Sometimes Pat Condell says something we don’t like, but we largely agree with him, and we enjoy his combative manner.

In this video he is characteristically challenging, perhaps even more vehement than usual.

He raises points that are likely to be controversial even among his fellow atheists.

All good fun.

Was the Republic of the United States created as a Christian nation?

Warren Throckmorton, in a Townhall article here, asks a question more precisely focused but essentially the same: “Did the first amendment create a Christian nation?”

His answer is no. He explains:

Most states had established Christian denominations in the years before the passage of the Constitution but two states did not, Rhode Island and Virginia. Virginia, the home of Madison and Jefferson, is the most relevant to what would become the First Amendment. In 1786, Madison succeeded in shepherding religious freedom protections through the Virginia legislature that in his words, “have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

Unfortunately not forever. “Hate crimes” are laws for the human mind. And they are entirely unnecessary. Those who commit them are either committing a crime, in which case they should be prosecuted regardless of what emotion accompanied it, or they did not, in which case the law should disregard them, hate though they might.

Still, what Madison did achieve was great and lasting – at least until now.

The law that gave Madison his ebullient hope was the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which reads in part:

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

According to Thomas Jefferson, who had no small hand in the matter,some Virginia legislators wanted to direct the act toward Christianity by inserting Jesus Christ into a section of the Preamble. Jefferson’s account makes clear the extent of the freedom of expression which the Virginia legislature affirmed:

“The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Islam], the Hindoo [Hinduism], and Infidel of every denomination.”

So Jefferson allowed a “holy author of our religion” to haunt the law, but managed to exclude naming it Jesus Christ. It seems most of the legislators had some notion that “Jew, Gentile, Christian, Mahometan and Hindoo ” all shared a belief in such a being. If so, they were mistaken of course. And whether Jefferson himself believed in it no one can be certain.

Jefferson and Madison sought to get the state out of the business of “making laws for the human mind.” In so doing …  Madison and Jefferson moved Virginia, and later the nation away from a national religion. …

Virginia moved away from having one of the most solidly established churches all the way to join little Rhode Island on the side of full religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Madison followed up his success in Virginia with a proposed amendment to the Constitution in 1789 covering religious expression:

“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

Through debate, Madison’s language was modified to the current First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Madison’s work in Virginia and his original proposal make clear that freedom of religious expression is an individual right and not meant for adherents of a particular religion, namely Christianity. …

The First Amendment forbids federal laws which interfere with a citizen’s free expression of religion and the Fourteenth Amendment extends the prohibition to the states.

Madison argued that Christianity itself supported the broad tolerance he was enshrining. Whether he was using the argument purely to achieve his end, or sincerely believed that Christianity was as tolerant as he was painting it, remains unknowable. The point is, it worked. He persuaded the people he needed to persuade.

He put it this way – explaining to the Virginia Assembly why they should not vote funds for teachers of Christianity:

“The establishment proposed by the Bill is not requisite for the support of the Christian Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world: it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care of Providence.”

With that he must have have sounded like a true believer, which he needed the Assembly to be convinced he was.

If he really was as firm a believer as he sounded then, it is all the more remarkable that he worked and pleaded so persistently and skillfully for the greatest possible tolerance of all religious belief and (by implication) none.  Or to put it another way: either he was an extraordinarily broad-minded Christian, or he was an extraordinarily persuasive non-believer. It matters not which, since he achieved the end which did matter and continues to matter – the absence of a national religion.

But now the freedom of conscience and belief that Madison bequeathed to the nation is under threat from “the Mahometan”.  Muslims whose freedom of religion he ensured, are exploiting the tolerance he enshrined, in order to destroy it.

Another sadistic Christian sect (see our post immediately below, The Church of Christ Sadist) lets children die in agony. It calls itself the Church of Christ Scientist (an oxymoron).

No date is given for the report we quote from here. These horrors were allowed to happen decades ago. Has legal action stopped them from ever happening again?

Authorities in four states are prosecuting Chris­tian Science parents on manslaughter, murder, or child abuse charges for refusing medical care to their dying chil­dren.

The cases — six of them in all, including three in California — represent the largest assault in history against Christian Science reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment to cure dis­ease …

Christian Science began in 1875 with the publication of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. About the same time the organization of “Chris­tian Scientists,” an association of Mrs. Eddy’s students, formed to learn the finer points of her mind cure techniques. In 1879 the organization incorporated under its official name — The Church of Christ, Scientist.

Although 44 states have enacted laws to prevent prose­cution of Christian Scientists on the basis of religious beliefs, a growing number of prosecutors are going after parents on the basis of child abuse statutes. Child abuse is not directly allud­ed to in most of the statutes pro­tecting Christian Scientists.

The Massachusetts law pro­tecting Christian Scientists passed by the state legislature in 1971 is similar to that of other states. Prosecutors argue that although it shields parents from charges of child neglect, it does not deal with child abuse.

A child is not deemed to have been abused if prevented by parents from being medically treated:

It reads: “A child shall not be deemed to be neglected or lack proper physical care for the sole reason that he is being provided remedial treatment by spiritual means alone.”

These cases are cited:

Robin Twitchell, 2, died on April 3, 1986, after suffering for five days from a congenital bowel obstruction. [Painful beyond description – JB] …

Mr. Twitchell said he blamed him­self for his son’s death, not for failing to seek a doctor, but because he “failed” in his “belief”. He said he prayed over his baby every night. …

William and Christine Her­manson of Sarasota, Florida, are accused of killing their dia­betic daughter [Amy, 7] by denying her insulin injections. …

The door for the above and other cases to be prosecuted was opened by a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court involving … three active cases in its jurisdiction. The same ruling also opened the door for potential legal action generally against religious groups accused of child abuse. That recent ruling stated that Christian Science parents who attempt spiritual healing and fail to the loss of life can be tried for manslaughter. In all three cases the children involved died of the same ailment — bacterial meningitis; and the parents were all charged with felony child endangerment and invol­untary manslaughter. [All too voluntary in reality – JB.]

The parents charged includ­ed Laurie Walker of Sacramen­to, whose four-year-old daugh­ter Shauntay died in March 1984; Elliot and Lisa Glaser of Santa Monica, whose 16-month son Seth died in March 1984; and Mark and Susan Rippberger of Santa Rosa, whose 8-year-old daughter Natalie died in December 1964.

The most recent case to be publicized is perhaps the most gruesome. Elizabeth Ashley King died of bone cancer near Phoenix, Arizona, on June 5, 1988. At the time of her death, the 12-year-old girl, who had been out of school for seven months, had a 42-inch-round tumor on her leg that had eaten through her bones and genital area.

Elizabeth’s parents, John and Katherine King, were charged with child abuse for let­ting her die. Prosecutor K. C. Scull said he recommended that manslaughter charges also be filed against the Kings, but the county Grand Jury would not go along with it after hear­ing tearful testimony from them.

How mysterious that the merciful God, for all the praying, did not save the children.

Any explanations?

CNN’s religious blog “belief” carries this report:

The Society of Jesus‘ Pacific Northwest unit and its insurers have agreed to pay a record $166.1 million to about 470 people who were sexually and psychologically abused as children by Jesuit priests from the 1940s to the 1990s, the victims’ attorneys said Friday.

Blaine Tamaki, an attorney in Yakima, Washington, described the payment as “the largest settlement between a religious order and abuse victims in the history of the United States.”

The Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus is now in federal bankruptcy court in Portland, Oregon …

“The $166.1 million is the largest settlement by a religious order in the history of the world,” Tamaki said. “Over 450 Native American children … were sexually abused repeatedly, from rape to sodomy, for decades …

Jesuits are the world’s largest order of Catholic priests and are considered the most educated in the priesthood … [They] number about 19,000 worldwide, according to the Society of Jesus in the United States. …

The abuse primarily took place in Jesuit-operated mission schools and boarding schools on Indian reservations in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Oregon …

Most of the abuse occurred in the 1960s, so many of the alleged victims are now in their late 40s and early 50s, Tamaki said.

None of the 57 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse by the victims has been charged with any crimes, Tamika said. …

Forty-nine of the almost 100 victims represented by Tamaki were sexually abused when they were 8 years old or younger, he said. The remaining victims were ages 9 to 14 during the abuse, he said.

One of the victims, now dead, “was in third grade when the molestation began allegedly by a priest and a nun who worked with the Jesuit missionaries.”

Before he died, Lawrence provided a statement for Friday’s press conference: “The nun or one of the brothers would send me to the rectory to see (the priest). He would give me candy or call me special – and then he would molest me. They all did at various times,” his statement said.

Asked why he never told anyone outside the order about it, he replied “we were scared that if we uttered even one word, we would go to hell.”

With its doctrine of hell, Christianity is still a cruel religion.

(Thanks to our commenter Macnvettes for the link.)

So successfully has the intellectual life of the Western world been commandeered by the Left, that it’s almost impossible to satirize it. Since we know this to be the case, we should not be surprised by a comment on our post below, Against schools, that takes for granted that the six absurd subjects we made up are in fact being taught – though they “take up far less time” than the conventional ones, the commenter informs us. We are, however, a little surprised, if also amused.

It is seriously deplorable that education in America should be so deeply corrupted.

The Left is chiefly to blame, but not exclusively. Religion is another rot in the beams.

Here’s a scandalous story, providing a rather extreme example of attempted indoctrination in the classroom, from Open Salon, written by a blogger who calls himself “The Unapologetic Geek”, and posted on January 18, 2011:

Almost three years and one million dollars in public funds ago, the Mount Vernon Board of Education in Ohio began considering the case of John Freshwater, a middle school science teacher. The accusations had piled up over the previous decade that Freshwater had been proselytizing his religious beliefs in class, that he physically hurt his students, and that he wasn’t adequately teaching the science curriculum. The Board of Education had a difficult determination to make: was Freshwater a bad, abusive, overzealous teacher, or was he the victim of overreaction, gossip, and heresay? It shouldn’t have taken nearly three years and one million dollars to answer this question, because once you look at the case, it becomes pretty clear that John Freshwater was more than just a bad public school science teacher; he – along with the mind-numbingly terrible and wasteful bureaucratic rigamarole the public school system had to go through to get him to stop “teaching” – is a good reason to consider homeschooling your kids. …

John Freshwater … used his eighth-grade science classroom to discuss what the Bible has to say on homosexuality, to discuss whether Catholics can be considered real Christians, and to preach that evolution has been fully discredited. He allegedly assigned pro-creationist literature as required reading … while refusing to spend a minute explaining the facts behind modern evolutionary theory. …

For at least eleven years, other teachers had been complaining about Freshwater. One high school science teacher has been very vocal about how difficult it was to re-teach basic scientific principles to freshmen who had been through Freshwater’s class. This is a serious failing for the public school system, because our science education is already lacking without having to deal with zealots like Freshwater giving young minds the wrong impression of what science is actually about. …

According to multiple reports, Freshwater used an electrostatic generator (a Tesla coil, essentially) to burn a cross into the arms of some of his students. … Even in a legitimate science class … using scientific tools to burn the skin of your students is not an acceptable thing for a teacher to do. In a perfect world, such an act should lead to automatic termination as surely as bruising your students would. After all, let’s call it what it really is: assault. …

The investigation that resulted came up with plenty of physical evidence, and that lead to Doe v. Mount Vernon Board of Education et al., a civil court case that went on for two and a half long years. In the end, Freshwater was heavily sanctioned for his behavior (both out of court and in court) and wound up having to pay several hundred thousand dollars in plaintiffs attorney fees. The Mount Vernon Board of Education had to pay a large settlement as well. It took two additional months for the Board to finally terminate Freshwater, which it did last week. All told, the entire legal battle cost the public school system an estimated total of $902,765.

This is perhaps the most shocking aspect to the case; that it took so long and so much money to fire one bad teacher. A fair hearing or an investigation is one thing, but this has been going on for over a decade. You have a teacher who apparently isn’t teaching the curriculum, is branding his students, and who has refused to obey continued instructions to change his methods, and it still takes you this long to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Freshwater had over ten years to continue his idea of teaching science to impressionable young minds, forcing future teachers (and hopefully parents) to work harder to undo the damage. That is, in a word, unacceptable. …

There’s no telling how many more of these teachers are out there, but Freshwater was certainly not the only one.

Pope Benedict XVI has discovered that the Jews were not responsible for the killing of Jesus.

From IBD:

In an upcoming book to be published this month, “Jesus of Nazareth,” the pope definitively ends any question of official Catholic church anti-Semitism, exonerating now and forever Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Well, better late than never. Two thousand years of blaming the Jews for something they didn’t do, and now it’s “Oops, sorry – we got it wrong. No hard feelings. Come on, Jews – shake hands and let bygones be bygones, okay?”

What needs to come next is the realization by this uniquely open-minded Pope that the Jewish teacher the Greeks called “Jesus”, who reputedly lived in the Roman province of Judea between the times of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, was not God.

Then the Church can be dissolved and Christianity can be looked back on as an historical curiosity.

Of course it’s a pity about all the Jews and heretics and pagans who were done to death in agonizing ways by Christians in the name of the gospel truth that turns out to be not so true, but that’s all in the past now and we’ve gotta move on.

There has been an earthquake in New Zealand which has killed at least tens and possibly hundreds of people. We haven’t seen or heard much about it on the usual news channels, but Mark Steyn has commented on it.

We are among Mark Steyn’s most devoted fans. We enjoy just about everything we read of his and quote him often with huge appreciation. We usually overlook  the very few bits of his writings that we don’t admire – occasional references to his Christian faith. But today we take notice of this:

I woke up this morning to photographs of a steeple-less Christchurch Cathedral – a jolting image to those of us with friends and colleagues on the other side of the world … As I write, the estimate of the death toll is between 65 and 200 people, which sounds low by the standards of global catastrophe but is devastating in a country with New Zealand’s population: It would be the equivalent of 5,000 to 15,000 Americans being killed in Hurricane Katrina. …  SteynOnline has a lot of Kiwi readers, and our prayers are with you today.

Why, in his understanding, does the being he worships need to be prayed to about the disaster? Is he not supposed to be all-knowing , all-powerful, and all-loving? Yet was not aware that an earthquake had happened in NZ until informed through prayers? Or is it that the almighty being would not aid surviving victims until asked in prayers? Has to be begged, implored? And such a being as this is to be loved and worshiped? Feared, okay: if author of everything, then author of the earthquake, the suffering, and the deaths.

It’s plain that our forefathers invented an evil deity in this “Almighty God” – but it’s also plainly impossible to invent a good one.

To continue our series of articles on obscure and lost religions, and because this day is called Valentine’s Day, here is an account of Valentinianism. (Though it has no connection as far as we know with [Saint] Valentine’s Day apart from the coincidence of the names.)

Lost religions, which seem to us no more than intricate fantasies, claimed the credulity and devotion of thousands of people through hundreds or even thousands of years. Similarly absurd beliefs claim the devotion and credulity of millions in our own day. In all likelihood they too will pass away – only to be replaced by new ones?

Valentinus was born in the year 100 CE in Phenobia, Egypt, went to live in Rome when he was 36, and died in 160 on the island of Cyprus. He was educated in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where he must have become acquainted with Judaism, Christianity, and many a pagan cult and school of philosophy including the grandest of them, Platonism and Neopythagoreanism. He was ordained a Christian priest but while in Rome broke away from the church and founded a new religion, perhaps because (as some chroniclers gossip) he wasn’t made bishop of Rome, a rival being preferred.

Valentinianism was a Gnostic creed. Valentinians believed that salvation from the miseries of earthly existence is attainable by an elite among humankind through the Gnosis (knowledge) with which they are spiritually gifted.

Valentinus proclaimed that what he taught was the real, secret teaching of St. Paul which Theudas, St. Paul’s companion, had imparted to him. It may have been. There are whole Gnostic passages in the known teaching of St. Paul; so much in fact that an argument can be made that Pauline Christianity could be classed as a Gnostic doctrine. Certainly most of the Gnostic cults which arose in the second century CE could be classed as Christianities. Both the Gnostic and the Pauline-Christian theologies owe more to Greek philosophy than to Judaism.

The typical Gnostic divine schema, or theogony, was a hierarchy of heavens and of the beings that dwell in them. Valentinus’s was one of the most elaborate. (His cosmic myth differed from that of most Gnostic cults of his time in two main respects, footnoted below.)

In summary, this is what Valentinus taught:

The Pro-Father (Propator), also called the Abyss or the Deep (Bythos), both male and female, and the source of all that exists, emanated a first pair (syzygy): the First Thought (Ennoia), female, and Mind (Nous), male.

From the First Thought descended Truth (Alithea), female, and from Mind descended The Word (Logos), male.

These parallel descents continued through 12 more phases to The Church (Ecclesia) and Primordial Man (Adam Kadmon), from each of whom descended 13 more pairs (a female and a male in each).

These are the Aeons of the highest heaven called the Fullness (Pleroma).

Then came the last of the Aeons, Wisdom (Sophia), who tried to imitate the Pro-Father by giving birth out of herself and all by herself, but being far inferior to the Pro-Father could produce only base substance which filled her with disgust and remorse.

Her first Intention (Enthymesis) became Sophia-Akhamoth, who whirled about in empty space and longed to be admitted to the higher heaven.

Sophia begged the Aeons to pray to the Pro-Father to redeem her creation, but he commanded Mind and Truth to engender Christ (male) and the Holy Spirit (female), and he himself the Pro-Father emanated a new pair, the Cross and the Limit. Together they make the symbol T, which strengthened the Pleroma, and excluded from it forever the imperfect creation which Sophia had produced.

When this was done, all the Aeons burst out singing hymns of praise to the Pro-Father, and all together, as the reinforced Pleroma, they emanated The Perfect Fruit, which was the Savior. He took pity on Sophia-Akhamoth, reached down and gave her a form. Then she was called the Holy Spirit of Earth and of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and the Mother.

After which the Savior withdrew into the Pleroma.

Having been given a form, the fallen Sophia became conscious of her suffering and searched for the light which had touched her and departed, but the Limit prevented her from reaching the Pleroma.

Most dolefully she pleaded to the Highest who had abandoned her. Her dread and woe and despair composed the Matter of which our world is formed.

Again in pity for her the Aeons decreed that Christ would be her spouse at the end of time.

Meanwhile they sent the Gnosis to allay her passions and console her suffering.

The fallen Sophia engendered her own Archons, and from them proceeded 3 Principles: The Pneumatic (the spiritual); The Psychic (the mental); The Hylic (the material), for each of which there is a corresponding plane –

• The Ogdoad for the Spiritual, highest and nearest to the Pleroma, where dwells the Mother (the heavenly Sophia).
• The Hebdomad for the Psychic, the plane of the Seven Heavens, formed for his own dwelling place by the Chief of the Archons, The Demiurge* (the craftsman)[the Jewish God, creator of this world], also called the Metropator. He believes himself to be the only God.
• This base World for the Hylic, the dwelling place of the Devil, who is also called the Cosmocrator. It is also the dwelling-place of terrestrial Man, Adam, into whose base substance the Devil breathed the psychic element.

But the Mother endowed Man with a spiritual element of which the Demiurge and the Devil know nothing, and which Man can discover in himself only by the Gnosis.

In all human beings there is a mixture of the hylic, which is ‘of the Left’ and will perish; the psychic, which is ‘of the Right’ and not perishable or corruptible, but cannot rise into into the Highest Plane; the pneumatic, which is perfectible and redeemable in individual persons, in this life, through the Gnosis. Every spark of it will be gathered up and restored to the source at the Consummation of the Universe.

The mixture is in different proportions in different people. So there are three classes of human beings: the mostly Hylic – the Pagans who are dense, irredeemable matter; the mostly Psychic – the Christians who are half-leavened by their dim understanding of the teaching of Jesus; the mostly Pneumatic – the Gnostics who are incapable of sinning. They can do anything without impairing their moral purity. Indeed it is their positive duty, their mission, to commit every kind of “sin” and “abomination” called such by the Psychics, the half-ignorant Christians who do not know that this world is evil. Whatever they call good must be treated as bad, and whatever they call bad must be treated as good. In this cause, acts of extreme licentiousness are to be carried out as “spiritual exercises”. Evil must be consumed. While the Christians believed in redemption from sin, the Gnostics believed in redemption by sin. That is how they must play their part in the ultimate destruction of this base world.

The Consummation of the Universe is the end and purpose of the cosmic story. It will happen when the spiritual seed dispersed among all beings will have been gathered up, which will come about when Evil has been overcome by the Gnosis-enlightened Pneumatics fulfilling their mission.

Then Sophia will at last be allowed to enter the Pleroma and it shall be as a bridal chamber for her, where she will espouse Christ the Savior – the Bride joined to the Bridegroom.

And then the Pneumatics, male and female, cleansed not only of the hylic but also of the psychic, which is forever cut off from the Pleroma by the Limit, will mount – invisible to the Archons – through the Lower Heavens, needing no password to break the seals**, and will rise to the Pleroma to become the spouses of the Aeons who surround the Savior.

And the Demiurge (who is not irredeemable because on hearing of The Savior he hastened joyfully to him with all his Archons), will rise to the Ogdoad, and there with him the Psychic elements will find rest.

Last of all, at the will of the Aeons with which the pneumatics are united, the fire which is in all things will flame forth, destroy everything here below, and all matter will pass into nothingness.

*The Demiurge. Gnosticism endeavored to answer the question how, since the source of everything is good, did evil come into existence? The Gnostic answer was that lower divine entities became, as they proliferated, ever further removed in their descent from the source of goodness, and the lower they were the less good they were, until one or more was positively bad; and though they were able to exercise divine powers and create a material world and the first human beings, they could not make their creation good. This world was made by the lower bad god named Ialdabaoth, identified with the Creator God of Judaism and often with the Devil. In most Gnostic systems he is all bad, and his creation, this world, is all bad: every single thing in it is evil. Human beings are bad and the best thing they can do is allow themselves to die out: cast off their carnal forms, their bodies, because it is their materiality that is evil. Deep within their immaterial souls, however, is a minute spark of the divine spirit granted to them by the remote high god. He took pity on Man when the low god made him out of mud as a botched and nasty thing, and so sent him the spark by which he might redeem himself from filth and extinction. Only a few human beings, however, will be thus redeemed, because only an elite few will know they have the spark of the divine within them and know the secrets by which they might rise to the high heaven when they’ve shuffled off their mortal coil. This knowledge is the Gnosis. Valentinus differed from most other Gnostics in teaching that the creator-god of this world is not evil, not good, but is just. He exists midway between good on high and evil below, ignorant that there is another god above him.

** Passwords and seals. In many Gnostic systems, the spirits of the redeemable, once released from their bodies by death, had to know passwords to say to the Aeons and Archons as they rose through the layers of heavens towards the highest. The passwords might be the secret names of the intervening powers. Sometimes whole speeches had to be recited to them before they’d let the ascending spirit continue its upward journey. These powers were called Aeons (heavenly beings, also ages in time) and Archons (principalities). According to some sources (but contradicted by others), Valentinus specifically denied that pneumatics in their final ascent would need passwords “to break the seals”. The seals are obscure. There’s a Gnostic hymn in which Jesus descends to rescue a fallen soul (possibly Sophia) and says to the Father: “Send me, Father. Bearing Seals I shall descend; I shall pass through all the Aeons; I shall reveal all the mysteries and I shall deliver the secrets of the holy way.”

Other posts in this series: Thus, more or less, spake Zarathustra, May 26, 2009 (on Zoroastrianism); Yezidis and Mandeans, April 4, 2010; Mani and Manicheism, May 9, 2010; How a rich shipowner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010 (on Marcion); Erotic religion, January 24, 2010 (on Carpocrates and Epiphanes); The father of all heresy, February 23, 2010 (on Simon Magus); Hot in the land of Hum, October 14, 2010 (on the Bugomils).

Is religion the most frequent cause of death?

Do more people die from religion than from heart disease, cancer, or road accidents?

To take just one religion, the most lethal at present: Islam kills people every day.

Here’s one of today’s reported incidents of Death by Religion:

From the Washington Post:

A machete-wielding mob of Muslims on Sunday attacked the home of a minority sect leader in central Indonesia, killing three and wounding six others …

About 1,500 people – many with machetes, sticks and rocks – attacked about 20 members of the Ahmadiyah Muslim sect who were visiting their leader in his house in Banten province on Indonesia’s main island of Java. …

Ahmadiyah, believed to have 200,000 followers in Indonesia, is considered deviant by most Muslims and banned in many Islamic countries because of its belief that Muhammad was not the final prophet.

Think of it – right now, in this age of space exploration, nuclear power, the internet, some people are killing other people because they believe that a man who lived 1400 years ago was “not the final prophet”!

Surely this killing disease, religion, is curable?

We recently heard of a group of Muslims who went to a university in the West and there encountered Enlightenment literature. They were stunned by what they read. They have become secularist, possibly atheist. They plan to make themselves known as a group and speak about their discovery in the near future. If and when they do, we will be among the first to applaud them.

What does their story tell us but that superstition is a curable disease? It suggests that if the West only took the trouble to teach its values to the peoples who live in darkness – those billions of Others – it might achieve what wars have failed to: the subduing of the barbaric hordes, the ending of their persistent onslaught.

During the Cold War, America spoke to the Communist bloc through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The effort was made to tell the enslaved peoples that what their masters would have them believe was not true. Those broadcasts helped to bring the Wall down. Why is no such effort being made to give new ideas to the Muslims? Vast numbers of them are taught nothing but the Koran – or rather, have it beaten into them. For many of them it is in a language they don’t understand. And even if they know the language, much of what they learn to recite by heart is incomprehensible. Those suras that are intelligible are full of evil counsel and absurdity: “kill the infidel…”,  and a lot of solemn drivel about Djinns. Why doesn’t the secular West give them something better to think about?

Teach them to question ideas rather than dumbly accept them.

Teach them that freedom makes for a happier life, tolerance for a longer one.

It might be argued that many Muslims who live in the West are aware of Western values and ideas and still reject them in favor of Islamic dogma. True. And we may assume that there will always be some who cannot be cured of religion. But the probability is that there are many who can be, if only they were better informed.

Yes, we are urging “proselytizing” and “conversion” on a massive scale: not from one religion to another, but from religion to reason. (To oppose one religion by another – to think of Christianity, for instance, as a cure for Islam – is to misdiagnose the disease.)

It must be worth trying. A start could be made with young Muslims who are already in the West with a positive program of teaching critical examination.

We know that the nations who live more freely live more happily. We know that educated women make better mothers. We know that Muhammad wasn’t a “prophet”, and also that he won’t be the last to claim that title. Why don’t we say that sort of thing, loud and clear, to those who should hear it?

No more giving in to Muslim demands for the separation of the sexes, for special facilities in schools and work-places, for courts to take account of their “cultural traditions” such as honor killings and wife-beatings and the sly deceptions involved in “sharia compliant finance”. We have arrived at our ways for sound reasons, so let’s stick to them, and insist that any who come to live among us conform to them. Away with “multicultural” sentimentality and hypocrisy. For the most part, those other “cultures” contain far more that’s fearful and contemptible than is worthy of respect. And the intolerance of Islam is intolerable.

We’d like to teach the world to think. We’d like the Western powers to have a shared policy of continually lecturing the billions who live in darkness.

Let’s seize them by the ears and say, “Now listen here … !”

Jillian Becker   February 6, 2011

Here’s Richard Dawkins.

We are not uncritical of his opinions. We disagree with him sharply on political questions. It seems to us he doesn’t really know anything about politics, but simply feels that nice guys are on the left, so his political views are of no interest. If you haven’t read the review of his book The God Delusion by C.Gee and want to, you’ll find a link to it in our margin.

We like this short video clip in which he talks about evolution (about which he has written great books), and the impossibility of arguing rationally with a person of religious faith.