Jewish Atheist

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Edmund Burke

In previous entries, I have described the grave dangers posed to humanity by religious belief, especially fundamentalism/orthodoxy.

I’ve noted the immense undeserved social prestige that’s accorded religious belief and practice, especially the Abrahamic religions, which continue to occupy center stage and cause so much human suffering.

The social prestige of religion is founded on fear. The fear is maintained via harsh social/economic sanctions (what network, except the marginal Showtime, has the guts to air anything that’s humanistic and positive — or, God forbid, anything critical of religion?). Much of the fear is maintained by threatened and actual violence (the Muslims’ main tool).

Combine this with the believers’ fear of hell and of unbelievers…and that’s WAY too much fear in the world.

I and others have warned about the relentless advance and ubiquitous violence of intolerant orthodox Islam (and Muslims have a VERY high birthrate) all over the world.

I’ve pointed with alarm at the merging of politics with religion in the both the Christian and Islamic worlds, giving rise to a potentially very deadly confrontation.

Aside from that, large numbers of human beings remain partially developed and thus not fully human, having relinquished their critical faculties and their very lives to political and religious charlatans of all sorts.

Parasites

I have recently begun to think of the priest and warrior classes as parasitic. As soon as human beings got organized enough to grow food and domesticate animals, they could settle in one place, with the luxury of allowing some human beings not to engage in food production.

In the case of useful activities like art and technology, this new freedom proved a boon to humanity. But it also allowed the emergence of the two parasitic classes — the clerics to make up reasons why things are the way they are and create excuses for wars of conquest…and the Warriors to dutifully prove their courage by going out and dying in whatever crusade or jihad the politicians or clerics had dreamed up.

The politicians and clerics are a gigantic net-minus for humanity. At a Catholic Mass last weekend, I watched a priest give communion. What do this man and his primitive act of symbolic cannibalism contribute to society?

And how about all of those Muslim clerics that the media describe as “fiery” or “radical?” What exactly do they do for a living? What besides violence, fanaticism, death and destruction is their impact on the world? Does a “radical cleric” pay taxes?

Bring individual skills

My friend Leo, the Atheist at Large, is right to warn people about the barbaric, pedophilic elements of Islam. He is a locksmith. He tells me his duty is to warn people of their threats, and then let them proceed and take the consequences of their actions.

He says this applies to locksmithing as well as to world events and philosophy. And he is right. Every secular humanist should watch Leo’s videos about the barbarities that are accepted by many Muslims because their holy texts allow them.

Each secular humanist — and we are smart people, with broad knowledge — must bring his or her expertise to bear on the battle against fanaticism. The relentless advance of orthodoxy during my lifetime tells me that we cannot afford to do nothing (well, actually we can — that’s the fallback alternative — see next post).

Just as Leo brings his locksmith’s mentality to bear on the battle for truth and reason, so do I bring the discipline of linguistics, using scientific principles of text translation and interpretation (showing how clerics often just make things up) and uncovering the language games that religious clerics and believers play to create and reinforce their imaginary, subjective worlds. I’ve done that in other posts.

The engineering of consent

But let’s talk about PR, because I have a lot of experience in that too. I’ve thought long and hard about perception versus reality…and about the real versus the perceived. PR was defined by its founder as “the engineering of consent.” Religious believers have been immensely successful at engineering consent. Can we hope to do the same?

Maybe. Our first alternative is to keep doing what we’re doing, which, as a PR professional, I see as gathering, dialoguing, and disputing in the cyber-world or the refined arenas of intellectual discourse, print and online. All well and good.

But in the real world of mainstream culture, I see religion predominating, in both news and entertainment. Religious faith is unquestioned. Huge numbers of people believe in the truth of Genesis. There is no visible appearance of — much less argument for — secular humanism, in politics or in the media, where it really counts.

Numerous secular humanists and atheists have said to me, “You’ll never convince people not to believe in God.” Sometimes they add, “It gives them such comfort.” That may be true of many people. They may not be capable of being saved, in the secular humanist sense. But I don’t set my goals that high!

The truth requires celebrity + cash.

After more than 25 years in both the academic and professional sides of public speaking and persuasion, my favorite quote of all time on these subjects is still the observation by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels: “The truth is that which most people believe. And they believe that which is repeated most often.”

In other words, what many people believe is not based on reason, persuasive as it is to us. What triggers the opening of the mind toward the possible re-consideration of the acceptance of religious fantasy…is something entirely different. Two things, in fact: celebrity and cash.

Cash means that a message gets repeated and reinforced, in one communication channel after another.

Religious believers were able to spend $27 million on a Museum of Creationism in Kentucky. Another $27 million went for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, which graduates 28,000 people each year, each with a Christian point of view, whatever that means. If it means they take the Bible literally and try to politically force its morality on modern people, we are in trouble. Those are people with education, people networking with each other, people who will have money and power in this society.

Where do they get that kind of cash? I certainly don’t have it. Where is our secular humanist Ross Perot or George Soros (who I understand is a big believer in cannabis)?

The other powerful force that moves mountains in this society is celebrity. Tom Cruise gave vast public exposure to the psychotic worldview of Scientology. Madonna professes interest in the Kabbalah, which is largely a bunch of imaginary rants.

How Jews would work themselves into such a mystic state and entertain such imaginings, I have no idea. Perhaps psychoactive substances were involved. Or maybe their outer world was really horrible.

But what if Madonna (or Scarlett Johansson, whom I’ve heard is a secular humanist; sorry if I’m wrong) were to openly come out and honestly, articulately (and very appealingly) explain the benefits of not believing in God?

Evangelical Secular Humanism

What if there were a couple dozen such celebrities who made public their commitment to reason and warned of the dangers of believing in imaginary entities like God and Jesus, the way Susan Sarandon gets involved in politics?

What if some of the secular humanists were young men and women with WASP good looks, who dressed really cool and spoke eloquently, in a Southern accent, about truth, the universe, and Darwin, with the same wide-eyed wonder and infectious charisma of a televangelizing Jesus-lover? Don’t forget the uplifting humanistic music — or the wry rap cataloging religion’s sins.

These are the factors of appearance, packaging, and behavior that open people’s minds. Might as well face the truth.

If Clint Eastwood would run for president as a Libertarian, he could change history. He has both cash and celebrity. You see what I mean.

Get them to pay attention.

So no, I do not expect to convince religious believers to abandon the fantasies in which they have invested so much. But Goebbels was right: if people hear something enough times, especially from the right people, they will open their minds to it – and some may even believe it outright, as religious belief abundantly illustrates.

But until the cash or celebrity appears (a secular Messiah, as it were) to get large numbers of people, including Muslims, to open themselves to the possibility of listening to reason, I expect no major change. (What would it take, for example, to get a group of the major imams and ayatollahs to renounce Islam? How many virgins? Just wondering.)

Things will continue as they are now (barring another 9/11, which is probably inevitable).

Secular humanists will continue to find each other, talk to each other, and debate each other and religious believers, online and in small-circulation print media.

Fledgling attempts to bring about change in the real world, e.g., the Brights, the Secular Humanist Coalition, the freedom-from-religion organizations, the efforts to secularize Islam — all of whose efforts I support enthusiastically! — will continue to make progress, but probably not enough to save the world from the onrushing tides of fundamentalism, both sides of which — Christian and Muslim — seem to be itching for a showdown, which humanity must avoid.

Aside from cash and celebrity to sort of crack the nut, what can individual humanists to do to be more active?

What you can do

I suggest, in addition to whatever you may be doing – and that could be as simple as acting humanely – you employ your own distinctive skills, as Leo and I do…and also think about people in politics and the media whom you could influence to promote secular humanism and to challenge the huge margin of undeserved respect that religious belief gets.

Also, you can join this new movement I’m founding: Positive Humanists International © – or PHI, the first letter of “philosophia,” the love of wisdom. I just Googled it, and it’s not taken, so I hereby copyright it, Alan M. Perlman, 2007. Also, I bought the domain name www.positive-humanists-international.org . So the Internet presence is there.

This may go nowhere, but we’ll see. For now, just the blog, the domain, and the copyright. The founding date: June 21, longest day of the year, symbolizing the farthest possible reach of the light of reason against the darkness of religious superstition.

Why?

Why another humanist movement? For one thing, humanism can always use another voice. Plus, this one is a lot more active, because at the rate religion is gaining ground, it may be the death of us. We’re going to try to avoid religious Armageddon by confronting the dangerous and destructive beliefs themselves.

This is a movement where we already know how to walk the walk: we know how to be good without God.

Now we must learn to talk the talk…because what is unique about PHI is that it not only challenges the veracity of religious belief, but it POSITIVELY asserts that these fantasies are harmful, that people do monstrous evil because of religion, and that secular humanism, not religion, offers the promise of a better life on earth.

So PHI brings together some traditional humanist themes — like the naturalistic world-view and the critique of religion‘s sins past and present (thank you, Messrs. Hitchens and Dawkins) — AND it openly (but humanely) challenges religion in the public arenas of politics and the media, AND it openly opposes religious (especially Muslim) bullying with truth and reason…AND – very importantly – it SEEKS CONVERTS, as well as the cash and celebrity to get the message out there and stop humanity’s backward slide into the darkness of religious superstition and conflict.

You can practice it individually, starting right now. You probably are practicing already, if you’re at least living a good, charitable, humanistic life. But it’s not enough. The religious believers are bringing the world to a truly dangerous state, and we must actively oppose them, in the ways I’ve described above. More on the message itself in my next post.

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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author — most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056. He is also the founder of PHI (Positive Humanists International)©.