A Leap of Faith--in What Direction, Exactly?

Today I was browsing through my google reader subscriptions and feeling nostalgicy about its imminent demise when I saw that one of said subscriptions had linked to this article on Kierkegaard, specifically this passage:

Kierkegaard’s greatest illustration of this is his retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is often held up as a paradigm of faith because he trusted God so much he was prepared to sacrifice his only son on his command. Kierkegaard makes us realise that Abraham acted on faith not because he obeyed a difficult order but because lifting the knife over his son defied all morality and reason. No reasonable man would have done what Abraham did. If this was a test, then surely the way to pass was to show God that you would not commit murder on command, even if that risked inviting divine wrath. If you heard God’s voice commanding you to kill, surely it would be more rational to conclude you were insane or tricked by demons than it would to follow the order. So when Abraham took his leap of faith, he took leave of reason and morality.

How insipid the modern version of faith appears in comparison. Religious apologists today might mumble about the power of faith and the limits of reason, yet they are the first to protest when it is suggested that faith and reason might be in tension. Far from seeing religious faith as a special, bold kind of trust, religious apologists are now more likely to see atheism as requiring as much faith as religion. Kierkegaard saw clearly that that faith is not a kind of epistemic Polyfilla that closes the small cracks left by reason, but a mad leap across a chasm devoid of all reason.

It's that last clause that is the most problematic: when we come to the end of reason, logic, morality, and evidence, we are not faced with a chasm, which we must then take a leap of faith across.  That would be bad enough--if you wanted to put me off the idea of something forever, you would have merely to describe it to me in much those same terms.  But those terms are incorrect, and the real difficulty is infinitely worse: at reason's end, there is not a chasm, which must be leaped, but a multitude of chasms, which any would-be leaper must choose between.

A leap of faith, you say, beyond reason and evidence?  Very well, I shall die heroic in battle and be escorted across the rainbow bridge by a beautiful blonde war-maiden, there to feast in the company of Wotan and his heroes until the clarion call of the Gjallarhorn summons us forth to die in fire and glory at Ragnarok.

Oh ... you meant a leap of faith beyond reason and evidence towards your god as opposed to all the others that ever were.  Ah.  Well then.  But why, exactly, should I leap across this chasm as opposed to that?  Be sure not to use reason, logic, or evidence in your answer, because once you've allowed those into the equation, the only possible conclusion is not to leap.

This is a very grave problem, and one with very real consequences: suppose Abraham was right to defy all morality and reason and ready a knife to plunge into Isaac, to be stopped only by an angel's timely intervention.  On what grounds, then, were the 9/11 hijackers wrong to defy all morality and reason and ready a plane to plunge into a building?  If there ever was a mad leap over a chasm devoid of all reason, then surely that was it!  And yet we rightly abhor them--as we should abhor Abraham as well.  The willingness to ignore morality and reason and kill for the voices in your head--that you distinguish from all other such voices, and furthermore trust, on unspecified grounds--is the mark of the psychopath, not the saint.

In the end, the leap of faith isn't so much an argument for faith as it is the admission that there aren't any good arguments for faith, and that we should do it anyway.  But, having dispensed with arguments, we find that without them we are powerless to determine what exactly the 'it' should be.

The Batman Shootings--Mystery and Selective Evidence

When the Batman shooting happened, there was one particular survivor--a girl shot in the face who lived thanks to a birth defect that deflected the bullet away from more vital areas of her brain.  Of course, humans like to look for agency in improbability, and being as how the girl was a Christian, it sparked remarks such as:  "It’s just like the God I follow to plan the route of a bullet through a brain long before Batman ever rises."

I was working on this blog entry at the time, but decided not to post it as the event as too raw.  With the benefit of the calmer perspective of the present, however, I would like to take another look.

 

This first thing to say is that I'm happy that this girl lived.  Really.  That's great.  I'm happy that the marvelous coincidence of birth defect and gun angle saved her life.  But God?  It's a classic Argument from Incomplete Devastation.

Here's the deal: if God planned the paths of the bullets through the brain of the one who lived, then he also planned the paths of the bullets through the bodies of the twelve who died--and where does that leave him?  "Good things happen, therefore God is good," as Christians are wont to say--and it annoyed me even when I was one.  If the universe is run by a supreme being whose character can be deduced by human reactions to events within it, then complete the following sentence: "Bad things happen, therefore God is ____"

Mysterious.  Very, very mysterious.  This 'every good thing, God takes credit for--every bad thing, that's a mystery' line?  Try that on your boss and see how far it gets you.  If there is a god who is responsible for the way that the universe turns out, then he's responsible for the way that the universe turns out: for the twelve who died every inch as much as the one who, improbably, lived.  You're claiming--in so many words--to believe in a being that knew this massacre was coming for twenty years, knew that thirteen people were going to die, and in his infinite goodness mysteriousness decided: "This won't do at all!  Instead of thirteen people killed, we'll have twelve people killed, and the thirteenth can get off with a gunshot wound to the face and brain damage."

Praise Jesus.

Don't get me wrong--I'm glad this girl is alive.  I understand the overpowering gratitude that her friends and family are feeling, and I know that they have been trained to direct it to God.  But if we step back from that emotion and examine it critically, we'll find that a being that could have saved her any injury at all and didn't; that could have saved all the others from injury but didn't; that could have saved the twelve who actually died but didn't--such a being isn't very deserving of gratitude.  Such a being would be capricious, indifferent, cruel--the gaping wound over which theology slaps the bandaid of 'mystery'.

The truth is that the universe shows every sign of being indifferent to us.  Sometimes that works out in our favor, as with those who made it out of the theater without a scratch.  Sometimes that means we get screwed, as with those who died.  And sometimes that means we have a close shave, and one improbability--being in the theater in the first place--meets another--having the life-saving birth defect--and things don't work out nearly as bad as they normally might have.  If we want to know a player's batting average, we have to count the misses and not just the hits.   If we want to know whether or not a proposition is true, we have to examine the evidence against, rather than contenting ourselves that a misapplication of probability counts as irrefutable evidence for.

My Dear Fellow Progressives,

Because this worked so well in 2000.

We need to talk.  I know you're idealistic.  I know you're disappointed with certain things Obama has done--he trashed the public option, he launched the drone war, he's been bad on state secrets, believe me I know.  But I've been hearing rumors (like this little picture to the right) that some of you are planning to vote 3rd party.  Why should we have to settle for the lesser of two evils, you ask?

And well you might ask!  But since the question is on the table, let me go ahead and answer it: those who refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils get the greater.  Not only that, they tend inflict it on the rest of us.

Let me tell you a little story.  This little story happened in the sleepy little state of Florida, way back in 2000.  It was Presidential election season, and lots of progressives--just like you!--weren't happy with their choices.  They didn't like how Al Gore wasn't left-wing enough, or charismatic enough, or cool enough.  "There's no difference between him and George Bush!" they cried.

And so when they went to the polls on election day, all these little Progressives--a hundred thousand of them!--didn't want to vote for Gore!  And they certainly didn't want to vote for Bush!  So they voted for Ralph Nader--all hundred thousand of them!

And then Bush won the election by 500 votes, and went on to become the single worst President in living memory, doubling the debt, trashing and deregulating the economy, raping civil liberties, instituting torture, and invading two countries--in the latter of which extremely conservative estimates put the death toll at 110,000.

Like so many stories, this one has a moral, and you'd think that my fellow progressives would have learned it, but in case any haven't, let me spell it out for you: a vote against Barack Obama is a vote for George Bush III and the Douchebag Dudebro.  My family is going to get health insurance through Obamacare; Romney's party has already voted against it multiple times.  If my family loses healthcare because you folks are sore about not getting the public option, I'm going to be upset.  You don't like Obama's militant stance on Iran?  If he loses office because of your pique, then we're having Gulf War III.  You think Obama hasn't done enough to rein in the banks and Wall Street?  By all means, turn up your nose at him--I'm sure Uncle Moneybags will do a much better job.  Obama is not sufficiently pro-women?  Disdain to help him defeat the party of Akin.

Would I like a real, hardcore progressive in office?  You bet I would.  It would be a frabjuous day indeed if the two parties were the Democrats and the Progressives.  But in the real world, real, hardcore progressives can't even win the Democratic primary, let alone the general.  And in the real world, the two parties are the Democrats and the Republicans.  Either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will be our President for the next four years.  You don't like it?  Reality has a marvelous way of not giving a shit.

So get your ass to the voting booth and vote for the lesser of those two evils, because denying that reality will doom us to the greater.

Election Varia

Obama and Romney clashed again on Tuesday night, and the President, who did not suck this time around, won decisively.  Libya should have been Romney's strongest moment, but instead of mounting any number of potential valid criticisms, Romney decided to bust out the conspiracy theories and got fact-checked in real time to the applause of the audience.

The substance of the criticism seemed to be that Obama didn't take a firm-enough stand.  Believing and saying the right things, with a sufficiently puffed-up chest, has become a substitute for actually doing the right things--a sad legacy of the GOP's unholy union with conservative religion.  Stand-taking is a substitute reality--thus Paul Ryan, to show his concern for the poor, waltzed into a soup kitchen, held a clean pot under the sink for the cameras, and waltzed back out.  But hey, stand taken, right?  And never mind that the soup kitchen is now losing donors over the incident--or that the House GOP, in its headlong rush to politicize the deaths of American service personnel, has recklessly and despicably endangered the lives of America's friends in Libya.

Still, it's refreshing to see the conspiracy-theory, information-bubble denialism have real time, real world consequences.  And that's one of the reasons that I'm absolutely against any liberal equivalent of Fox News, as some have suggested.  While I normally love a guy whose Twitter profile pic is an elephant blowing itself, he's dead wrong here.  The willingness to spew prolefeed inevitably becomes the willingness to swallow it. This happened to the communists and it happened to the GOP, and don't for a moment think that it won't happen to liberals. Ignoring reality in favor of what we wish to be true, or what is expedient to electoral victory, is merely the first step down the road to that horrid, crazy place where the raving lunatics of the Tea Party mewl in the dark about baby-killing communazis and shariah-law implementing, atheist homofascists. You just can't take the One Ring and hope to do good with it--all that your sterling intentions will amount to is resisting just a wee bit longer than they did.

Speaking of mewling in the dark, Billy Graham, one of the last evangelical leaders who was not a Republican shill, recently repented of that failing via a full-page ad in the WSJ.  Worried about the future of the country, which he referred to using a phrase that was added to the pledge of allegiance when he was 35, the elder Graham firmly cemented his legacy as a civil rights opponent defender of marriage the way God intended: between one man and however many women he can afford one woman.  He also all-but-endorsed Mitt Romney, following which all references to Mormonism being a cult disappeared from his website.

And in unrelated news, the nones just hit 20%.  One wonders why.

The State of the Race

My wife complains: here I've been blogging about esoteric theological twaddle in the midst of a presidential campaign. So balls to that. Here's some politics.

Obama's debate performance was crap. Not 3-d chess, not some cunning plot, not the altitude (wtf, Al?), crap.  He got beat, and that right proper. He under prepared, and Mitt showed up not as GOP primary Mitt, but as Massachusetts moderate Mitt, and was positively wounded, sir, that you could say such things about him. He then lied his ass off. What, are you some kind of grandfatherly budget cobbler and the little congress gnomes will come out at night and patch the $5 trillion dollar hole in your plan?  Fuck me--and fuck you: those with pre-existing conditions are not covered under your plan. My family can't find a first insurance company, let alone shop for a different one as you suggest.

In the wake of that disaster, Obama finally woke the fuck up: the balls dropped, and he started sounding like he wanted it.  Biden came out swinging in the Vice Presidential debate, and walked away with the victory. Obfuscation can only carry one so far, it seems, and the Very Serious Ryan ... isn't. Nor ever was: that famed concern for the debt only ever amounted to a constipated expression as he helped Bush double it. Just another Randian hack with dreamy eyes and a hard-on for powerpoint and tax cuts.

So calm down, Andrew Sullivan. Yeah, it was bad, but I really just can't see Team Evil winning it even so.

That's where things stand, more or less. Romney/Ryan are desperately shaking their Etch-a-Sketches and refusing to give details, while O and the Dems race to stop the bleeding from the Pres' horrible, awful, no-good debate night.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Jesus: the source of atheism (yes he really said that)

Looking back on losing the faith, what surprises me the most in hindsight is just how bad the arguments for God really are.  The Cosmological argument, founded upon a premise disproved by physics nearly a century ago; the Ontological argument, which defines God as existing and then claims that God exists by definition; the argument from design, refuted by biology a century and a half ago; Pascal's wager, in which you bet your soul that God is dumb enough to fall for a mercenary swindle; and then the countless variations on the theme of 'subjective experiences have convinced me of the ultimate reality of my God, but not the God of all those other people who have also had subjective experiences.'

There are others, of course: shred 43 terrible arguments, and soon comes the shout of triumph, "The 44th stands unanswered--victory is ours!"  Or, more commonly, you have the folks who acknowledge that many bad arguments get made, but insist that good arguments exist, and they were reading one just the other day, and that you would like it, and that it's much better than this one, and they'll send you the link later if they can just find it again.  But for sheer weirdness, I've never seen an apologetic to match "An Attempt to Explain Christianity to Atheists In a Manner That Might Not Freak Them Out."

To begin with, the title: atheists don't 'freak out' over 'Christianity'--most of us are actually former Christians who are pretty familiar with several different flavors of it.  The point of contention is not that we don't know what Christians think, or that it gives us the willies, but that, being familiar with the doctrines of said religion, we think that they are incorrect--or at the very least not sufficiently supported by evidence.  We know what you believe--we just don't believe it ourselves.

As for the argument?  He starts with the premises that suffering must have a purpose and that the universe doesn't measure up to his standards; from these dubious beginnings he assumes that God exists, then arrives at the notion that Christianity is true and also that Jesus is the source and wellspring of atheism.

In his defense, he claims not to be trying to prove God; in my defense, I did warn you that it was weird.  I've read it twice now; I think I know what he is trying to say, but I can't imagine thinking this argument convincing.  Wishing that suffering had a purpose does not make it so; finding the universe less than satisfactory proves nothing whatsoever; bowdlerizing 'sin' to refer to that shortcoming proves even less; and Aquinas--"a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest"--is flagrantly incorrect: a thing is said to be hotter according as its temperature increases, and there is no maximum.

It's 'The Case for Christ' as it would have been written by Plato, if only he were vaguely aware of spacetime and intimately familiar with word-salad theodicy.  'Weird' only just begins to cover it.

Mitt Speaks His Mind

The just-leaked secret footage of Romney being candid paradoxically contains the first comments I've ever heard from him--apart from glowing generalities about the goodness of good things and badness of bad things--that I agreed with.  For instance:

... you see, you and I, we spend our day with Republicans. We spend our days with people who agree with us. And these people are people who voted for him and don't agree with us. And so the things that animate us are not the things that animate them.

Quite so, and that's one of the harder lessons for any specialist--policy wonks in particular--to learn: the public does not care about the things you care about nor follow them with the interest that you do.  Thus, campaigning is like any other form of advertising: you don't tell your customers what you personally like best about the product, you tell them what is most likely to get them to buy it.  Tell your story in language that the listeners can relate to.  Likewise:

Well, I wrote a book that lays out my view for what has to happen in the country, and people who are fascinated by policy will read the book. We have a website that lays out white papers on a whole series of issues that I care about. I have to tell you, I don't think this will have a significant impact on my electability. I wish it did. I think our ads will have a much bigger impact. I think the debates will have a big impact.

Again, spot-on, and I heartily agree with that wish, though I might quibble with how important the debates really are.  Why is it spot-on?  Because everyone who actually knows policy already knows who they will vote for.  Thus, the election will come down to the "good citizens" who haven't been paying enough attention to Romney for the past year, Obama for the past four years, or the Republican party for the past ten, to have made up their minds which of these things they prefer.

When he drops the robotic public persona, Romney can be cold, cynical, calculating, and right on the money--which I admire.  It's like when Obama had his little donor meeting leak:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

My reaction upon hearing that soundbyte was the same as my reaction upon reading those Mitt quotes above: yep.

Of course, I'm cherry-picking the few things that I liked.  The other bits were incorrect ("He told you he'd keep unemployment below 8 percent. ... Fifty percent of kids coming out of school can't get a job."), delusional ("[I]f we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy."), nasty (My taxes pay for the prisons and workhouses, the poor must go there!* "[M]y job is not to worry about those people."), or some combination of the three.

We'll hear the core of the leak--the really juicy bits--done to death in coming days.  The gleeful little partisan in me is binging on Schadenfreude even as I type this, and I note in passing how incredibly lucky a campaigner Obama has been to have opponent after opponent self-destruct.

But on another level I'm glad to have it out there, and not just because I think that it makes my guy more likely to win.  Past all the campaigning, the not-quite-laughs, the hair-gel and the ads, we've been privileged with a glimpse of who he really is and what he really believes.  This is Mitt Romney, take him or leave him.

Would that we had that privilege with all those who would lead us.

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*Yeah, yeah I know that's movie Scrooge, but the conversation in the book is considerably more drawn out and lacks that one snappy zinger.

The Cosmological Non-Sequitur

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the cosmological argument is one of them.  How else to describe it, really?

The bare essence is this:  everything is caused, therefore there must be a first cause.

The obvious objection: what caused the first cause?

Well, they reply, the first cause is causeless. The Kalām variant is a way of rephrasing the original premises such that this retort is already couched within them--a rhetorical tiger waiting to pounce.

But hang on: we assert that all things belong to the set of things which do have causes.  Then we reverse and assert the existence of a set of things which do not have causes.  And we further assert that spacetime and mass-energy must belong in set 1 and not set 2, and that Vishnu or whoever definitely goes in set 2 and not set 1.  On what basis?

Now it's normal to think of things and events having causes.  You are reading this blog because you clicked a link.  I wrote it because I find the argument annoying. You were born because countless millions of years of evolution programmed your parents to love babies and enjoy making them, and so on.  But the ordinary, everyday events and objects with which we interact are merely arrangements of much smaller parts: molecules, which in turn are made of atoms, which in turn are made of parts smaller still, which are interchangeable with energy, and so on.  So yes, stuff rearranges itself in patterns which derive from previous patterns, but stuff and space remain.

In fact, in the only examples we have wherein stuff and space come into being, they do so from nothing.  Space is expanding: the space between the galaxies is growing.  Stuff pops into being all the time in the form of virtual particle/antiparticle pairs: provided the positive and negative energy of the particle pairs cancel each other out, there is no violation of the laws of physics.

So if the universe had zero net energy--if the positive mass and energy were canceled by gravity or other forces, let's say--then there's no particular reason to suppose that it cannot causelessly pop into being like any other net-zero fluctuation.

Aha! the apologist might interject, in both cases the space and the stuff arose within already-extant spacetime!  They wouldn't arise from absolute Nothing!  But this is a testable hypothesis: let them find some absolute Nothing, and through a series of rigorous tests determine what, if anything, arises from it, and I shall of course revise my position accordingly.

Nothing--"real" nothing, absolute nothing--is inconceivable.  When I try to picture it, I picture a dark empty space, which, as Einstein showed, is something.  It is meaningless to speak of its properties, just as it is meaningless to speak of causality "before" time--or, for that matter, to view quantum mechanics in terms of causality as opposed to probability.  The more modest "nothing" of the physicists, however, can get us everything we need to start up a universe quite nicely.  The disembodied First Cause is essentially moot.

Mike Huckabee vs the Priests of Baal

If I asked you to fill in the blank: "Mike Huckabee is rallying [adjective] groups in support of the fuckwad who thinks that a woman's body can magic away a rape baby," would you even need to click the link to know that the missing word is religious?

Mike thinks that the kerfuffle over Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin can result in "a Mt. Carmel moment"--"You know, you bring your gods. We’ll bring ours. We’ll see whose God answers the prayers and brings fire from heaven. That’s kind of where I’m praying: that there will be fire from heaven, and we’ll see it clearly, and everyone else will too."

Let's refresh our memory from 1 Kings 18:

... When [Ahab] saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?”
“I have not made trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table."

So Ahab gets the prophets of Baal together and Elijah proposes a test:

"Get two bulls for us. Let Baal’s prophets choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The god who answers by fire —he is God.”

 Baal doesn't show up; Elijah mocks them, and calls upon the Lord:

Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”

That'll show those gosh-durned liberals!  And then this happens:

Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.

I'm reasonably certain that Mike does not intend, upon his divinely granted victory, to slaughter the modern analogue to the priests of Baal.  But when ancient tales of triumphalist sectarian slaughter become the go-to metaphor for an earnest defense of rape apologists--and when that fact is considered unremarkable--then something has gone badly awry.

Throwing Confetti

Time was that I was interested in theological debates--an active participant, even, on this blog and elsewhere.

That was then.  This is now.  A year and a half, give or take, after the process of liberalizing belief to save it from what I knew was untrue broke right on through into non-belief.

At first, I still followed things--reading about the agonizing struggles of the progressives or the liberals in their efforts to redeem the faith from this or that conservative position, usually homophobia or some other brand of nasty American politics that had gotten mixed up in it somehow.  Reading, too, about the conservatives returning fire to save the ugly bits of the Bible (the ones that they like, of course--the 'kill the gays' but not the 'shellfish are abomination') from the liberals seeking to corrupt God's Holy Word or vote Democrat.

But recently--especially over the Chick-fil-a flustercluck--I've just found myself losing interest.

Go through the Bible and cut out every verse you aren't following or cleverly interpret yourself out of, and all you'll be left with is two piles of confetti.  Every theological debate boils down to "Jesus would arrange the piles my way and not yours."  Sure, some of them make a better, more consistent case than others; sure, some of them acknowledge (though not in quite these terms) that this is what they're doing whereas others don't; but in the end ... who cares.

You want to know why atheists go after religion?  Because in the twenty-first century we're having a "serious" debate about whether or not certain groups get civil rights and you have both sides scrambling to show that their position is consistent with a "moral" code that allows men to sell their daughters into slavery.  Because millions of people oppose science education on this basis of its contradicting a book that says that the stars are set in a firmament that keeps out the water above them.  Because it poisons the minds of otherwise good people into agonizing over how they arrange their confetti piles.

For what's it worth, I get it, because I did it for a good many years.  But ask yourselves--is keeping those four or five little scraps of paper in the right-hand pile (with 'thou shalt not murder' and 'love your neighbor') and not the left-hand pile (with 'no bacon' and 'slavery is okay') really more important to you than your brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters, and your friends?  I can understand the appeal and struggle of religious belief, but what I can't understand--and couldn't even then--is putting a silly and inconsistent doctrinal 'purity' over the actual happiness of actual people that I love.

What I like most about having left religion behind is the freedom--freedom from arranging those confetti piles, freedom from having to defend positions on any grounds other than the merits, freedom from being called upon to live and think within a theoretical framework whose 'eternal' boundaries were laid down by men who thought that saving the virgins for themselves after capturing a city was sound practice.  Ideas are right or wrong because they can be shown to be right or wrong and not because they can be twisted into consistency with the Bible, and actions are moral or immoral because of consent, harm, and the value of human life and dignity rather than their concordance with the musings of genocidal, misogynist slaveowners.

It doesn't matter whether the progressives or the conservatives are right about religion because religion itself is wrong.  Of course, we would be better off if all religious folk did as the liberals advised and put 'do unto others' above slavery and homophobia--you can sort those piles into some ways that are more harmful than others.  But in the end that's all they're doing, and we'd be better off still if they stopped.