As we head into a new year, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or, in crass economic terms, to retain market share. Some Christians have turned to soul searching while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners, and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.” In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home” marketing campaign. The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand themselves. A hipster mega-church in Seattle combines smart advertising with sales force training for members and a strategy the Catholics have emphasized for centuries: competitive breeding.

--snip--

In all of the frenzy, few seem to give any recognition to the player that I see as the primary hero, or, if you prefer, culprit—and I’m not talking about science populizer and atheist superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson. Then again, maybe Iam talking about Tyson in a sense, because in his various viral guises—as a talk show host and tweeter and as the face on scores of smartass Facebook memes—Tyson is an incarnation of the biggest threat that organized religion has ever faced: the internet.

A traditional religion, one built on “right belief,” requires a closed information system. That is why the Catholic Church put an official seal of approval on some ancient texts and banned or burned others. It is why some Bible-believing Christians are forbidden to marry nonbelievers. It is why Quiverfull moms home school their kids from carefully screened text books. It is why, when you get sucked into conversations with your fundamentalist uncle George from Florida, you sometimes wonder if he has some superpower that allows him to magically close down all avenues into his mind. (He does!)

Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas. These behaviors range from memorizing sacred texts to wearing distinctive undergarments to killing infidels. Such defenses worked beautifully during humanity’s infancy. But they weren’t really designed for the current information age.

Tech-savvy mega-churches may have twitter missionaries, and Calvinist cuties may make viral videos about how Jesus worship isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, but that doesn’t change the facts: the free flow of information is really, really bad for the product they are selling. Here are five kinds of web content that are like, well, like electrolysis on religion’s hairy toes.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/religion_may_not_survive_the_internet/

A hidden disorder may be making you ill. It’s quite common, but many people don’t know they have it and conventional doctors tend to ignore it. Medical tests fail often enough, turning up negative while patients continue to suffer a plethora of symptoms. Few people will have all of these symptoms, and most symptoms will be intermittent, and at least partially resolve when the patient is more active, so there will be great variability between patients. An estimated 80% of people experience Forer’s Disease at some point in their lives, yet it is frequently overlooked and misunderstood by the medical community. Forer’s Disease is becoming a popular topic in the medical community; as a result, it is important to recognize the symptoms of this particular condition. Sufferers typically experience a wide assortment of symptoms, and it’s important to learn how to recognize them.

Most sufferers of Forer’s Disease experience some or all of the following symptoms:

Fatigue
Backache
Mood swings
Digestive upset, such as nausea, indigestion, and gas pains
Headaches and migraines
Insomnia
Low energy/malaise
Joint pain
Decreased libido
Constipation
Skin irritation
Memory problems
Cravings, especially for sugar, salt, and fat

Sound familiar? Of course it does, because the actual condition that leads to these symptoms is “being human.” Pretty much every person (in an affluent nation at least) will experience many of these symptoms at some point in their lives. And people are more likely to experience many of them during periods of high stress or, let’s face it, when we’re getting older.

I borrowed the name Forer from the Forer Effect, in which subjects assign a high level of accuracy to a list of vague and generally applicable descriptions, when the list is presented as a personalized profile of the subject. It is most often used to discuss horoscopes and personality tests (“You are a caring person, but sometimes you fail to live up to your own ethical standards. You enjoy being with other people, but sometimes feel shy and reticent”), but I think a similar effect occurs when someone suffering from obnoxious symptoms reads a list like the one above, paired with a proffered cure. The list of symptoms seems to be so accurate, even tailored to the reader. It’s easy to believe that the web site or book you’re reading is accurately diagnosing what’s wrong with you.

Deliberate quacks and misguided natural health gurus alike have a tendency to cobble together a similar list of “if you’re human you have them” symptoms and assign a disease to them. If you have many of the above symptoms you qualify for Systemic Yeast, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Gluten Sensitivity (with negative Celiac test), Subluxations, Adrenal Fatigue, Electromagnetic Sensitivity, and Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome, and probably a dozen more fad diagnoses that have come and gone over the years. The problem is that aggregating a bunch of common symptoms and deducing a particular disease isn’t reliable. As you can see, it casts far too wide a net.

http://skepticalmothering.com/2013/01/16/do-you-have-forers-disease/

There was a time I felt halfway sorry for Mark Sanford. Remember? Sanford was governor of South Carolina, he disappeared, supposedly to hike the Appalachian Trail. He’d actually fallen head over heels in love with a Brazilian Argentinian beauty and was down south fornicating, much to the chagrin of his wealthy, proper wife back home. Disgraced, Sanford resigned and dropped off the face of the earth. … He’s baaack!

NBC News — Ex-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford will announce tomorrow that he is running for Congress, First Read confirms with an aide close to Sanford. Sanford will announce via press release tomorrow; there will be no press conference or public events associated with it, according to an aide. NBC previously reported that Sanford would attempt a political comeback running for his old first congressional district seat. Sanford would be running to replace Tim Scott, who was appointed to Jim DeMint’s Senate seat.

All Sanford did was fall in love and act on it. Regrettable for his wife, perhaps tough on the whole family, but it happens thousands of times a day all over the world. It’s not a crime — although we’d all be way more interested in hearing what happen to Sanford’s true love as opposed to his plans for self enrichment.

But then we find Sanford is just another grifter invoking the name of God-eh to sweep away doubt — either that or he really believes this crazy shit:

It took several dominoes to fall for Sanford to be lined up to run in this race, something Sanford also acknowledged. “I’m not saying it was God-ordained or anything like that,” Sanford said, “but a series of rather miraculous events have coincided here, that did not escape the attention of the friends who were urging me to look at this.”

Of course you’re not saying that Mark, of course you’re not.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2013/01/16/im-not-saying-it-is-gods-will-or-anything/

Disgraced Judge Roy Moore has been back on the Alabama bench less than one week, and he is already giving church-state separation supporters reason to worry.

Moore was sworn in last Friday as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a post he held from 2001 until 2003, when he was removed from his position for defying a court order and ignoring the Constitution.

In 2001, Moore thought it would be a good idea to haul a 2.5-ton granite monument depicting a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments into the foyer of the Alabama Judicial Building and announce that it was his intent to “acknowledge God.” Americans United and our allies in Alabama sued, charging Moore with violating the constitutional separation of church and state. The federal courts ruled in our favor, but Moore ignored the order to remove the monument. That worked out about as well as you’d expect. The monument was removed from the foyer, and in 2003, Moore was removed from the state supreme court.

After failed runs for governor in 2006 and 2010, Moore somehow managed to get reelected to the Alabama Supreme Court last year. When he took his oath of office on Jan. 11, he showed he had learned little from past experience.

“We’ve got to remember most of what we do in court comes from some scriptures or is backed by scriptures,” Moore said, according to the Associated Press. (Moore took his oath not on one Bible, but a stack of them.)

That remark was bad enough, but Moore didn’t stop there. In fact, things got worse as Moore continued to rant on the importance of the Bible as the basis for laws in the United States.

http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2013/01/decalogue-deja-vu-alabama-commandments-judge-says-legal-system-comes-rrom-bible/

The European Court of Human Rights, often unfairly, gets a regular kicking in the British press. So it's good to see that the judges in Strasbourg have come up with a series of careful and nuanced rulings this morning on the issue of religious discrimination that are a cracking advertisement for exactly why we need such a court.

The judgements cover four cases that were brought by British Christians who claimed they were discriminated against by their employers because of their religious beliefs.

British Airways steward Nadia Eweida and NHS nurse Shirley Chaplin both lost employment tribunals because they refused to take off necklaces bearing a crucifix. Lilian Ladele, a marriage registrar from Islington, and relationship counsellor Gary McFarlane lost their jobs because their opposition to same sex relationships impinged on their ability to do their jobs without discriminating against others.

While accepting Eweida had been discriminated against, the ECHR threw out the other three cases for very good reasons. I’ll go into why the judges found the way they did below.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-loss-for-the-christian-lobby-the-echr-ruling-reinforces-the-crucial-point-that-religious-rights-dont-automatically-trump-the-rights-of-others-8452458.html

The CEO of Whole Foods said in 2009 that the Affordable Care Act was tantamount to “socialism,” but now he’s changing his tune: It’s not socialism anymore. According to him, it’s “fascism.” That’s what John Mackey told National Public Radio (NPR) on Wednesday, in an interview aired on “Morning Edition,” seeming not to mind that the two forms of government are largely incompatible and ill-suited for framing the U.S. health care laws.

Mackey had a different take in 2009, when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Affordable Care Act is precisely the kind of “socialism” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned about. “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism,” he told NPR on Wednesday. “Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”

--snip--

What he doesn’t mention is that fascism is also known as government by corporations, whereupon the poor and working classes have little to no social welfare programs and must depend upon the generosity of employers for life-saving medical care, among other basic needs. In a stroke of irony, that is precisely what Mackey was flacking in 2009 with his advocacy of high deductible health insurance policies that only cover catastrophic medical emergencies.
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1yxNP)

When my son was around 3 years old, he used to ask me a lot of questions about heaven. Where is it? How do people walk without a body? How will I find you? You know the questions that kids ask. For over a year, I lied to him and made up stories that I didn’t believe about heaven. Like most parents, I love my child so much that I didn’t want him to be scared. I wanted him to feel safe and loved and full of hope. But the trade-off was that I would have to make stuff up, and I would have to brainwash him into believing stories that didn’t make sense, stories that I didn’t believe either. One day he would know this, and he would not trust my judgment. He would know that I built an elaborate tale—not unlike the one we tell children about Santa—to explain the inconsistent and illogical legend of God.

And so I thought it was only right to be honest with my children. I am a non-believer, and for years I’ve been on the fringe in my community. As a blogger, though, I’ve found that there are many other parents out there like me. We are creating the next generation of kids, and there is a wave of young agnostics, atheists, free thinkers and humanists rising up through the ranks who will, hopefully, lower our nation’s religious fever. (AMEN!!!

Here are a few of the reasons why I am raising my children without God:

God is a bad parent and role model.

If God is our father, then he is not a good parent. Good parents don’t allow their children to inflict harm on others. Good people don’t stand by and watch horrible acts committed against innocent men, women and children. They don’t condone violence and abuse. “He has given us free will,” you say? Our children have free will, but we still step in and guide them

God is not logical.

How many times have you heard, “Why did God allow this to happen?” And this: “It’s not for us to understand.” Translate: We don’t understand, so we will not think about it or deal with the issue. Take for example the senseless tragedy in Newtown. Rather than address the problem of guns in America, we defer responsibility to God. He had a reason. He wanted more angels. Only he knows why. We write poems saying that we told God to leave our schools. Now he’s making us pay the price. If there is a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who loves his children, does it make sense that he would allow murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind? Doesn’t this go against everything Christ taught us in the New Testament?

The question we should be asking is this: “Why did we allow this to happen?” How can we fix this? No imaginary person is going to give us the answers or tell us why. Only we have the ability to be logical and to problem solve, and we should not abdicate these responsibilities to “God” just because a topic is tough or uncomfortable to address.

(5 more reason at link...)

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282