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commentary

God's dupes

Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics -- and are every bit as delusional.

By Sam Harris
SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."

March 15, 2007

PETE STARK, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.

The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.

Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.

Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.

Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.

Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?

There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.

Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

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From www.secular.org, the web site of the Secular Coalition for America, a great organization that needs your support:

Congressman Holds No God-Belief

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) is first Congress member in history to acknowledge his nontheism

For Immediate Release
Contact: Lori Lipman Brown, (202) 299-1091
March 12, 2007

There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America. Rep. Stark is a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and is Chair of the Health Subcommittee.

Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition's research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show that Americans without a god-belief are, as a group, more distrusted than any other minority in America. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president even if he or she were the most qualified for the office.

Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, attributes these attitudes to the demonization of people who don't believe in God. "The truth is," says Silverman, "the vast majority of us follow the Golden Rule and are as likely to be good citizens, just like Rep. Stark with over 30 years of exemplary public service. The only way to counter the prejudice against nontheists is for more people to publicly identify as nontheists. Rep. Stark shows remarkable courage in being the first member of Congress to do so."

In October, 2006 the Secular Coalition for America, a national lobby representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists, announced a contest. At the time, few if any elected officials, even at the lowest level, would self-identify as a nontheist. So the Coalition offered $1,000 to the person who could identify the highest level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States.

In addition to Rep. Stark only three other elected officials agreed to do so: Terry S. Doran, president of the School Board in Berkeley, Calif.; Nancy Glista on the School Committee in Franklin, Maine; and Michael Cerone, a Town Meeting Member from Arlington, Mass.

Surveys vary in the percentage of atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheists in the U.S, with about 10% (30 million people) a fair middle point. "If the number of nontheists in Congress reflected the percentage of nontheists in the population," Lori Lipman Brown, director of the Secular Coalition, observes, "there would be 53-54 nontheistic Congress members instead of one."

© 2007 Secular Coali

ACTION ALERT

Thank Rep. Pete Stark for his brave and historic self-identification as a nontheist

Mar. 12, 2007 - With your support, we made history today. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) openly self-identifies with the nontheist community. He is the first member of Congress to be on record as not holding a god-belief. For more information see our press release.

We can only guess what the reaction to this announcement will be from certain communities. It is very important that you, other nontheists and our theist allies, contact Rep. Stark to thank him for his brave and historic decision. You can e-mail his office at http://www.house.gov/stark/contact/. Please share this alert with others so that Rep. Stark receives as many positive responses as possible.

Below you will find a sample letter. Please feel free to adapt it to your voice and provide additional information of importance to you:

It's tough to an out-of-the-closet secular humanist here in religion-dominated America, where atheists' poll numbers consistently hover around those of cockroaches.

So it's with great respect that I salute the Denver Post's courageous editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe, who consistently is on the correct side of church/state issues, while working for a newspaper in a traditionally and solidly Red State.

And in recognition of his work, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (www.ffrf.org) recently honored Keefe with its Freethought in the Media: "Tell It Like It Is" Award.

Check out Mike's cartoons at www.InToon.com.

No, not the mythological New Testament, but an L.A. Times report that a new generation of more socially conscious evangelicals - like, you know, they're concerned about such little things as global warming and AIDS - are successfully challenging the power of the Old Guard pukes, chief among them the Grand Puke, James Dobson, whose views can just about be summarized by his adamant belief that passing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is more of a priority than addressing global warming!?!.

 Not that I have any great admiration for the younger evangelicals, but if they're on the correct side of some social justice issues (I assume, for instance, they’re still for relegating gay human beings to second-class status, denying them the right to marry), even for bogus reasons (Jesus tells them to), then I at least have some respect for them. And then of course, there's that whole “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing. Link to the Times story follows:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-

evangelicals10mar10,0,5336382.story?coll=la-home-

headlines

http://pacificjustice.org/resources/news/focusdetails.cfm?ID=PR070306a

 Something like this just doesn't help our cause. If the parents of a graduating student want to write "God bless you" in his yearbook, they should be allowed to do so.

 It's not really a church/state separation issue, but a First Amendment one. Preventing the parents from doing so makes our side look like intolerant Stalinists. At press time, btw, the school agreed to put the “God bless” message back in.

AP
Dollar Coins Missing 'In God We Trust'
Wednesday March 7, 12:51 pm ET
By Joann Loviglio, Associated Press Writer

 Except for a brief period in college when I (as well as many others of my generation) went through an Eastern Religion phase, and another period later in life when I toyed with Christianity only because I was trying to get into the pants of a hottie co-worker who was "born again," I've never been much of a "God" person.

 Still, when Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" came out a few years back to much controversy, I decided to seriously explore Christianity. Maybe there was something to it, after all.

  Rather than becoming a believer, however, through considerable reading, I became an ardent non-believer.

 From the Jesus Seminar's "The Five Gospels," I learned that the seminar had concluded that 82% of the quotes ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament had likely been concocted by his followers after the fact.

 From Burton L. Mack's "Who Wrote the New Testament?", I learned that Jesus' followers over time steadily inflated his significance, from at first, merely a wise teacher to years later, the Lord of the Universe and All Creation, even though he never claimed to be the latter.

 From S. Acharya's "The Christ Conspiracy," I learned that many pre-Christian pagan religions worshiped "saviors" with uncanny similarities to Jesus; some were born of virgins, some were baptized; some performed miracles; some were crucified, resurrected and returned to heaven.

 And from author Earl Doherty ("The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?"), I learned that a strong case can be made that the historical Jesus never existed. That argument essentially holds that during Jesus' alleged lifetime, there are absolutely zero references to him in any of the historical works of that time. "This does disprove his existence," writes Dan Barker in "Losing Faith in Faith, "but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed." Only decades later, when the Gospels were written by Christian propagandists based on hearsay or flat-out invention, do the details of the life of the alleged historical Jesus get mentioned. Hmmm...

 Taken together, all that, plus much, much more that I've learned by merely freeing my mind, makes a pretty convincing case that Christianity is just another of the world's many mythologies. And to think I owe it all to Mel Gibson.

There have been many, many "Gods" throughout human history. Virtually every people and culture has had them, including (just to name a scant few) the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, native Americans and Hindus and of course, adherents of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

 Yet Christians only believe that Jesus is God, rejecting all the others, making them atheists when it comes to the vast majority of humankind's "Gods." The same applies to Muslims, who believe only Allah is God. Jews, meanwhile, are atheists in that they don’t worship Jesus or Allah (to be fair, many believers of just about all “faiths” reject the other faiths’ Gods).

 Why are the “faithful” so adamant in believing that just their God is real, but all the others are false? Admittedly, the Roman and Greek and Norse Gods are obviously myths, but why is any more credence given to, say, stories of a virgin birth, resurrection from the dead and ascendance to Heaven? Especially in contemporary times, given that such stories were first formulated in ancient, pre-science societies populated by people who were ignorant – they believed the earth was flat, for instance - by today’s standards? Those people wouldn’t even qualify as contestants for the new American TV game show, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”

 P.S. - As long as I'm on the subject of ascendance to Heaven, good ol' Pat Robertson, who can always be counted on to stick his size tens in his flapping gums, once on his 700 Club broadcast ridiculed the Muslim belief that Mohammed ascended into Heaven, but then in the next breath, and with a straight face, said that of course only Jesus ascended into Heaven. But of course. How could anyone possibly think differently?

  Is there a more hoary sports cliché than athletes pointing to "the Man upstairs" or dropping to their knees for a quick silent prayer after say, hitting a home run or scoring a touchdown? As if God was a fan of their team, favoring them over their opponents (Yankees, good; Red Sox, bad)?

  This curious phenomenon reached new heights of absurdity Saturday night during the pay-per-view broadcast of a mixed martial arts competition, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) 68, staged in the bellwether Middle American state of Ohio.

  It was a real Jesus-fest, as fighter after fighter publicly thanked Him for their victories in which, as opposed to hitting home runs or scoring touchdowns, their opponents were left bruised, battered, bloody messes.

  And here I thought that according to His followers, the main message of "The Prince of Peace" was to love one another. Maybe MMA bouts are His idea of tough love, I dunno. Can someone please explain?

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 It's a very human reaction to a tragedy - the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama, resorting to that hoary cliché and asking for the prayers of those touched by the recent tornado deaths of eight high school students.

 But if God existed, and was all-good and all-powerful, why did he/she/it permit the deaths in the first place? And what good will prayers do now? Bring the victims back to life? I thought only Jesus was worthy of resurrection.

  By any objective standard, prayer simply doesn't work. If it did, to cite one obvious example, wouldn't world peace have been established a long time ago, given all the repeated prayers for it, from, including none other than his Popeness? If God doesn't listen to him, why in the world would he listen to us, the insignificant little people?

 I'm not making light of a human tragedy - I'm truly sorry for the deaths in Enterprise - but we really ought to stop wasting our limited time, and pinning our hopes, on such a futile, well, enterprise, as prayer. It just doesn't work.

 P.S. - Unlike the grossly insensitive religious rightists who blamed Katrina on New Orleans' "sinful" ways, I have great empathy for the victims in Enterprise. I will not stoop to blame the deaths on God being angry that that the good citizens of the Bible Belt city have twisted His teachings into a gospel of intolerance.

is to spend eternity with a bunch of fundamentalist Christians. OK, that's a joke, but can you imagine being stuck for all time with those insufferable types? Could anything be more hellacious? Of course, Hell doesn't exist, but if it did, I'd rather reside there (yeah, OK, with all my friends) than Heaven, if Heaven just had to be populated by the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world. Say Amen!

RR types are big on promoting a supposed "culture of life."  For instance, in a critical response to Bush's State of the Union address in January, Tony Perkins, head of the wretched Family Research Council said, "The president failed to draw a line in the sand on behalf of life. What will become of the culture of life?"

Hey Tony, you mean like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in Bush's unnecessary, unpopular war, a war that these days is still supported by many on the RR (about the only ones who do)? Uh, excuse me while I barf. Is there anyone more hypocritical than the RR? Don't answer. That was merely a rhetorical question. You know the answer.

Is This Jesus's Tomb?

There were two types of fame on display at the press conference Monday morning in a grand, sky-lit room at the back of the New York Public library. There was director James Cameron, towering like a a six-foot-plus druidic monolith in a dark jacket and black turtleneck. And there was a light tan limestone box about two feet long lying on a table in front of Cameron — which the Titanic director was presenting as the burial box of Jesus Christ. All things being equal, we know who would be the bigger draw. (It was John Lennon who said he was bigger than Jesus, not Cameron, right?) But all things were not equal. Those in the room knew that Cameron was provably authentic. The other guy? Much more problematic.

Cameron (acting as producer), biblical film documentarian Simcha Jacobovici and a handful of their expert consultants were at the Library to publicize Jacobovici's The Jesus Family Tomb, which will run this Sunday on the Discovery Channel, and a HarperSanfrancisco book of the same name. Their claim is that there was indeed a Jesus family tomb in what is now suburban Jerusalem: and that the two bone boxes on the table in front of them, exported from Israel, had contained the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, whom the filmmakers assert was Jesus's wife and the mother of a son named Judah. Meet the Jesuses! Cameron told the press that when Jacobovici, who has been working on the project for years, laid it out for him in detail, he thought, "I'm not a biblical scholar, but it seemed pretty darned compelling." He added, "I said, this is the biggest achaeology story of the century. And I still believe that to be true."

If true, of course, it is more than that. If true, it is a contradiction, in the most earthy, concrete way, of the Bible, which claims that Jesus was taken up bodily into heaven.

But as its creators have revealed more and more of it over the last two days, key parts of it seem increasingly like debatable conjecture.

Here's the set-up. In 1980 a construction crew in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot chanced upon a first-century tomb, which are not uncommon in that city. The Israeli Antiquities Authority found 10 bone boxes there, and stored them in a warehouse. Some bore inscribed names: Jesus, son of Joseph; Maria; Mariamene e Mara; Matthew; Judas, son of Jesus; and Jose. Each name with the exception of Mariamene seemed common to their period, and it was only in 1996 that the BBC made a film suggesting that. given the combination, it might be that family. The idea was eventually discounted, however, because, as University of St. Andrews (Scotland) New Testament expert Richard Bauckham asserted in a subsequent book, the names with Biblical resonance are so common that even when you run the probabilities on the group, the odds of it being the famous Jesus's family are "very low."

Jacobovici, however, remained fascinated, and announced at the press conference what he had added to the equation:

—University of North Carolina scholar James Tabor told him that Mariamene was the name some Christians gave to Mary Magdalene. If true, that added a rather uncommon name to the statistical mix. (Or as Cameron put it, "If you found a John, a Paul and a George, you're not going to leap to any conclusions... unless you found a Ringo.").

—Jacobovici also contends that "Jose," a name that appears in the Bible as that of one of Jesus's brothers, is rarer than previous scholars thought.

— He came up with a new process called "patina fingerprinting," which purports to show that a different bone box that popped up in the hands of an Israeli collector some years ago and is alleged to have contained the remains of Jesus's brother James originally came from Talpiot, which would raise the coincidence level even higher.

—And Jacobovici managed to get tests done on DNA from the "Jesus" and "Mariamene" bone-boxes that indicated that they were not related on their mother's sides: therefore, Jacobovici quotes the DNA expert as saying, if this was indeed a family tomb, the two "would most likely have been husband and wife" (which is the source of his contention that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that the Judah in the tomb was their son).

That last bit alone should give some sense of how problematic some of Jacobovici's conclusions are. A sampling of difficulties:

— If "Jesus" and "Mariamene" weren't related matrilineally, why jump to the conclusion that they were husband and wife, rather than being related through their fathers?

— The first use of "Mariamene" for Magdalene dates to a scholar who was born in 185, suggesting that Magdalene wouldn't have been called that at her death.

— St. Andrews' Bauckham defends his probabilities, noting that Jacobovici was comparing his name-cluster to the rather small sampling of names known to have been found on bone boxes, while his own basis for comparison, which adds names from contemporary literature and other sources, makes the combo far less unusual.

— Asbury Theological Seminary professor Ben Witherington, a early Christianity expert who was deeply involved with the James Ossuary, says there are physical reasons to believe it couldn't have originated in the Talpiot plot.

Darrell Bock, a professor at the conservative Protestant Dallas Seminary, whom the Discovery Channel had vet the film two weeks ago, adds another objection: why would Jesus's family or followers bury his bones in a family plot and "then turn around and preach that he had been physically raised from the dead?" If that objection smacks secular readers as relying too heavily on scripture, then Bock's larger point is still trenchant: "I told them that there were too many assumptions being claimed as discoveries, and that they were trying to connect dots that didn't belong together."

Your move, Mr. Titanic.

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 Approach religion with any kind of honest intellectual openness and one can't but help but come away with, at worst, serious doubts about its validity, and at best,  the conclusion that it's all mythology and false.

 Yet so many believers just swallow it whole, with such obscenely lazy reasoning (if you can call it that) as "God said it. It's in the Bible. I believe it." I can perhaps understand such thinking in Third and Fourth World countries with extremely low levels of education, but here in the U.S., even among the well educated? Many people just seem to have an emotional need to believe, the facts be damned.

 Let's just take the New Testament Gospels as something whose purported accuracy can be intellectually de-constructed in about a New York minute: they were written decades after Jesus allegedly existed by anonymous Christian propagandists who never knew the alleged Jesus and who based their accounts on hearsay.  The Gospels wouldn't even be admitted into evidence in a U.S. criminal trial, which in general, bans hearsay testimony as unreliable.

 Or as Michael Martin writes in his book, "The Case Against Christianity," published by Temple University Press, "The primary historical sources for an existence claim about an individual become doubtful if they are contradictory, report events that are intrinsically improbable, and are based on clearly biased writers who wrote long after the individual was supposed to have died and the claim is not independently confirmed either by other writers both biased and unbiased who wrote earlier than the primary source. Such doubts increase when the major aspect of this individual's life can be accounted for without making any existence assumption, that is by supposing that the individual's life and existence is a myth."

Hey believers, any part of that you don't understand? Uh, hello? Anyone awake?

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   Christian fundamentalists are always gibbering on about how the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation," which since the 1960s has gotten away from its "Christian roots" due to dreaded liberal/secular influences and as a result, will face "the angry judgment of God" because of it.

  In their desperation to rewrite American history, they always seem to overlook (or simply lie about) that facts that most of the Founding Fathers were Deists and children of the Enlightenment, not Christians, and that the Constitution, the binding Law of the Land (no, not the Bible), contains exactly zero references to God, Jesus or Christianity.

  Just as damning to their argument, IMO, is this stat from Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" published by Viking: "At the close of the American Revolution...only 15 to 20 percent of the population regularly attended church." Fifteen to 20 percent?!? Only one in five Americans regularly attended church? That sounds more like contemporary post-Christian Europe than it does like the beginning of a so-called "Christian Nation." Of course, facts aren't something that "believers" value too highly anyway, are they?

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You ever notice how so many Christian fundamentalists (as well as their counterparts in Islam and other religions) believe so fervently in things for which there is no empirical evidence (God, Jesus-as-God, etc.), and disbelieve equally fervently in things for which the empirical evidence is overwhelming (evolution, global warming, the big bang)? Is it any wonder these people are so confused? Delusional, indeed Dr. Dawkins.

From an essay by Paul Kurtz, founding chair of the Council for Secular Humanism, entitled "Why Do People Believe or Disbelieve," contained in a collection of essays from Prometheus Books entitled "Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?,": "Only 6 to 8 percent of the American population may be classified as unbelievers...Are disbelievers aberrant - lacking the genetic disposition? Or on the contrary, do they represent an advanced form of the evolution of the species?"

Well, I certainly like to think so.

These are a few of the essential works (books and periodicals) that made me the committed Free Thinker I am today. They belong in every Free Thinker's library and are an excellent starting point in the Education of a Free Thinker.

Books:

Why I am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
Losing Faith in Faith, Dan Barker
The End of Faith, Sam Harris
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

Magazines:

Free Inquiry
Skeptical Inquirer
Skeptic

The books are all available through Amazon.com, where one can purchase used copies in good-to-pristine condition for a fraction of the cost of a new copy at Borders or Barnes and Noble or wherever (the magazines are available on Amazon too, but not at discounted prices). I HIGHLY recommend these books (as well as Amazon, virtually the ONLY place I buy books from anymore).

What the world needs now, DESPERATELY needs now in this post 9-11 era, are more free thinkers - people who have freed themselves from the slavery of religious dogma, replacing such superstition with reason and science.

In a world where Islamic fundamentalists seek to nuke us back to the Seventh Century and where their Christian counterparts here in the U.S. deny the secular roots of this country, seeking to establish a "Christian  Nation" theocracy where, among other things, the fairy tale of creationism (or its stealth name, Intelligent Design) will replace the solid science of evolution and gays will be relegated to second-class citizens, the dangers of religion have never been more apparent.

Welcome, therefore, to Free Thinkers, my attempt, however humble, to undermine the dangers of religion - Stop the Madness! - and spread the Free Thinking word. I, of course, welcome my fellow Free Thinkers, but I especially welcome those curious about Free Thinking, aka, secular humanism/atheism/agnosticism, but not yet free from the slavery and ignorance of religion. Think of it this way (to analogize to the popular Matrix movies): religion is like the Matrix, a grand illusion used to pacify human beings. Free Thinkers have awakened from the dream of the religious Matrix to fight for a more just and enlightened world. Join us.