This video was made to give a taste of a forthcoming book, The Last Testament: A Memoir by God with David Javerbaum, which  will be published by Simon & Schuster on November 1, 2011.

We’ll post a review of it on that day.

According to Penn Jillette, writing in the Los Angeles Times, non-believers may be more numerous than adherents of any particular religious sect in America:

Atheists are growing way fast, from under 2% to about 8% just in this century. If you throw in self-labeled agnostics and those who identify as not religious, you’re getting up to around 20%. Evangelicals are about 26%, Catholics about 23%, Jews, 1.7%, Mormons also 1.7% — if you start breaking Christians up into their smaller groups, nonbelievers come close to being the dominant religion, if you can call no religion a religion, like calling not collecting stamps a hobby.

We hope it is true, and we think it may be. We also suspect that a great many individuals who claim membership of this or that denomination are privately skeptical about the beliefs it teaches.

The main theme of Penn Jillette’s article is conjecture as to why politicians compulsively declare themselves generic “Christians”, preferring not to name the particular sect they belong to; with special reference to presidential candidates Bachmann and Perry:

When I was a kid, politicians wanted to avoid talking about religion if they could. John F. Kennedy couldn’t duck the issue, being Catholic and all. So how did he address it? By reminding Americans that religion shouldn’t be an issue, that he was concentrating on big things like poverty and hunger and leading the space race. When he finally got around to talking about religion, here’s what he said: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Can you imagine a presidential candidate talking that way today?

“Freethinkers,” a great book by Susan Jacoby, explained that the modern use of the word Christian was pushed to fight Roe vs. Wade. The anti-choice people wanted a big-tent word for the religious objection to abortion, and that meant they had to bring all the Protestants and Catholics together if they wanted to claim God for their team. The word Christian did that.

Since then, religion and politics have gotten ever more entwined. Jimmy Carter happily identified as born-again, and that phrase and the magic word Christian started to be used more and more. One American president who mentioned religion constantly and seemed to appear in a different church every time you blinked was Bill Clinton. Slick Willy really rammed home the idea of Christian. He was a church slut, not caring what church he appeared in as long as he was seen at a church.

And, now, we come to Bachmann and Perry.

I’ve used pornographic images, obscenity and poetry to try to make even the most doubtful blush, but I’ve never come close to Bachmann’s insult to the gentle, honest faithful when she said the suffering and casualties of natural disasters were her God’s message to wayward politicians. What she said was disgusting …

And stupid.

Bachmann was a longtime member of the Salem Lutheran Church, a small denomination that has some odd teachings. But even in the broadest definition of Lutherans, there are only about 13.5 million, and that’s not enough to elect you president. Now Bachmann has moved to Eagle Brook, an evangelical church, but even if she wins all the evangelical vote, that gives her only 26.3% of the American people. With those percentages, you need to shut up about religion. …

Perry is the same deal. Perry has moved away from his Methodist background … and moved to the Lake Hills Baptist Church, which went on to drop the word Baptist to be more inclusive. When Perry did his big apolitical political rally in August, he was very careful to call it nondenominational. It was Christian. Now let’s watch Mitt Romney as he works on trying to convince Americans that his sect, with its magic underwear and its belief that the Garden of Eden was in North America, really is just another Christian offshoot.

All interesting stuff. Fatuous beliefs promoting or hampering serious political purposes.

But what we find most interesting in the article is the possible numerical predominance of atheists and agnostics*.

Most of them are likely to be on the political left, but among so many there must be a fair number of conservatives.

May they find our site!

*Agnostics: atheists wearing an intellectual condom? 

(Hat tip Frank for the link.)

(Thanks to Frank for the link)

Check this out –

http://www.e-paa.org/

It is the newly launched website of Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics.

They are brave to come out into the open in an Islamic state.

They deserve our encouragement.

We enjoy Andrew Klavan’s writing. We like the way he thinks, we like his humor.

How does a man of such engaging intelligence bring himself to believe in a god, and (adding a riddle to a nonsense) that “God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, we wonder.

Here are parts of a column of his at PajamasMedia, in which he argues that the present war is a Holy War, between Islam and other religions, chiefly Christianity:

What has been fatuously called “The War on Terror,” this ongoing struggle between Islamism and the rest of the world (including some of the Islamic world) is, in fact, a holy war: a violent argument over the nature of our Creator.

Americans right and left hate this fact. Many can barely face it. Almost no one in authority or the media ever dares mention it at all…  In principle, through tradition, by law and nature, most of us are repelled by the idea of killing over religion. Freedom in these matters is our watchword. I say Jesus; you say Allah; let’s call the whole thing God.

This is not to indulge in any mealy-mouthed moral equivalence or dribble out some balderdash about how all religions are one and faith is a mountain that can be climbed from any side. Not likely. If there is a God — whether or not there is, in fact — there will be things you can say about Him that are true [how will you know they are? – JB] and things that are not true and some religions will surely contain more of the truth than others. …

None will. But on we go:

Over hard history, we have learned that there are some struggles in which the evil of the fight itself supersedes the good of any potential victory. Faith is not knowledge …

Right, Klavan!

We should approach the super-natural with humility in our beliefs and forbearance towards the beliefs of others. And anyway, many cherished doctrines, no matter how deep or meaningful, don’t have much immediate effect on our lives. I believe that God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — but if it turns out He’s five guys named Moe, I’m not going to change my weekend plans.

That’s quite funny. He goes on:

So we hate the idea of fighting a holy war. But we have no choice.

We have no choice but to fight the war, and certainly the other side believes it is a holy war (that’s what “jihad” means), but is it? He hasn’t established that yet.

No matter what moral knots some self-loathing westerners tie the facts into, the truth remains, the other bastards started it and now it’s on. Doesn’t matter how tolerant you think you are. Doesn’t matter how many “Coexist” bumper stickers you own. If a man with a gun kicks your door down and starts telling you how to pray, there are only two possible outcomes: victory or surrender.

In order to secure victory in a holy war [or any war – JB], however, you have to know what you’re fighting for. It’s not enough to kill the jihadis who want to kill us, or to dismantle the no-go Sharia enclaves being purposely created in cities throughout the west. A holy war is a violent argument about the nature of our Creator …

This one isn’t. And a war is instead of an argument. But yes, we do need, in the long run, to win our argument against Islam. How? By opposing one irrationality with another irrationality? That is Klavan’s belief:

So in order to win, we have to know what Creator we’re trying to defend.

He recognizes a difference between Islam’s allah and the Christian three-in-one godhead. But if either of those absurd fictions were to “win”, war would be just beginning for us. Fortunately –

This isn’t easy in a nation committed to religious liberty — a commitment that could not survive a kill-or-be-killed smackdown between your prophet and mine.

There are those, of course, who believe the problem is religion itself: remove the subject of the argument, they say, and the argument would end.

Right, right.

But he then goes on ridiculously as the gullible-of-the-gods often do:

The murder and oppression that defined the atheist empires in communist Russia and China – not to mention the slow, insidious death currently claiming “post-Christian” Europe — strongly suggest otherwise. Culturally, atheism is a disaster— although atheists are entitled to express their opinion right up until the moment the Islamists [or any sole-possessor of religious “truth”] kill them.

It wasn’t the atheism of the Communists that made them murder and oppress: it was their Communism. It isn’t their atheism that is making European nations commit suicide, its their Socialism.

For the rest of us — including those atheists who have the wherewithal to think it through …

Nice being patronized by a Christian, isn’t it?

… we must be willing to stand in open argument…

Agreed!

… and, if it’s our calling, in bloody battle for the God our founding principles, in fact, imply. …

So he plants his riddle-of-a-God more firmly in the Constitution than the Founders themselves cared to.

Sure, if we had to choose between living under modern Christianity, it being a flaccid religion except among the very few who will kill for it, or under  intensely oppressive and cruel Islam, for which all Muslims are instructed by their holy writ to kill, we’d have to choose the former.

But we don’t have to choose between them. The fight – or, as the man says, the argument –  is not between the Cross and the Crescent. It is not between God and Allah. It is between Western civilization and Islam. Reason is on one side only (impeded somewhat by the religious with their unreasonable declamations), and that’s why guns and drones and bombers are in operation.

Reason will win eventually. The little grey cells are mightier than the  sword and the scimitar, the drone and the suicide bomber. But it might take a weary long time.

We cannot understand how sane, adult, educated, intelligent people can believe in the supernatural.

It’s astonishing to us that such an astute observer of the political scene, so witty a commentator as Ann Coulter can believe in creationism – the belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being: “God”.

Some creationists say that the supernatural being created the earth with the fossil remains in it of creatures who were never actually alive; bones that seem to prove the earth is much older than creationists absolutely know for sure it is; and which may also seem to prove that evolutionary changes have happened over time. They seem to, but they don’t, the creationists say. They were put there by God in the form they have now – as a sort of joke he wanted to play on archaeologists? Creationists don’t put it that way; they don’t ascribe a sense of humor to their God.

In fact there are many versions of creationism, some of them acknowledging that a certain amount of evolution does occur, but denying that human beings evolved from older species. All versions of creationism are equally apodictic. They who demand absolute proofs for every claim that evolutionists make, declare without any proofs at all that God made everything; designed and created the universe out of nothing.

The nearest they come to offering the sort of evidence that science recognizes is by “disproving” evolutionary explanations. They argue: “If some phenomena cannot be incontrovertibly explained by evolutionary theory, it proves they were designed by a superhuman intelligence.”

They believe they have found such phenomena. Not easily, though. Evolution is such a good explanation for Things Being As They Are that, to find anything which challenges its explanations, creationists have probed deep into the structures of life through powerful microscopes. And one of the “gotcha” things they found under the glass was a thread on certain cells, including bacteria such as Ecoli, that enables them to swim. It is called the flagellum.

The flagellum has a complex structure that has set creationists gloating in triumph. There is no way, they say, that the flagellum could have evolved from simpler structures because without every single one of its parts being present and operating exactly how they do, it couldn’t work at all.

In a recent column, Ann Coulter waves the flagellum (so to speak) in the faces of evolutionists. It proves, she believes, that evolution is not true. Its discovery is a supreme achievement of “advances in science” which have, she says, “completely discredited Darwin’s theory of evolution”.

She claims there is now a “mountain of scientific evidence disproving this mystery religion from the Victorian age”. And from the mountain she has plucked “one small slice” – the flagellum.

It is a mathematical impossibility … that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell’s flagellum … could all arise at once by random mutation. … Nor would each of the 30 to 40 parts individually make an organism more fit to survive and reproduce, which, you will recall, is the lynchpin of the whole contraption.

The authority she cites for these assertions is a religious scientist [now there’s an oxymoron for you] named Michael Behe who “proved” them to be the case.

In fact, Michael Behe’s proofs have been disproved, the claims made for the “irreducible complexity” of the flagellum shown to be fallacious. (You can find the counter-arguments for this special case here, and for this and many other anti-evolution claims here.)

We quote a short summary of the refutations of Michael Behe’s “proof”:

Based on similarity in structure and partial similarity in amino acid sequence, it is generally accepted among scientists that the eukaryotic flagellum and cilium have evolved from the cytoskeleton, while the eubacterial flagellum has evolved either from the type III secretion system or from a more ancient secretion system from which the type III secretion system has evolved as well. The archaeal flagellum has probably evolved from the type IV pili. …

In his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, intelligent design proponent Michael Behe, under funding from the Templeton Foundation [which exists to promote religion over science – JB] cited the bacterial flagellum as an example of an irreducibly complex structure that could not have evolved through naturalistic means. Behe argued that the flagellum becomes useless if any one of its constituent parts is removed, and therefore could not have arisen through numerous, successive, slight modifications. This claim has been strongly challenged by the work of Zvonimir Dogic. His team reported constructing active hairlike structures containing only two proteins that reproduce the beating functionality of flagella, proving that the flagellar complexity is in fact reducible. Behe’s argument is weakened by the observation that the proteins used by Dogic are all present in every eukaryotic cell in the centriole, and could easily have evolved into a flagellum through numerous, successive, slight modifications. … Exaptation explains how systems with multiple parts can evolve through natural means.

So no – evolution is not proved to be wrong by the flagellum, or by anything else, and “most scientists” do not consider it disproved as Ann Coulter claims they do.

Now let’s briefly examine her alternative belief. In doing so, we step away from science. Science is concerned only with the natural. Anything to do with the supernatural has nothing whatsoever to do with science. “Is there a god?” is not a scientific question.

Let’s posit a Creator. Let’s imagine him designing and making the flagellum – out of nothing, remember.

Let’s translate his God language into English and catch his thoughts as he goes about his creating.

“Now I’m going to fit these bacteria with this complex structure by which they’ll propel themselves into the bloodstream of animals and human beings and make them sick and kill them.”

The question, Ann, is WHY?

A Creator, one who designed and deliberately made the universe – whether exactly as it is at this moment or long ago set upon a course of development through many ages – is a Purposer. Those who believe in him hold that he created a universe not accidentally but on purpose.

What is the purpose of the universe?

Religion absolutely requires an answer to that question. But the believers never answer it. They cannot. It has no answer.

God, No! by Penn Jillette, Simon & Schuster, 231 pages (published today)

Penn Jillette is half the comedy-magic act, Penn & Teller.

God, No! is full of real-life stories, some of them exuberantly pornographic. It doesn’t tell you how the magic tricks are done, or even describe any, but it does tell you a lot about Penn Jillette.

In the entertainment industry there may be many atheists, but few say they are. Penn Jillette does, and for that we applaud him.

We know there are very few stars of stage, screen and television who are not lefties. Penn Jillette is one of the few, and for that too we applaud him.

He states plainly and emphatically what he means.

Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism.

There is no god and that’s the simple truth.

You have to make it clear to everyone, including your children, that there is no god.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government take money by force through taxes to give poor people money is compassion.

Atheism was a real comfort to me when my mother and sister died. … I could never have understood suffering as part of an all-powerful god’s “plan”.

There is a world of safety in doubt. The respect for faith, the celebration of faith, is dangerous. It’s faith itself that’s wrong.

One of the stories is about an orthodox Jew who loses his faith. With Penn’s assistance he orders, and much enjoys, his first non-kosher meal. But not yet being comfortable with his atheism he asks himself, “Who will take care of me?”

Another new atheist says: “For me the biggest part of letting go of god was holding myself accountable for my own actions… It felt safer to be a passenger in my own life than to take the wheel.”

Perhaps with time, experience, and Penn’s influence, those two came to feel as excited as Penn himself clearly is to be responsible for themselves, as happy as he is to be free.

Sam Harris, fellow atheist, talks about Islam.

A leader of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack, was himself a trained terrorist.

Here’s the story.

On May 15, 1974, three terrorists belonging to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) broke into an apartment at Ma’alot in Israel, and killed three members of the family who occupied it, the father, the pregnant mother, and their four-year-old child, and severely wounded another child. The terrorists then went on to a local school, where they found 100 teenagers and their teachers staying overnight on an outing from Safed. The terrorists held them hostage, using them as sandbags at the windows. Explosives were wired to the walls of the school. At one point the terrorists started singing songs of the Palmach, the commando force of the pre-1948 Jewish Defense Army. After sixteen hours the Israeli security forces stormed the building. The terrorists killed 22 of their hostages and one rescuing soldier, and wounded 56 others before they themselves were shot and killed.

Under the leadership of a Christian from Jordan, Nayef Hawatmeh, the PDFLP had broken away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Both were self-declared Marxist groups. They  both joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when it was reconstituted in 1968 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah.

Two years after the Ma’alot atrocities, the PDFLP [also known as the DFLP] acquired a Norwegian member, Lars Gule, who served as the head of the Workers Youth League – the organization that was running the youth camp on Utoya Island when Anders Breivik perpetrated his massacre.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page that two years after the Ma’alot Massacre –

Lars Gule was trained by the DFLP and dispatched to Israel via Norway with explosives hidden in the covers of his books. …

None of this impeded Gule’s career in any way. He went on to the University of Bergen and served as the head of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack. Today he is a prominent figure on the left.

How can we make sense of this? Glenn Beck compared the Workers Youth League camp to a Hitler Youth camp. He was close, but not entirely right. The roots of the Workers Youth League are actually Communist.

A very fine difference if any at all!

Norway’s Labour Party was a member of the Communist International. The Workers Youth League was formed by the merger of the Left Communist Youth League and the Socialist Youth League of Norway. We often use “Communist” as a pejorative– but in this case the Utoya camp, literally was a Communist youth camp.

The day before the massacre, Norwegian Foreign Minister Gahre-Store visited the camp and was greeted with banners calling for a boycott of Israel, and Gahre-Store responded with an Anti-Israel speech to cheers from the campers. …

There are few children of workers at the Workers Youth League camp. They are for the most part the children of the party, the sons and daughters of bureaucrats and party leaders, training the next generation to perpetuate the Labour Party state.

Breivik came from that same background. The son of the left wing elite. And if his parents’ marriage had not collapsed, with the young boy allotting a share of the blame to the Labour Party, he would likely have a comfortable spot in the socialist state. Breivik may have turned against his roots, but the idea that terroristic violence is a legitimate solution is one that he could have easily picked up on the left.

Gahre-Store may have been greeted with a banner calling for the boycott of Israel, but he would never have been greeted with one calling for a boycott of terrorists. And indeed if there is an Islamist terrorist group that Gahre-Store doesn’t support, it’s hard to find. Gahre-Store had called for negotiating with Al-Shahaab in Somalia, an Al-Qaeda offshoot, he spoke with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and called for a reconciliation with the Taliban.

Nor is the Workers Youth League call for the destruction of Israel a recent one. In the 70′s … the man who led the organization [Johan Jurgen Holst] then went on to become the country’s Foreign Minister playing a key role in the Oslo Accords that turned Israel into a free fire zone for the terrorist allies of the League and the Labour Party.

Media commentators have made a great deal of Breivik’s radicalization, but despite his death toll, his radicalization seems to be an isolated event in comparison to the magnitude of radicalization at Utoya. If Breivik’s violence and bigotry is to be condemned – shouldn’t the species of violence and bigotry at Utoya be condemned as well?

The left can hold up Utoya as an example, but there are a legion of counter-examples. Not the least of which is Lars Gule, traveling with explosives in his backpack, on a journey that took him from DFLP terrorist to Workers Youth League leader.

And behind that is the larger string of DFLP and Fatah atrocities. And that of other terrorist groups around the world. The Utoya attack cannot be viewed as an isolated event. It must be seen within the context of support for terrorism as a valid tactic. An idea that goes back to the Marxist roots of the Labour Party and which is embodied in its political support for terrorism. …

Breivik and Lars Gule had their common origins in a country dominated by a political left which sees violence as a legitimate tool of political change, while dehumanizing its victims. Norway’s ambassador to Israel carefully distinguished between the Utoya attack and the terrorist attacks on Israelis. The latter would go away if Israel just followed Gahre-Store’s example and negotiated with Hamas.

But what Norway’s political elite failed to grasp is that the genie of terrorism cannot be kept in a lamp, to emerge only at your command. Once you legitimize terrorism as a tool of political change, you lose the ability to determine who will make use of it. Breivik followed the example of Lars Gule, that of the Marxist terrorists, whose intellectual legacy is the black tar that seeps through the painted walls of Norwegian foreign policy.

A group called American Atheists have filed a lawsuit in protest against a cross being officially recognized as a 9/11 memorial.

No one deliberately erected the cross. Two iron girders, one vertical with a shorter one attached to it horizontally near the top, were left  standing in the rubble. Some Christians have chosen to treat it as their sacred symbol. A Franciscan monk performed a ceremonial blessing of it when it was moved recently to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Here’s part of a report and commentary on the story:

American Atheists expressed their outrage that, in a memorial partially subsidized by tax dollars, a cross should be the only religious object included.

“We honor the dead and respect the families,” they wrote in a statement on their website, “which is why we will not allow the many Christians who died to get preferential representation over the many non-Christians who suffered the same fate. This was an attack against America, not Christianity, and Christianity’s does not deserve special placement just because THEY think the girders look like their religious symbol.”

In the complaint … American Atheists point out that people of many different faiths died in the attacks. According to the lawsuit, the cross was originally blessed by the priest who ministered to workers clearing the site after the attacks, in response to the workers’ belief that the cross was “a sign that God never abandoned us at Ground Zero.” Naturally, some are asking: whose God are we talking about?

We wonder how Christians reconcile their trust in the beneficence of their all-knowing,  all-powerful god with his permitting those thousands to suffer and die on 9/11. If he didn’t abandon them, what was he doing for them? But that’s an aside. The issue here is whether Christians should be allowed to treat the girders as an officially sanctioned religious memorial.

Although the atheists’ “us vs. them” rhetoric leaves something to be desired, their point is fair. If the creators of the 9/11 Memorial truly want to honor the dead, they can’t include only one religious symbol, even if it was recovered from the wreckage. It might require a little creativity to come up with appropriate tributes to the faith traditions (or lack thereof) of the many people who lost their lives in the attacks – but then again, perhaps it would be best simply not to include the cross at all.

We are entirely tolerant of other people’s choices and behavior if it in no way harms us. We don’t understand why people worship idols and imaginary beings and continue to hope against all experience that, when supplicated, the idol or the unknown god will do something good for them; but we are as unperturbed by their religious foibles as we are by any other kind. A pair of girders are for us simply a pair of girders, and if some choose to hold them sacred and bless them and kneel down before them in prayer, though we may be bemused, we feel no indignation. We cannot live in a state of perpetual emotional turmoil because others (most Americans, in fact) are religious.

Some atheists are arguing that the cross should only be allowed at the Memorial and Museum if other religious – and, presumably, atheist – signs and symbols stand with it.

What signs and symbols? Some religions have them, many do not. Would those that don’t have to devise them specially?

How does anyone know what some three thousand individuals believed?

What sign or symbol would the protesting atheists put up for their supposed like-thinkers who perished on that day?

We would like to know what our readers think about this.