Atheists seem to have hit a nerve. What an anguish ridden content-lite op-ed. But he is on to something. I've long felt it would be a good strategic move to shine the spotlight on the Catholic hierarchy. For one they are a little nutty and make a good target. They are also a stain upon humanity. It's not just the poor altar boys. Their reach is much more insidious. In one of countless examples, the scourge of AIDS in Africa would not have been as virulent if not for Vatican policies on sex and birth control. Most of all, I don't think even atheists realize the role the Catholic church and radio blowhards played in the McCarthy era to snuff out the flame of freethought that burned through most of U.S. history. (Susan Jacoby's A history of Amrican secularism is a must read). The Catholic church's complicity in retarding a modern, scientifically savvy civilization since the middle ages has been innumerable. And they remain as pestilent as ever.

I've been critical of Shermer myself but I feel he's being punched below the belt. Some posters take Shermer to task for making assumptions on the nature of divinity. I did not for the briefest instant come away thinking that Shermer has any belief in divinity in any way, shape or form. It's quite clear that when he speaks of divinity he's merely empathizing with the believer, and conveying that IF one was to accept the premise of such a divinity, certain perspectives ensue that defer to science as the means to unraveling the grandest of mysteries.
Of course Shermer does not believe this himself, and merely sees himself as playing the diplomat exploring grounds for comity.
My objection is Shermer does science and reason a disservice by going down this route. That's all.

Bonzai:
None of those criticizing Shermer in this thread discount the importance of Public Relations savvy in advancing the cause of science. And most of us even like Shermer despite his collaboration with Templeton and being an Ayn Rand worshipping wing nut. We fully believe that in writing the CNN piece he had the best of intentions. Our gripe is that his way of going about it -by misrepresenting what the essence of science is- amounts to a Faustian deal.

Okay. I give up. I'm tired of fighting. I concede one may take the view that evolution is part of nature and a wonderful facet of the Almighty's grand plan. As a matter of fact, denying evolution is tantamount to denying a key element of God himself and is thus sacrilege. This line of thought should advance science amongst the masses.
I have an itty bitty request Dr.Shermer, all in the name of honesty. If you could append this video to your articles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwk-THcjmlI

It's about a fascinating creature called the Guinea Worm. It afflicts without much discrimination those living in certain rural areas... babies, children, women, hardworking farmers. It is interesting because it showcases evolution with such grandeur. It is contracted by drinking infected water. But such is its life cycle that it must also spawn in water. As the worm exits one's skin, it causes excruciating burning that makes one run to the nearest pond to submerge one's limb in to relieve the torment... unless you're a baby, in which case you just tough it out :-(. The sheer beauty of evolution. At this point, the seed for the next generation is released into the water.
It is such an incredible life cycle, that no doubt came about by an Almighty supervised Evolution. I'm not sure what exactly this says about God. But it sure says something about one willing to seek the good grace of such a sick fuck.

Dr. Shermer, think what you may about Christians and Muslims. But in a way you have to respect the fundus amongst them for the stand they take.

I am vexed Dr. Shermer. In the vein of picking your battles carefully and choosing strategy wisely, one may concede that evolution is controversial. This would placate a swathe of citizenry and biology may continue to be taught unencumbered and without poisoning the civility amongst ourselves. Think about it... would you not like to extend the reach of biology?

You are clearly willing to dilute the essence of science by suggesting that faith may be be compatible with its absolute antithesis: the very methodology grounded in rationalism and empiricism. From there, giving evolution the shaft should be a very small step.

P.S. For those who may have missed it, Jerry Coyne has a superb essay in The New Republic on science and religion titled "Seeing and Believing".

It would be in order for AAI to issue Bill Maher a letter of official rebuke, forever to pin itself on his legacy just as the Richard Dawkins award does. What innocent kids will be put through because of the stance of celebrities is unconscionable. And especially so for a Bill who bills himself a rationalist. It should be AAI's ethical obligation to consider a letter of rebuke.

Going by the tenor of Shermer's letter and comments from the godless legions Maher supposedly lionizes, I'd say his award is already sullied. Though it's never too late to repent.

Maher certainly needs an education. I cannot imagine he was clueless that his award was not controversy free. And still, he goes on air just a couple of weeks later, throws in his lot with bimbo brains Jenny McCarthy, so much so that a full fledged "Schaivo-is-conscious" Republican comes across as the rational one.

There are a small number of children who legitimately cannot get all vaccination shots - because of organ transplants, immunosuppressant drugs or some other issue. Because herd immunity is being lost, some end up getting diseases through no fault of their own. Vaccinations have been so successful, the horrors that accompany some of these diseases like measles, mumps, rubella etc have been forgotten.
I hope you are listening Maher, about what these diseases lead to.

BLINDNESS. DEAFNESS. MENTAL RETARDATION. And much more.

For the sake of decency, please at least be informed about what you are doing to these kids when you spout conspiratorial crap from your megaphone.

Comment #410165 by TheVirginian

Hinduism is a loose word that spans a number of beliefs across the eons. But I do think you are correct the shift from polytheism to monotheism was for the worse - and not just in elegance of explanation. Some Vedic texts estimated the age of the universe in billions of years. They posit a cycling rhythm to the universe, growing and collapsing. They dally with ideas of Maya, that reality may be much more spooky than the illusion that meets the eye. And that gods may exist only in the dreams of men. Likewise some of the beliefs in ancient Egypt were not correct but exhibited a remarkably supple imagination. In terms of ethics, the Egyptian book of the Dead is way more sophisticated than the puerile Ten Commandments. Christianity was backward even for its time. But it had an effective meme: blood and gore. It promised the slaves salvation (though not from slavery). Among the trodden this primitive faith festered, and like a disease, a pandemic gathered steam as Rome collapsed into economic and intellectual decline. The infestation was fully set in with burning of the pagan works at the library of Alexandria.

Interesting then where our judeochristian nation gets its values. One influence on Thomas Jefferson were the heretics of the enlightenment. But possibly even more important were the works of Cicero and Tacitus. Without a doubt it is an appreciation of these polytheistic pagans that compelled him to famously remark that it neither picks his pocket nor breaks his leg if someone believes in one god, twenty gods, or no god.

"...a long and messy op-ed piece..." The incomparable Jerry Coyne takes Wright to task. Given how titillated the media has been with Wright, a full-throated response is in order.
Check out:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/robert-wright-pirouetting-on-the-fence/

Dear Thomas Guihen, I want to commend you for your civil posts in the face of aggressive lecturing. You've obviously given this topic plenty of thought. I consider myself a voracious reader but am aware I'm in the company of people vastly smarter than me at such sites who routinely conceptualize research paradigms at the margins of human understanding. I would hope they would consider me amenable to reason, and argue respectfully if I were to express an opinion counter to their own.

Amongst Enlightenment figures I admire are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Morality in those ages was governed by the interpretation of heresy laws. These were based on scripture. Moral arguments singularly revolved around what the scriptures said. There was simply no other way to conceptualize right from wrong other than examine what scripture decreed. Hobbes and Locke went one step further. They posed the question why and how religion serves humanity, if at all. Doesn't sound like a big deal nowadays but this next small step was a watershed event that influenced the course of western civilization.

Like you, everyone has an emotional sense of goodness and virtue. It is so profoundly grounded in us that taking that next small step to question why it permeates our world view can be steeply counter-intuitive. But I encourage you to take it.

Things like altruism is manifested in several species. In one dramatic instance, E.Coli bacteria in times of stress trigger their own demise so that a handful a few in their colony may feed on them. It evolved simply because it improved odds of the gene regulating this "goodness" to propagate. This should help illustrate that our own sense of virtue is a perspicaciously naturalistic phenomenon. Our goodness instinct is so deeply embedded into us that our minds easily slip into furrows of a "privileged perspective" when we start contemplating rubbish such as a transcending universal goodness.

Some of the latest research in anthropology and neuroscience is instructive. It is now believed that the primary conduit for altruism to have evolved and valued amongst humans is war. Individuals possessing the gene where empathy and devotion to the group were strong enough to lay down their lives for it underwent natural selection. We would not be who we are, and we would not have a sense of overweening sense of goodness (at least a major facet of it) were it not for murder, mayhem and war. It's a perspective that hardly soothes the ego. But that's not what science and reason are about.

P.S. I recall reading Winston Churchill bemoaned how the Pashtuns regard the vices of murder and betrayal as virtues. Indeed, many a historian has noted how such "vices" are admired as qualities of strength, cunning and ruthlessness in these lawless badlands. The role of culture cannot be neglected in what we perceive as virtuous.

A few posters have referred to Wright's views as a form of Deism. I don't think it is. Deism pushes the instinct of "agent bias" out of the domain of here and now to an immeasurably distant past. An elemental point of this early form of freethought is that the "author" of the reality we live in is utterly indifferent to all manner of humanly affairs. Wright with his talk of "higher purpose" is distinctly less sophisticated than the deist Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine was.
Wright's rigor of thinking fails on multiple levels. One of the most poignant consciousness raising as a result of Darwin's work was that no matter how mind-bogglingly complex and awe inspiring a paradigm before you, conquering it requires one to commit to a rational naturalistic methodology. It ought to follow that the key to understanding anything and everything requires such a path. And paid dividend it has - the majesty of scientifically attained knowledge handily eclipses the wildest hallucination under the banner of God. People like Wright, instead of drawing enlightened lessons on their outlook to the universe instead play whackamole with the latest body of facts. They hob and bob around the knowledge gleaned through the sweat of others to find a way of propping the same worn modes of worldview that apotheosizes some version of a sentient super-agent. In so doing Wright makes a mockery of every tenet of scientific thinking - of upholding occam's razor in rendering ultimate explanations, of not falling prey to any "privileged perspective", of not shaping arguments so as to conform to a soothing emotional predisposition, of ensuring the most robust established knowledge is concordant with any overarching theory that ties it together, and so on and so forth. Wright is a fucking joke. On closer inspection his thinking hews closer to the ancients who believed lightning occurred because the gods were cross - the differences lie in degree and chronological order, not in kind. But apparently his woozy casuistry is giving many media personalities from Fareed Zakaria to Andrew Sullivan an immense hard on.

I'm getting fed up with the term militant atheist. There is no doubt those who use it do so in the context of a subtle pejorative. Well, it is about time the term is exposed for the skin-deep asinine slogan that it is. What -exactly- is meant by it? Is it an atheist who speaks his or her mind with candor? Is it an atheist who simply has the darned moxie to conflate god-belief with superstition? Is it an atheist who won't sugar coat their disdain for religion... in exactly the same manner a believer won't sugar coat their words addressing heretic positions? (and oh I wonder why the word heretic, pagan, or blasphemy has a contemptuous connotation to it in the first place).
It is tragic those fond of the militant atheist term are secular humanists (like E O Wilson). They should not be allowed to get away with it. For starters, if you choose to use it, have the spine to spell out exactly what you mean by it.

The Four Horsemen rule the atheist universe. But a book with a historical approach that sadly gets scant attention is Susan Jacoby's A History of American Secularism. It ought to be a mandatory read. I doubt even atheists realize the extent to which the religious bloc have impeded social progress. Or the extent to which just about every leap in humankind, from science, to emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage, public education, conferring of human rights to children etc was either conceived or fervently encouraged by brave atheists and agnostics. That's for starters but what'll get you worked up is how the sacrifices and pioneering efforts of freethinkers were swept under the rug to appease the religious masses. Next time someone questions how you can possibly be a good atheist, fling a Jacoby paperback into their face.

I hope Michael Shermer could learn a few things from Grayling and Dennet.

I'm glad these letters are being made public. TF is merely a propaganda machine and has been having a great run of late. About time someone countered them a little more forcefully.

The figure of 14 to 20% of Americans who have no religious affiliation gets bandied about much. It is nothing but self-flattery when spokesmen from humanist and atheist outfits go on radio and proclaim their kin to be as numerous by conflating atheists in that estimate. Atheists are no more than 2% of the population at most. And it not likely to change much. Atheists have reached their intellectually bold conclusions through assiduous reasoning. They're usually highly educated and have the guts to buck orthodoxy. But your average "no religious affiliation"Joe has everything from football to Angelina Jolie on his (or her) mind and is minimally steeped in matters of church. This latter segment may have no gripes ascribing to New Age woo-woo or incessantly worrying about being abducted and inappropriately fondled by aliens. There is a world of difference between these "not religious" folks and true non-believers.
Not that I don't welcome the decline of religious influence in our lives. As many books as Dawkins and Hitchens may write, nothing will speed up a general secularization of society as a high GDP combined with universal health care, high literacy, and an amelioration of other social inequalities. We may not have nailed the mechanism of why this happens, but can be fairly certain that it does. The future looks bright.

Fascinating. Thought provoking. Even uplifting.

And surely profoundly upsetting to Dinesh D'Souza. I suppose it's time for round two of a Bonobos-really-do-suck conservative rant in the WSJ.

Good article. But what delights me most is Richard's name nicely plopped in the very first sentence. Like most on this site I'm naturally a fan. But the point I'm making is the persona of the fountainhead of a movement or school of thought has greater social impact than the pith of what he spearheads. Pele did something for soccer. Likewise Richard does something for reason. There are a lot of lay clever people out there who will now google and probe further and will consequently be energized. Olivia does us a great service. Thank you.

I felt the ground had caved under my feet when I heard about this. Even if you downplay the Rick pick that it has no bearing on core policy, such an overtly religious figure should not be given a bullhorn. A huge number of Americans, most of them believers, worry that the religious right has an excessive influence on politics.

Obama's depressing choice however says little about his personal beliefs. This is purely political calculation. The democrats are committed to winning back "values" voters from the Republicans. The strategists behind this might as well have secular sympathies, but they correctly conclude that none of their political inclinations matter if they are locked out of power. Faustian concessions to the right are all but a necessity.

Obama did what he deemed politically expedient. Now we must do our part. We are numerous, but we have no political bite. I want to see the day where a politician would shake in his boots at the thought of crossing the secular constituency. For starters, groups like the Secular Coaltion and FFRF can do with our unflinching support.

I'm assuming the poll was conducted in the U.K. I cannot believe that almost one in five science teachers hold such absurd views... in the U.K.! I thought we Americans had a lock on Wasilla Hillbillies. It shudders me to think what a poll among U.S. science teachers would yield.

Is it improper for me to wonder how many of these teachers are naturalized Brits from places like Somalia or Pakistan...

Hope to see more such videos/ articles on this site. I just got done reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos. For those rationalists who were too young to immerse themselves in Sagan when he peaked in the 80's (as I was), it's not too late to grab his book. The space exploration he speaks of is dated. But his zest, supple intelligence, and emotion vested into narrating the adventure of exploration and the history of our rational transcendence has no equal. Having been infected with Sagan's enthusiasm makes the hairs on my neck stand when I view videos like this. What would he have thought of Cassini?
I plan on reading Demon haunted world next...

Incomplete. And how many Nobel laureates endorsed McCain?

McCain shouldn't lose heart being left a little behind. After all, how cool is it to be endorsed by a sitting Vice President?

From the article I gather that the Nobel laureates are exclusively from science backgrounds. I'm curious how many laureates from all fields lean towards one candidate.

This website has a pro-science bias. It's little surprise scientists back Obama. But what about Economists?
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342127

Surely some of you can find something redeeming in the woman's words. Meanies!

Now she did say Obama's Christianity is not the sort that's really found in the bible. She's dead-on correct about that.

If they teach little Indians anything in school, they ought to instill these ideas from one of modern India's founding father's, Jawaharlal Nehru:

On organized religion...

“almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”

and then again...

“religion has not only broken our backs but stifled and almost killed all originality of thought or mind”

These deplorable events showcase the extent to which religious violence is a manifestation of the limbic brain. Sex, hunger, territoriality and in-group loyalties effortlessly tend to circumvent ethics, laws, or for that matter any sort of cerebral considerations. In this case, the instinct happens to be mindless out-group hostility. Hinduism itself is a loose amalgam of beliefs. It's theology ranges from monism, monotheism, polytheism to atheism. The "religion" embraces every imaginable idea, from the absurd and silly to the bold and surprisingly sophisticated. These sick acts against Christians cannot have any conceivable theological underpinning. The violence boils down to misplaced nationalism and cultural chauvinism. Historically, India has been comparatively welcoming of people of foreign faiths. Jews and Zoroastrians sought haven here.
The exception has been the nationalistic push back against Abrahamical faith's singular focus on proselytization and expansion. This is seen in the growth of religious bodies like the Khalsa, Arya Samaj, and RSS. Some have morphed over a couple of centuries into new religions (e.g. Sikhism, which incorporated Sufism with Upanishadic theology). Other more recent outfits like the RSS remain fringe groups. India's constitutional secularism notwithstanding, it is a nation hopelessly steeped in superstition, mysticism and religious stupidity... a land where the degree to which faith and spirituality are viewed as virtues is truly lamentable.

Tories in the U.K. are to the left of Democrats in the U.S. in several areas, notably so in religious attitudes. Americans agape at Richard's presence at a conservative forum will be helped by the Yougov poll chart in this Economist article:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10926321

The United States is probably the only advanced country with a major political party with a closer bearing to the Taliban than any other political entity in rest of the first world.

Evolution can never be stopped. Right now, the world population is expanding. Once it's static, evolutionary leads should manifest themselves, led by sexual selection pressures for example. Or the accumulation of mutations that lead to loss of function. Since natural selection pressures have been so heavily altered, many of our senses may go the route of our sense of smell, down the tube ... color blindness is already more prevalent in modern settings than it is in primitive groups.

For those of you who've never watched Bill Maher on HBO before, you're being misled by the balance of comments posted thus far.
Some people may genuinely not think highly of him. But I'm sure there's a measure of egoistic "my tastes are way too cool for this" thrown in the mix.
I'm a fan of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Maher. Jon is the sharpest of all. But their style and wavelength of humor varies and I certainly wouldn't diss any one. Maher is not by any measure dull or boring. On the contrary I think he's witty and outspoken. He has fabulous guests on, from big-name politicians to contributers to the New Yorker, the Post, and the Times to the odd comedian. On no other political show will you ever find such a showing of freethinkers and secular humanists: Salman Rushdie, Hitchens, Janeane Garofalo etc. You may not find yourself always agreeing with Maher, but he certainly comes across as a person amenable to reason. He is refreshingly irreverent. His New Rules segment aren't to be missed. I'd be wary of those issuing tortuous uptight verdicts. At the end of the day, the man's a comedian... one who abhors George Bush and religious nuts with every fiber in his body. And that makes for a rollicking permutation that has few peers in American media.

If you're a freethinking political junkie, sample Maher's show for yourself.

Thanks Kaiser for the links to The Daily Show forums.

Bill Maher is getting beat up with the same old Christian apologist arguments in these forums.

I enjoy being on the RichardDawkins site, but let's be honest. This is an echo chamber where most people already agree with each other on gross positions.

It'd be helpful if some of you could head to the Daily Show forums and unleash some of your firepower. Most Daily Show fans are intelligent and well read, and would at least be receptive to reasoned arguments from the non-theist perspective.

Thank you.

About the most distressing thing in the interview was the whoop and clapping from the audience following the inane question about asking God what he thinks. It's chilling to think what sort of world these minds dwell in, what sort of questions they feel are incisive, what sort of stuff they're titillated by...

Glad this interview was done for this audience. It sickens me how many women get fuzzy over Jesus despite the fact this is one group that has been historically most subjugated by the clutches of religion. Perhaps a comedian is needed to pave the way for someone like Annie Gaylor to give these pious women a real education on the abyss they've been pulled out of by freethinkers like Elizabeth Stanton, Frances Wright and Margaret Sanger.

Seth Shulman's Undermining Science is a very concise and easy to read book. Chris Mooney has also written in Harper's on the subject and has a book, "The Republican war on Science" which I haven't read. Quickest way to get up to speed is "Political Science" by Michael Specter in a March 2006 issue of The New Yorker. The verdict is profoundly upsetting. I don't think there's a single government agency that hasn't been drowned in a torrent of conservative stupidity. Religious belief is a culprit in most instances. What is remarkable is the amount of stuff that isn't in Shulman's book, for example the bullying of the ex-surgeon general Richard Carmona. Apparently the downpour didn't stop after the book was published.

What peeves me is McCain sympathizers who say Bush is an anomaly we should just forget about. Bull! Bush and Palin are the natural byproducts of a Republican tryst with anti-intellectualism beginning with Nixon, and which has been gathering steam ever since.