End tax-exempt status for churches

Life was good for the priest, back in the old days. He would grant legitimacy to the throne, put the crown on the royal head, say a few things about the divine right of kings, blah blah blah, and in return the king protected the papacy and provided access to power.

Those days are gone, but churches still get a sweet deal. They're exempt from taxes, which means that all of us, even non-believers, are stuck with the tax bill for their water rates, property taxes, roads, car registration tax, and more -- to the tune of at least half a billion dollars a year in Australia alone.

But this might be changing in the USA, as cities start to tax churches for their fair share.

When a community needs to rebuild crumbling roads, should houses of worship pay fees for the number of times their congregants drive on them?

That's the question behind a recent suit filed by churches in the small city of Mission, Kan., who argue the city's new "transportation utility fee" is a tax they should not have to pay.

With cash-strapped states and cities facing a slew of tough choices, there's a growing debate nationwide about whether religious congregations should help foot the bill.

I don't know how successful this will be, but I find it incredibly encouraging that people are starting to have this discussion.

"It makes no sense to tax churches and to limit their ability to provide their services, and it does damage to the constitutional separation between church and state," argues Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Catholic and Baptist churches in the city of 10,000.

Ohh, now they care about separation of church and state.

Seems one American senator is highlighting the problem at the federal level.

“THE constitution does not require the government to exempt churches from federal income taxation or from filing tax and information returns.” The potential implications of this comment, in a report earlier this month by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, are starting to dawn on a large chunk of America’s charitable sector, which has until now taken for granted that it is exempt from tax.

Currently, an estimated 1.8m “churches” are exempted from income tax—as they have been since America created its modern income tax system in 1894—and indeed from the many other reporting requirements imposed by the Inland Revenue Service on secular charities, which have to file IRS form 990 each year detailing their finances. The influential Mr Grassley, who has long championed greater transparency and accountability in the charitable sector, has become increasingly convinced that this privilege is being abused to the tune of many millions of dollars.

I look forward to a lot of squealing from the ecclesiastical sector. So churches do charity work? Fine. Have them disclose what percentage of their work is for charity, and treat that part of the business like any other charity. The rest of the business can pay taxes. Churches are money-making businesses, and they ought to be treated as such.

Everyone worships the same god -- ours.

Shorter Dan Peterson:

Atheists wonder why we Mormons think our god is the right god, while everyone else's god is the wrong god. But in fact everyone really worships our god, which is the right god. When people find out they've been worshipping the wrong god (which is actually the right god), I have it on good authority that the right god will give them a pass.

How terribly condescending. I wonder if he'd be just as happy to admit that he worships Allah.

And what about polytheism?

English-only in Indiana

The English-only movement is essentially an anti-immigrant movement, but they don't always make it as obvious as this.

An Arizona-like Immigration bill is looming in the Indiana legislature, as one state senator is looking at cracking down on illegal immigrants in Indiana. But the bill goes a little further, making English the only language used by state and local government.

"It's going to put everyone under the same rule of law, there isn't going to be a question anymore that people in the state of Indiana are legally able to be here and legally able to work here as well," State Senator Mike Delph, (R) Carmel, said.

Senator Delph, is the author of Senate Bill 0590. A bill that will require police to as people to verify their legality, for example, during a traffic stop if police suspect they could be illegal.

The bill also mandates all local and state government to only use the English language.

"Any government entity at the state or local level would be required to perform all of their operations and interactions in English, including public meetings, voice activated systems with the telephone or electronic communication," Delph said.

An English-only provision tacked onto a bill designed to stick it to immigrants. Bit of a giveaway, isn't it.

Meanwhile, another English-only bill has passed the Indiana House, and is on its way to the Senate. What's up with Hoosiers these days?

'Moroni's promise' still not evidence

I can't do much better than profxm's takedown of this drivel from the Mormon Times. A guy named Lane Williams bemoans the fact that some journalists have decided that atheism is interesting and worth writing about.

As disappointing as it is to say this, reporters may not be able to do much better than provide a balanced conduit for atheists in the modern world we live in.

Dontcha hate when that happens? I mean, balance? But have no fear -- since journalists are providing a 'balanced conduit', he's going to use his journalistic influence to unbalance the balance, or something like that.

So my point today, really, isn’t so much about reporters; my point is to use the opinion format of this blog to take a public stand because so few news reporters can or do so.

Way to go, Lane. That's what journalists should do -- argue their side, regardless of how true or well-supported it is. And here's where things go awry.

Mormonism’s last evidence sits in the power of the Holy Ghost that comes to the hearts and minds of those who seek God through earnest, submissive prayer and faithful action. It is an "experiment" successfully repeated millions of times around the world.

Prayer is not any kind of experiment. As I've pointed out, it relies on bad sampling, since everyone who doesn't get a revelation is either struck from the sample, or told to repeat the experiment until they get the "right" answer. Test subjects are told what emotions to expect, so bias enters the picture. And so on.

You can't use a 'holy ghost' to confirm the existence of a god. They're part of the same story! That's what you're trying to ascertain. It's like saying "I know Santa Claus exists because I prayed to him, and one of his reindeer told me."

Millions of Mormons, including me, would say that God answers prayers because of their own experiences with the Holy Ghost and prayer. Therein lies our evidence that God lives. I assume other religious believers feel much the same way.

That's part of the problem. Many other religious believers feel the same way... about their mutually incompatible, multiply conflicting religious claims! Anyone who knows about science has heard that anecdotal evidence is not data. And notice the bandwagon fallacy. If this is the best Mormonism can do, they'd better give up their scientific pretensions.

Then he says, in a hushed voice, deep with portent, "I know."

I study Shakespeare and have many books that have inspired me for years, but when I read the Book of Mormon for the 30th time or so and experience a deep, almost mysterious reassurance no other book has come close to giving me amid trial, I know.

I have experienced many joys of human interaction at holidays and in evening activities, but when I experience the quiet, soul power of priesthood blessing called down on a dark night, I know.

I am only one flawed journalist, but in the midst of the atheism debate that Gervais and others continue in our public space, I must say something. I know.

No, you do not know. You're just certain. There is a difference. Even if your claims were coincidentally 100% right, you still would not know that they were true. Knowledge does not come from intuition or feelings. Knowledge comes from observation of real-world phenomena. And this kind of evidence is nowhere to be found.

This is my beef with religion and supernaturalism. It is such a lazy way of thinking (or not thinking). You take your own beliefs and preconceptions, and just assert them over and over again without trying to back them up with any real evidence. You get to feel all spiritual and believing. But it stops you from learning anything.

University retirement crisis somewhat overstated

Haven't we heard this story before?

Ageing academics set university timebomb

UNIVERSITIES face a new crisis: up to 40 per cent of academics and lecturers are expected to retire over the next decade, with no one to replace them.

I remember reading stories like this ten years ago. You'd have thought everyone was going to retire by now, leaving lots of lovely jobs for all the up-and-coming grad students like me. Then, mysteriously, the old guard failed to retire, or if they did retire, the university decided not to keep their position going. Or they came back to teach part-time because they liked it so much. Apparently only 41 percent of American academics plan to retire at 65. (No stats for Australia, sorry.)

And no one to replace them? I wouldn't worry. Even if everyone retired tomorrow, there'd still be a huge backlog of postdocs and postgrads to do the teaching, since many departments haven't been good at discouraging students from doing PhDs. Ironically, the less discriminating and the less responsible they are about this, the more postgrads they have to do the teaching. Postgrads are cheaper, too, so it's a win for everyone except for PhDs who are trying to get on permanently. (I say this as one of the lucky postgrads, getting to teach like I have.)

Let's do the math. Say every professor supervises -- what -- 30 PhD students over their career? How many will get that professor's job when he or she retires? One. Or maybe none, if universities keep downsizing. Which means that more and more qualified academics are chasing fewer and fewer jobs. There's your real timebomb. The collapse of the academic talent pool when everyone realises that going for a PhD won't lead to an university job.

Mormon young adult fiction: Preserving Racial Purity edition!

Today's inspirational reading for youth is from the 1956 classic, "Choose Ye This Day" by Emma Marr Petersen. Yes, that's the wife of Mark E. Peterson, an apostle during the swinging 70s. While it's not quite as authoritative as if Elder Petersen had written it himself -- although he might have, who knows, plausible deniability being what it is -- I doubt Sister Petersen would have strayed too far from his ideas. (She was known to share the stage with Elder Petersen on one occasion.) At the very least, the book is an interesting indicator as to the kinds of thoughts that were welcome in the Petersen household.

In this chapter, trouble is brewing at a small college when Milo Patterson, a black student, takes a spot on the football team over the protests of students. Some students decide to ask Hank, an older, respected member of their community and a Latter-day Saint, what position he takes on the matter. Hank, who serves as the voice of the author, launches into a frighteningly candid defense of institutionalised racism in the LDS Church and society in general, using the tried-and-true 'blacks were less valiant in the pre-mortal life' argument that I heard many times during my Mormon days. At least Hank/Emma doesn't advocate total banishment of the seed of Cain. He/she only asks that blacks endure partial social acceptance throughout their lives, and then eternal servitude in the highest Mormon heaven -- but only if they're righteous.

This extract serves as evidence that, yes, the idea that Africans were less valiant in the pre-mortal life was well-known and taught at one point in LDS history (note that Hank has been taught these things 'all [his] life'). But it also shows that Mormon doctrine can change when members draw upon their capacity for fairness and justice, and ignore dogma coming from the many apologists in their midst.

Might a knowledge of evolution have helped Emma Petersen? When you understand that some people have dark skin because of evolutionary adaptation (instead of picking some self-serving supernatural reason, like "they're evil"), it reduces your need to take scraps of mythology and weave them into a complicated justification of whatever social prejudices are prevalent in the religious community. But then, neither of the Petersens went in much for evolution. Sister Petersen's book shows a creationist professor giving an evolutionist professor a good thrashing in a debate, while Elder Petersen once opined that evolution was Satan's way of destroying America via atheism.

Happy reading! Scans at the bottom.

CHAPTER EIGHT
HANK'S POINT OF VIEW

THAT night when they went to Hank's for a snack, a large group of students were watching TV. Hank himself waited on the two boys.

When he brought the order, Kent said in a voice loud enough to be heard by the other students, "Hank, what do you think about this Patterson rebellion over at school?"

Many wished to know what Hank thought about it.

"My attitude on this subject is pretty well guided by my religious views," he said, "so I hope you won't mind if I mix a little religion with what I say."

The other students held Hank in such high regard that they listened respectfully.

"My religion teaches that our existence did not begin when we were born into mortality. We lived before we came to this earth. We were persons then as we are now."

"Are you talking about reincarnation?" one student asked.

"No, not at all," said Hank. "I certainly do not believe in reincarnation. We have one existence in mortality, and that is all. I mean that before this earth was made, we lived and worked and played together in another estate.

"We could do as we pleased there, too, just as we can here. Some were not as obedient as others, and naturally they didn't get along as well.

"We are the children of God, as you know. We were with him. We were his family.

"It is my understanding that at one time our Heavenly Father called us all together and announced that he was planning to send us to this earth where we could be tested and tried under mortal conditions, to see if we would be worthy of further advancement in his kingdom.

"The Lord explained his plan to us at that time, but some of his children did not accept it, and rebelled. This rebellion was led by one of the brightest, but also the most ambitious and selfish of all God's children. His name was Lucifer. About a third of all the spirits in heaven joined him in this rebellion. They were all driven out, and they became Satan and his followers.

"This fight up in heaven was very much like wars in this life. Some of God's defenders were more valiant than others. Some were disloyal, but not so bad that they had to be driven out with Lucifer.

"When the time arrived for us to come to this earth, it appears to have been the plan of the Lord to reward us according to our loyalty.

"How could he do that? It seems quite easy, as I look at it, for he permitted those who were most obedient to be born into this life with white skins, and to have opportunities such as are to be had in our country.

"Others were born with dark skins in the jungles of Africa or in the valleys of the Amazon. Still others were born in China or Korea, or India, where opportunities are not as great as here.

"It was a case of reaping what we sowed. I have this same understanding regarding rewards in the life after this where we will be placed in a degree of glory or in other circumstances according to what we earn in this life."

"Do you mean, Hank," broke in one of the girls, "that a white person is born white because he was more valiant than others in the life before we came here, and that a colored person was born colored because he was not so valiant?"

"That is exactly what I mean," said Hank. "How else could all this apparent inequality be explained?"

"Can other races get all the blessings of the Church?" asked another.

"All except the Negro," said Hank. "He is under a greater handicap than all the others. Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiians, Indians, Koreans, and people of all other races may have all the blessings of the Church, including temple marriage, but not the Negro.

"Evidently because of what he did in that other life, he is placed under a ban and cannot have the priesthood, he cannot advance as far as other people.

"But I would like to say this, though. I have heard some of our leaders teach that even the Negro can go to the celestial kingdom if he is faithful. However, he can be only a servant there. But that is more than many white people will receive, for many of them will be placed in the lower degrees of glory in the next world, because they did not live righteously. So in some respects, Negroes, if they are faithful, may receive a higher glory in the world to come than those of other races who defile their birthright."

"But what about this football argument? How does all this fit in there?" asked one of the students.

"It fits in like this," went on Hank. "Each race may develop within itself. So far as the Negroes are concerned, we will give them every right and privilege within their race that we claim for ourselves within our own race, but we will not become intimate with them in any way, and we will not intermarry with them. That is my own personal feeling on this question, and it is what I have been taught all my life. I believe that is a fair position to take, and I believe it squares with the word of God.

"Too close association with them might lead to intermarriage and that would bring the curse of Cain upon children born to such a marriage.

"I must admit that one great danger in being as tolerant as we would wish to be is that some of our people lose their balance and forget that there is after all a barrier between white people and Negroes which should never be crossed. It was the Lord and not man who established that barrier. When man tries to break down a wall set up by the Lord himself, he is asking for trouble, and only trouble can come from intermarriage between white people and Negroes.

"You may not know it, but the Lord anciently commanded that His people should not marry the descendants of Cain, just as he commanded that His people should not marry unbelievers and idolators. If we were not faced with the danger of intermarriage with the Negro, we could be much more tolerant than we are. But there are some leading Negroes who advocate complete absorption of their race with the white race by intermarriage and that is something which I for one can never accept.

"Marriage between white and black people, as I see it, is a violation of God's commands. So we must avoid steps which would lead to such a thing."

"I take it, then," said one of the students, "that you would be in favor of allowing a Negro to play on our football team, as long as we did not take him so far into our social life that some white girl might become infatuated with him."

"That is just what I believe. I support the school president and the governor in what they have done, and I think you students should do the same."

"Well, if that's what you believe, I guess we'll give the idea another whirl," Steve said. "Pat's a good fellow and a swell football player. How about it?"

"Whew, quite a speech," said Kent, "but I'm game."

    

Prayer is a strange concept anyway, but this...

Australia 2011 Census: Mark "No Religion"

A follow-up to the UK census post: the Atheist Foundation of Australia has launched the "Mark 'No Religion'" campaign.

The AFA will be unveiling billboards across the nation in major cities stating “Census 2011: Not religious now? Mark ‘No religion’ and take religion out of politics.”

“It is time the Australian community questioned whether they hold religious beliefs or not. How they answer this question in the Census will influence decisions by Australian governments. Often the transfer of taxpayer money to religious organisations is justified on the basis of the Census results, as are special concessions and exemptions including the right to discriminate against some groups.

Of course, the 'No Religion' box is for the people who haven't quite made it all the way to 'Atheist' yet. If you do identify as 'Atheist' or even 'Agnostic', feel free to write that in. Both categories are recognised on the census, so commentators can include them in with the non-religious vote.

One thing isn't clear: what happens to joke answers like 'Jedi' et al. I can't tell if they get dumped into the 'did not answer' bin, so don't write them and risk not being counted. Let's make the number of non-religious Australians zoom up this year.

Dear America: The gun thing

Hi, America. Just wondering how you're doing. I know things have been a bit crazy lately -- well, just like always, eh? Or maybe a little crazier.

Look, I noticed that you haven't really changed your mind about guns, even with all the recent unpleasantness.

Americans' overall attitudes toward gun laws have not budged an inch in the wake of the shootings in Arizona, according to a new national poll.
...
"Those numbers are identical to the results of a poll taken in the summer of 2009, indicating that the tragic events in Tucson have not changed how the public feels about gun laws," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "This is a familiar pattern in polling - surveys taken after previous incidents like the Columbine shooting have shown little or no change in Americans' attitudes toward guns."

I guess it was inevitable that nothing would change after the shootings -- if Columbine didn't do it, or Fort Hood, or Virginia Tech, -- or the 80-something Americans that get killed every day -- then I don't suppose anything will. Just the cost of doing business.

But I also noticed that you think some restrictions are good.

The poll indicates that the two sides of the gun debate are evenly balanced, with one in seven Americans opposing any restrictions on guns at all and one in seven saying that all guns should be illegal except for police and other authorized personnel. Roughly a third support minor restrictions and roughly a third support major restrictions.

Wow, two-thirds of you want restrictions on guns. And yet there's no plans to make it happen. It's a dead issue. That must be frustrating. Is the gun lobby thwarting it? Would a bill ever get off the ground?

I'll level with you, America. This issue makes you look... well, let's just say other countries are starting to talk. That you can't seem to get a hold on this issue even though it kills a lot of you seems suicidally masochistic. And it does kill a lot of you. Right now, gun deaths account for 78 percent of all your homicides -- that's the highest in the world except for Colombia.

Yeah, I know you like your guns. At least, those of you who are still alive. Let's ask the rest of you how they feel. Oh, wait, we can't. (Maybe that's part of the problem -- the dead can't vote.) But some of you who are still alive say that you can't take guns away because then only outlaws would have guns, or something like that. I guess that's true; I wouldn't like to be gun-less in a country already awash in guns. You can't put the genie back in Pandora's box, if you will.

Maybe gun control can't work in America anymore, and if you want less gun violence, you just have to go somewhere else. I did go somewhere else, but even so, I still find this profoundly depressing. I like you a lot, America, and I hate thinking that this drama is going to play out again and again, and everyone will act just as shocked and outraged as ever, but it'll never get better.

Machine translation could save minority languages

We've seen Word Lens, which translates signs automatically. Now this:

Google Translate App works as you speak

In an attempt to break down language barriers the world over, Google have developed an App which allows you to translate your words into another language as you speak.

Users simply speak into the device and the Google Translate app translates your speech and then reads the translation out loud, all in real time.

The person you are conversing with can then respond in their own language and their translated words will be spoken back to you.

But language teachers and linguists can rest easy that they’re not about to be put out of a job just yet: currently the app only supports English and Spanish.

I'd love to play with a copy. At the moment, I suspect it'd be pretty rudimentary and error-prone, but there would be updates. The task of machine translation is as yet unsolved -- or should I say the set of problems that converge on MT -- but we keep seeing innovations that get us closer and closer to that goal, inch by inch.

If we ever do realise the goal of instantaneous, unconstrained automatic translation, communication would of course be the most obvious beneficiary, but the other would be minority languages. It could potentially save them.

I see it as similar to the OS wars of the 90's, which, like language, was a conflict over standards. Computer operating systems, like languages, require a population of users who can exchange information (in this case, files) with each other. But cross-platform file compatibility issues made this difficult. Operating systems also run applications that won't run on other systems, so there's a disincentive to adopt an OS that doesn't have the software you need. At the time, the Mac was on the bad end of that struggle -- there were fewer installed users, and some programs weren't available for the Mac. I remember feeling very concerned that the Mac OS would die out.

Then the Mac adopted standards that were in common use anyway -- text was text no matter what computer you were on, jpegs were jpegs, and Word files didn't need to be converted. (Perhaps Mac users should be grateful for Word after all.) You couldn't run the exact same programs, but every computer became able to do mostly the same things: Java, Perl, Flash, and so on. And if you got really desperate, there were Windows emulators. So the cost of settling on a minority OS went way down.

What automatic machine translation does is lower the cost of maintaining a minority language. Languages like English or Mandarin have an irresistible attraction for speakers of other languages because they have a huge install base. They represent economic and social opportunity. If translation between them is easy, then using the other language isn't an irretrievable commitment.

You could argue that the ease of translation would doom minority languages because the translation might only flow one way: toward the big language. That's not what happened in the OS wars. People liked their Macs, and the ease of conversion helped them hang on to them. People like their languages, too. They're important markers of their identity. But not if the cost is too high. MT would bring the cost down.

One space or two after a full stop?

Forget left and right wing, forget coriander lovers v haters. The real divide in our society is between the one spacers and the two spacers. And Slate's restarted the war with this article: Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error.

I'm a one spacer, and I'll tell you why: Go to your bookshelf, open up any book, and look after any full stop. You'll find one space. That's how the pros do it.

Back in the days of typewriters, all the characters were monospaced, so an 'm' took up the same space as an 'i'. A monospaced font will look like crap if there's only one space after a full stop, so people were taught to use two. Nowadays, we have computers with well-designed typefaces, so you only need one space, as nature intended.

I can only see two reasons to use two spaces. Either you're on a clanky old IBM Selectric, or you were taught to type by sadistic nuns who beat you if you forgot the extra space. The former can be cured with a computer, the latter with therapy.

Rhetoric, Palin, and the Arizona shooting

A friend asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin's responsibility with regard to the Arizona shooting. Here's what I wrote back.

People have seized upon Palin as a very visible example of unacceptably over-heated rhetoric. This is not entirely unfair -- Palin has done much to poison the dialogue, and there are many examples that people have unearthed. But the problem is much bigger than Palin. Advocacy of violence has been SOP for the GOP for a long time now, and there are many who have done it much more consistently than Palin. I'm thinking of Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage -- at times, the most popular commentators on the Right. Check this link for many more examples of violent eliminationist rhetoric.

Does this send some people over the edge? Well, direct causation is hard to determine. I tend to view this a bit probabilistically. Let me use the example of health. In any population, there will be robust, healthy individuals, and some people on the margins. And there are always some nasty germs around in the population, and there's a chance you might get sick from them, but you might not if you're otherwise healthy. But if we now inject other factors into the population, it changes the odds. Say there's an earthquake where services get knocked out. Now we'll see the entire population moving toward poor health. Many people will remain healthy, but the probability of getting sick rises, and it's going to send a certain percentage of least healthy individuals over the edge.

Similarly, if you have a population of individuals ranging from nice to crazy, and you change the environment so that formerly unacceptable kinds of discourse become commonplace, and in fact so common as to be barely noticeable, you are raising the chances that someone on the edge will take action (though they may not). This time someone did.

I also think our toxic discourse has the effect of hiding people with real problems: "I didn't think anything when he said that; people on the radio say things like that all the time." How do we know that someone wearing this shirt isn't a potential shooter?

How about this guy?

They're just normal guys, right? Or they could be crazies. They seem crazy to me. But if these people aren't crazy, they're making the real crazies that much harder to spot.

I don't want to put limits on what people can say just because a mentally ill person might take them seriously, but I think it's time for people to draw the line and vote with their feet and their money when media personalities engage in this kind of talk.

Finally, what I find most objectionable is the attempt of right-wing apologists to disclaim any responsibility by saying the shooter was a crazy guy. Well, yes, he was a crazy guy. Who else would do that if they weren't? But he was also someone who used a gun for its intended purpose, acting on cues from the most significant and well-paid voices on the right. The GOP claims to stand for personal responsibility, but this incident has shown me that, once again, they don't believe their own story. Everyone is responsible but them.

Census: 'Atheism' or 'No Religion'?

Now here's an effort I can get behind. Atheist Ireland requests that if you're not religious, don't automatically tick the box for a religion in the upcoming census.

Be Honest to Godless in the Irish Census on Sunday 10 April. Think before you tick. And if you’re not religious, please tick the no religion box.

It’s now three months to the next Irish Census on 10 April, and Atheist Ireland wants to see an accurate answer to the question on religion. You won’t write in your childhood home address unless you still live there. So don’t write in your childhood religion unless you still really practice it.

Sounds reasonable. And the British Humanist Organisation is saying the same thing.

If you say you’re religious on the census and don’t really mean it, then you are treated by some sections of the media, churches, and even government policymakers as if you are a fully-fledged believer.

This is significant for Australians because we're having a census of our own in August this year. We have a census every five years instead of ten. (Takes less time to count us.) The 2006 census was the first time I'd identified as "No Religion" (but I didn't identify as an atheist). I have to say, it was a somewhat exhilarating experience, one that you can enjoy for yourself. I'm really looking forward to see how the unchurched categories jump, as they have consistently done.

But somewhat strangely, the Irish Atheists are requesting that atheists not say they're atheists.

Please don’t write in ‘Atheist’, or anything else that is not a religion, in box number 6, which says ‘write in your RELIGION’. That makes some people mistakenly think that atheism is a religion, and creates the impression that there are far fewer atheists than is actually the case.

Okay, so atheism is not a religion. But if someone asked me, "What religion are you?" I'd say, "None; I'm an atheist." So I can see "No religion" or "Atheism" as appropriate answers. The confusion about atheism-as-religion is annoying, but people won't suddenly straighten themselves out from the census alone. It's the kind of thing you have to explain to people over and over, one person at a time. Which we will continue to do after the census is over.

And if you think about it, it doesn't make sense to say "Don't write in 'Atheism' because not enough people will write in 'Atheism'". Let's turn that argument on its head -- do write 'Atheism' so that more people will be writing 'Atheism'!

How does the religion question work for Australia? The Australian Bureau of Statistics has a space for the categories "No Religion", "Atheism", and "Agnosticism". (Download an Excel spreadsheet of all the religious data on this page.) I plan on writing in 'Atheism' because observers and journalists will group atheists in with the 'No Religion' category anyway, and why not be as specific as possible? And, of course, if atheists write "Atheism", then more atheists will be identifying explicitly as atheists, which is a good thing.

That's my argument, anyway. But what is everyone else doing?

As a final note, the LDS Church claims that there were 108,851 Mormons in Australia in 2006. In the same year, only 52,141 people self-identified as LDS. You'd think saying "I'm LDS" would be some kind of minimal requirement to be considered a member. Do you think the LDS Church is not doing their best to keep a really accurate count?

Brodies for 2010

It would appear that a few Good Reason posts have been nominated for the 2010 Brodie Awards. Many thanks to the nominators!

Even if you don't vote, that link is worth checking out just because of all the great, funny, irreverent posts from other ex/post-Mo's. I think it's kind of cool that we have such a large, vibrant community these days.

Ronald Reagan was a bad president.

Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday is coming up, says Gawker. I grew up in the Reagan 80s, so I knew Reagan sucked. Every punk song said so. Oh, sure, he did preside over economic good times and suffuse America with a breezy optimism that was sorely lacking under Carter. He was even fortunate enough to preside over the fall of the Soviet Union (by outspending them). But there were a lot of negatives.

• His union busting made things hard for working people.
• He dawdled on AIDS, and his flunkeys treated it like some kind of joke.
• His checkbook diplomacy made life into a hell for South Americans, and ended up funding dictators that we'd end up fighting later.
• His ramped-up militarism turned America into Sparta II, and not having that money for schools impoverished America's education.
• His public piety paved the way for the religious right.
• He refined image manipulation to an art. Prior presidents were thinkers and decision-makers -- Reagan was just some kind of totem that we held aloft to show ourselves our national identity. There wasn't the same kind of identity politics before Reagan.

And that's just the things I can think of off the top of my head.

But there's one thing that he's responsible for that towers over all those other things for me.

He championed a reflexively anti-government philosophy that has pervaded American thought to an extent that we're not even aware of. In saying

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

he harnessed a counter-productive cynicism about government disguised as liberty. With this view came privatisation and free-market cultism. Lack of regulation over the financial sector has caused untold economic hardship. And now we have a new generation of poorly-educated citizens who don't know that they are the least taxed of any developed nation, and complain loudly about having to pay their share.

For someone in government to undermine the very fabric of government was unconscionable. Other presidents did it worse, but Reagan started it rolling. And that's why he was a bad president.

On faith and gratitude

I was quite moved by the story of Ted Williams, the homeless man with the golden voice.



It seems that he's getting a second chance, and people are clamoring to have him do voice work. Now his biggest problem will be managing his success. I sure hope he makes it.

I have to say, it's made me think about my attitudes about homeless people. Instead of averting my eyes from someone's cardboard sign, might I not look closer and find a special talent? How many people passed right on by him?

Here's a more recent interview.



Mr Williams is a religious man, mentioning his god a lot, giving his god credit for his good fortune. I don't mean to take away from his story, but it seems to me that people, not gods, are responsible for his turnaround. The Columbia Dispatch reporter who discovered him, the Redditors who worked to find him and get him some things he needed, the employers who are seeking him out and lining up work. When he had his god without the people, he wasn't doing too well.

It reminds me of the joke: Someone said to a farmer, "God certainly has been good to you with your beautiful farm." And the farmer said, "God? You should have seen the state he had the place in before I came along!"

When someone has little control over their life, it's a normal human tendency to be superstitious. And sometimes when I look at my life, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Even I feel like directing that gratitude toward the entire universe! But then I think how much better it is to direct it back to the people who make my life worthwhile.

It's important to correctly identify the source of the good things that come to us. We humans can do a lot for each other, and we do, even when gods do nothing.

Opt-out for phone books

Like everyone else in Australia, every year I get phone directories plopped onto my porch (sorry, veranda), even though I don't want them. (Between Google and the White Pages website, phone books seem like such a leftover artifact.) And every year, I dutifully carry the dratted things off to the Post Office because they want them, and they're happy to hold extra copies for people who want extras. Apparently there are such people.

Sensis is the company that makes the books in Australia.

Sensis admits that producing the 22.5 million White Pages and Yellow Pages directories in 2009-10 created the largest part of the company's carbon footprint. More than 52,000 tonnes of paper are used to make the directories each year and they account for 175,000 tonnes of emissions annually, while Sensis's business operations (fleet, electricity and air travel) total 30,000 tonnes of emissions.

If everyone's getting the books I'm getting, 22.5 million phone books would cover the state of WA nearly twice.

Well, I've just discovered that you can halt the tide by opting out through Sensis' Directory Select website. By telling them your address, you can cancel delivery and stay off the list for three years.

It's not the best solution -- the process should be 'opt-in', rather than 'opt-out'. Why don't they do it that way? Oh, someone's already asked.

Why not offer an opt-in system rather than an opt-out system?

With such widespread use of Yellow Pages® and White Pages® books and only a small proportion of people requesting not to receive a book, we believe an opt-out such as www.directoryselect.com.au is an appropriate way to support consumer choice.

Hey, how about we make that proportion a whole lot bigger? Head over to Directory Select now while you're thinking about it.

Why get married? A straight guy reflects...

I have an announcement: Ms Perfect and I are engaged! I proposed on Christmas Eve, and amazingly she said yes, despite knowing me for years.

Members of my family were pleased. At last, our relationship would have legitimacy! (No, they didn't say that. They said, Have the wedding in winter so we can come to Australia in summer!)

Before the engagement, we lived in delicious sin as a committed couple, ready to spend the rest of our lives together. Now, post-engagement, we're living together as a committed couple, ready to spend etc. No difference, really. So why did I decide to do this? It's not like we had to get married. Besides the ring, some photographs, and a certificate, things won't be noticeably different. And as Dean once said, secular atheists don't need marriage. But I could think of a few reasons why I might want to be married.

It's a party. Okay, we can always have a party. But not one as theatrical. Or cinematic. So it's something.

Okay, next reason. It's a narrative of how your life is supposed to go. You grow up in your middle-class suburban home, watching movies with weddings and thinking, "This is the goal." That's not very good either, but we'll add it to the pile with the other reasons.

Having children out of wedlock would be a stigma, but that's only an issue for a few more years, as all the people who think this will assuredly die off soon. So let's move on.

How about this: It's a way of making your relationship public and real. Well, what about now? Aren't we already public and real? And yet...

It's like I don't really have a reason at all for wanting to be married, not a reason anyway. But all the little reasons add up, plus an urge that says, "This is what I want to do. With her."

As I weighed up my reasons for marriage, I found myself (not for the first time) considering the situation of gay guys and gals, and wondering why they might want the same thing. I also reflected on the reasons people had for denying them marriage.

Why do they need marriage? say the Moral People. Why don't gay people just live together? Well, we 'just' lived together, and it was lovely. But I decided I wanted to do it 'for real'. What if someone had come and told me we couldn't, because their god disapproved? And since theism is massive projection, they mean 'because they disapprove'. I'd tell them to get bent, and I'd hope any gay couple would do the same.

Well, we'll give them a civil union, the Moral People continue, but we won't call it marriage. Isn't that good enough? What's the difference? Well, is a civil union a marriage? I'd say no, it's not. So what is a marriage? A marriage is where they say "It's a marriage." If they don't, it's not. And that matters to me.

And I guess that takes us to a Big Reason for marriage. Marriage is the way our society confers favour and approval on relationships, and some of us -- however iconoclastic and rugged we be -- desire it. We want the whole thing, cake and ring and all, however silly and clichéd that is. Religious conservatives (ever the tribalists) know something about societal approval too, and they oppose gay marriage because they don't wish to confer societal approval on those types of relationships.

At least, I think this is what's going on. I have no idea if this is what goes through the mind of a religious conservative or not, though, because strangely not once in any of the many discussions I've had on this topic has one of them ever said this. They come up with log-stupid arguments about reproduction, polygamy, or incest, but they never say 'I can't stand them and won't have them in the club'. Either they're ashamed to admit that's the real reason, or I'm totally off-base. But I don't think I am.

How lucky I am to be a straight guy, able to marry the straight girl of my dreams. How unfair that not everyone can have what comes so automatically to us.

Warring religious tribes

I've always been fascinated by the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, the ancient Greek mathematician. So I finally got a chance to see the film 'Agora', which treats her life, her death at the hands of a Christian mob, and the destruction of the library of Alexandria (again, at the hands of a Christian mob) -- one of the great crimes against humanity, but considered by Christians to be a victory over paganism.

A theme in the film is the continual warring of religious tribes -- what Richard Jeni described as "killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend". Back and forth it goes, as pagans attack Christans attack Jews attack Christians attack pagans... on and on, in return for perceived insults against their gods. (The gods seem less inclined to deal with such slights directly.)

And I thought: Religion hasn't changed. Some religions which are considered nice and moderate now had murderous beginnings, and could easily return. The Taliban of today partakes in the same spirit as the Christians of Hypatia's time. Christian pastors in Africa are calling for the execution of gay people. Meanwhile, Pakistan is considering getting rid of the death penalty for blasphemy, and it's driving Muslims to violence.

Violence flared Friday as police and protesters clashed during a mass protest strike that closed businesses across Pakistan over a bid to end the death penalty for blasphemy.

Police said protesters near the home of unpopular President Asif Ali Zardari in the financial hub of Karachi pelted stones as they shouted slogans including "We'll sacrifice our lives -- we'll save the sanctity of the Prophet".

Teargas shells were fired to disperse them, while normally busy town centres turned quiet across the Muslim country, AFP reporters said, following a move to amend a law which permits death sentences for those found to have blasphemed.

Religion isn't just believing what you believe and leaving it there. It's this kind of thing that turns me from ordinary non-believer to raging anti-theist.

I could have said 'Human nature hasn't changed', and that would be true, too. But without religion, what would we fight over instead? Resources like food, water, and oil? We fight about that now. No change there. Sports teams? Well, regionalistic fervour is a worry. But these incidents are a direct result of pious people taking on the presumed injured feelings of their deity, and their willingness to kill in order to silence others. As it was in the beginning.

UPDATE: I've just remembered this recent story about the bombing of a Christian church -- in Alexandria, of all places.

Egyptian investigators say they may have uncovered a number of people with possible links to Saturday's church bombing in Alexandria. Meanwhile, Egyptian religious leaders are working to maintain a precarious calm between Christians and Muslims after several days of angry demonstrations.

Eyewitnesses say a fragile calm prevails after overnight clashes between Coptic Christians and police in front of St. Mark's Cathedral in Cairo, which is the headquarters of Coptic Pope Shenouda III. Dozens of police and protesters were reportedly wounded in the clashes.

Pope Shenouda is urging the government to take steps to prevent further violence.

He says everyone should reflect on what to do now in order to come to terms and prevent such events from repeating themselves. He stresses that such violence is new to Egypt.

In the light of history, this claim is cruelly and ironically absurd.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt speaks out.

There is no religion worthy of the name that does not regard as one of its highest values the sanctity of human life. Islam is no exception to this rule. Indeed, God has made this unequivocal in the Quran by emphasizing the gravity of the universal prohibition against murder, saying of the one who takes even one life that "it is as if he has killed all mankind." Islam views murder as both a crime punishable by law in this world and as major sin punishable in the Afterlife as well. Prophet Mohammad said, "The first cases to be decided among the people on the Day of Judgment will be those of blood-shed"
...
Terrorism, therefore, cannot be the outcome of any proper understanding of religion. It is rather a manifestation of the immorality of people with cruel hearts, arrogant souls, and warped logic.

While it's encouraging that he's condemning violence, he's picking an orchard-worth of cherries here. The verses he's picked out about murder contradict others in the Koran that command the killing of unbelievers. On what basis does he think his peaceful interpretation of his religion is more correct than an equally scriptural violent interpretation?

If terrorism were really incompatible with 'proper' religious understanding, then we should expect such incidents to be fairly rare. Unfortunately, they're not. Such acts form a part of religious understanding for a good many people.