devised through countless millennia for coping with their own conscious knowledge of their own mortality.

Man's attitude toward death has changed. Christians force their fear of death on the rest of us. Consider the right-to-die advocates like Jack Kevorkian. Proponents of physician-assisted suicide have been advocating its legalization for those who are terminally ill but our Christian society resists. Some of us think a suicide is the best way to die if you're terminally ill. You have choice. You have control. You’re ready.

And how can we not be human? And who would want not to be human?

Being human doesn't mean you have to let some priesthood pull your puppet strings with phony hopes and fears.

What you are asking for, as I have argued before, is salvation by reason.

There is no salvation of the kind you're asking for, Andrew. There is only living better and dying better. There is only facing the reality that death is the end of us.

But even after you have been saved by reason, you will die, Sam. And what will save you then?

He will say good-bye to everything he knew and then he won't care about anything because there is no him to care any more. This is the same thing that will happen to Andrew in spite of all his faith.

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