Which stars are unbelievers?

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Angelina Jolie, Atheism, CM Punk, Daniel Radcliffe, George Clooney, Mark Zuckerberg, Tyler the Creator, Zac Efron

I said recently that I’ve posted two items that I had written for my book What If I’m an Atheist? but had to delete from it in cutting the book to the proper word count. In the spirit of “Well, why not?”, here is an excerpt that did get into the book and that I think deserves a blog posting.

Angelina Jolie

When The Onion asked Jolie if there’s a god, she answered, “For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn’t need to be a God for me.” The longtime man in her life, Brad Pitt, is an unbeliever as well. In 2009, he told the German magazine Bild, “I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic.”

CM Punk

This World Wrestling Entertainment star is not just atheistic but combative about it. When a journalist told him “Stop being a dogmatic atheist. It’s overdone and annoying,” the wrestler answered, “Stop believing in a man in the sky. It’s illogical.”

Daniel Radcliffe

The guy you love as Harry Potter is an unbeliever. “I’m an atheist, but I’m very relaxed about it,” he’s said. “I don’t preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like [atheist author] Richard Dawkins who do.” What’s more, he’s called himself “a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.”

George Clooney

“I don’t believe in heaven and hell,” Clooney’s said. “I don’t know if I believe in God.” He doesn’t object to religion, though. In an interview on CNN, he’s said, “Whatever anybody believes, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, it’s fair enough and works. And I think it’s real and matters. I don’t happen to have those beliefs as much. I don’t believe in those things.”

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s founder was born Jewish, but the young billionaire has listed himself as an atheist on his Facebook page. He doesn’t talk much about his beliefs (or lack thereof), though.

Tyler, the Creator

“I hate religion, to me it keeps people in a box and won’t allow them to do what the fuck they want,” the Odd Future rapper has written. When a fan challenged him about loving Jesus, he answered, “[Jesus] is not real. Why the fuck would I love someone that I haven’t met?”

Zac Efron

The Neighbors and Baywatch star has said, “I was raised agnostic, so we never practiced religion.”And he’s stayed that way. Although his ancestry is Jewish, he told the Jewish newspaper Forward that he remains agnostic.

 

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Highly moral unbelievers

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Andrei Sakharov, Atheism, Fridjtof Nansen, Henry Stephens Salt, Humanitarians, Peacemakers

I recently posted two items that I had written for my book What If I’m an Atheist? but had to delete from it in cutting the book to the proper word count. In the spirit of “Well, why not?” here is an excerpt that did get into the book and that I think deserves a blog posting.

 

To prove that unbelief is immoral, some theists have pointed out that mass murders such as Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong were atheists. But other unbelievers have been close to saintly.

Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939), humanitarian

Salt led crusades for nature conservation, peace between nations, and improvements in schools and prisons. He wrote the first book proposing animal rights. Mahatma Gandhi praised his high moral code.

And he was an atheist. “Religion,” Salt wrote, “has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man.”

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), diplomat

Fridtjof Nansen was an agnostic — “The religion of one age,” he wrote in 1907, “is, as a rule, the literary entertainment of the next”  — and an international hero.

When his native Norway demanded independence from Sweden, he prevented a civil war by helping to negotiate a peaceful split. During World War I, when supplies were scarce and shipping was dangerous, he secured food for his hungry countrymen. After the war, he helped refugees and prisoners of war get home safely. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), physicist

Lifelong atheist Andrei Sakharov signed the 1973 Humanist Manifesto, which included the line “As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God.” But that was only one of the ways in which he championed his beliefs.

The Soviet Union had awarded Sakharov its highest honors for developing the country’s nuclear weapons. But when he spoke out against those weapons and in favor of giving the Soviet people more freedom, the government arrested him and held him prisoner for six years. For his efforts on behalf of freedom and peace, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Other unbelievers who have performed in conspicuously moral ways:

Clarence Darrow, lawyer (1857-1938): Defended disadvantaged people and unpopular causes.

Linus Pauling, biochemist (1901-1994): Received the Nobel Peace Prize for anti-war activism.

Warren Buffet, businessman (1930- ): One of the world’s biggest charitable donors.

Bob Geldof, musician (1951- ): Raised millions of dollars for famine victims in Africa.

 

Four bad, bad believers

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Congo, Dracula, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Leopold II

A short while back, I wrote a book of guidance for teenage atheists. My manuscript ran long, and I had to cut some parts. One of my favorite deleted passages debunked the idea that religion helps to make people moral by pointing out that some terrible, terrible people were religious.

Here, for the first time in public, is that deleted piece of the book. (If you’re wondering whether Adolf Hitler — clearly a terrible person — is one of the bad believers, he’s actually a more ambiguous case, as you can see here.)

Prince Vlad III of Wallachia (1431-1476), also known as Dracula

Vlad, alias Dracula (“son of the dragon” in his language), inspired the creation of the blood-sucking count. His people called him Țepeș, “impaler,” because he ran sharp spikes through his enemies. And he considered thousands of people his enemies. He also enjoyed, according to one expert, “cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, [and] mutilation of sexual organs.”

Vlad was Christian twice over: born into the Eastern Orthodox Church but converted to Catholicism. When Pope Pius II called for war against the Muslim Turks, Vlad was the only national leader to obey.

Czar Ivan IV of Russia, also known as Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584)

Ivan the Terrible established a national police force that robbed, tortured and massacred people — thousands of them. He launched (and lost) wars that ruined millions of lives. He beat his own son to death.

And he was a devoted Christian. Ivan supported Russia’s Orthodox Christian church (until some of its members started opposing him) and accepted the church’s head as a close advisor. Late in life, he underwent fits of wild praying, fasting, and confessing his sins. And in 2003, a movement arose within the Russian Orthodox church to declare him a saint.

King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909)

Leopold was born and died a Catholic. He wasn’t especially devout, but he supported efforts to convert Africans to Christianity.

“Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium’s King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all,” said a BBC report. “He turned his ‘Congo Free State’ into a massive labor camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.”

President Idi Amin of Uganda (approximately 1925-2003)

The New York Times put it well: “[Idi Amin’s] eight-year reign of terror in Uganda encompassed widespread killing, torture and dispossession of multitudes, and left the country pauperized.” Rumors circulated that he was a cannibal. His nickname: “The Butcher of Uganda.”

Amin was also a dedicated Muslim. The British Guardian newspaper said, “The Islamic religion became a fetish for this unbalanced man, and his uncouth espousal of it did great harm to the Muslim cause in Africa.”

Other evil theists:

Tomás de Torquemada, Spanish priest (1420-1498), Christian: Burned, tortured and murdered thousands of people he considered heretics.

Enver Pasha, Turkish military leader (1881-1922), Muslim: Presided over the murder of more than a million Armenians.

Augusto Pinochet, president of Chile (1915-2006), Christian: Ordered thousands to be tortured, killed, exiled or imprisoned.

Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, president of Pakistan (1917-1980), Muslim: Used military forces to murder hundreds of thousands in parts of the country that opposed him.

The Bible for atheists: Seven infamous passages

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Atheism, Bible, Deuteronomy, God, Religion

As I mentioned here, I’ve written a book for teenage atheists. My manuscript ran long, and I had to cut some parts. One deleted passage countered the claim that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality by noting some of the book’s uglier passages.

Here, for the first time in public, is that deleted piece of the book.

The Bible recommends love, mercy, and kindness, but it also teaches some nastier lessons. If they represent God’s idea of morality, then God has some explaining to do.

Second Kings 2:23-24
As [the prophet Elisha] was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, [who] mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you bald head; go up, you bald head.”
And he turned back and looked on them and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tore forty and two children of them.
Yep, a prophet called out bears to rip up some kids for making fun of his hairless dome. And he gets away with it. God considers him righteous and doesn’t smite him or anything.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and when they chasten him will not hearken to them:
Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him and bring him to the elders of his city and to the gate of the place;
And they shall say to the elders of his city, “This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice.” . . .
And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, so that he die.
In other words, don’t talk back to Mom and Dad, or your neighbors will kill you. With rocks.
This isn’t the only time God commands the death of kids who mouth off. Check out Leviticus 20:9’s Every one that curses his mother or father shall surely be put to death.

Numbers 31:17-18
Moses is leading the Jews from Egypt to Palestine. They run into the people of Midian. Midianite women seduce Jewish men into pagan rites so wild that a plague breaks out and kills 24,000 Jews. Apparently the Midianitesses were bubbling over with germs.
So God tells Moses to take revenge against the Midianites. Moses’s battle plan for his troops says, among other things:
“Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that has known a man by lying with him.
“But all the women children who have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”
You read that right: murder all little boys and most of the women, and take the virgin girls for your own purposes.
Want more Biblical examples of cruelty in God’s name? Try First Samuel 15:2-3 (which includes killing babies and animals), Hosea 13:16, Isaiah 13:16 and Deuteronomy 7:1.

Exodus 21:20-21
If a man smites his servant or his maidservant with a rod, and he [the servant] dies under his hand, he [the servant’s master] shall surely be punished.
Notwithstanding, if he [the servant] shall continue a day or two, he [the master] shall not be punished; for he [the servant] is his [the master’s] money.
This one says that you can beat your servant nearly to death, as long as the servant stays alive for a day or two after the beating.
FYI, the business about the servant being his master’s money hints that God allows slavery. So do other parts of the Bible, like Leviticus 25:44-45. Exodus 21:7-11 even tells you how to sell your own daughter as a slave.

Psalms 137:9
Happy shall he be that takes and dashes your little ones against the stones.
The context for this gem is that God’s followers would rather kill their children than let the kids grow up in a strange land.
Psalms are essentially songs, so you can allow for poetic exaggeration. Still, claiming that you’d be happy to bash babies is a weird way to say that there’s no place like home.

First Timothy 2:12
I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
This bit of sexism isn’t alone. The Bible has other passages against women, like the First Corinthians 14:34-35, Deuteronomy 22:13-21, and the notorious Deuteronomy 25:11-12: When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draws near to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smites him … then you should cut off her hand.

 

What if God was one of them?

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Bill Cosby, creativity, Genius, God, Mozart, Picasso

I just had a terrible thought.

Some geniuses who make beautiful art are ugly people. Picasso, I hear, treated the women in his life abominably. Mozart was spectacularly vulgar and scatological, but his music was and is heavenly. Bill Cosby has told brilliantly observed stories of childhood and family life but seems to have raped dozens of women.

Like all of us, those creative masterminds were made in the image of the greatest creator of all: the creator of the universe. Here’s the terrible thought: What if He follows their pattern?

You die, enter the afterlife, and beg to see God. When you enter His Celestial Chamber, you see Him in a robe stained with last night’s beer and last week’s sweat, slouching in His Glorious Throne with one grossly tattooed leg slung over the Throne’s arm. He grabs you and shoves you up His Anus to give himself an enema, after which He excretes on you and tosses you away with an insult.

And then He creates a breathtaking new species of butterfly and delivers rain to drought-stricken farmers.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty damn confused.

Should Islam change as Christianity did?

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Christianity, Islam, Wahhabism

I’ve read opinions saying that Islam needs the kind of reformation that Christianity went through. Maybe so.

But I don’t think so.

For one thing, you could argue that Islam (at least Sunni Islam, the faith of over 80% of all Muslims) has already had a reformation. Its Martin Luther was 18th-century cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who wanted to “purify” Islam and preached a hard-core fundamentalist approach. Today, Wahhabism in one form or another seems to influence ISIS, al-Qaida and other extremist Islamists.

If you don’t buy Wahhab as Luther, consider this: Why should Islam follow the Christian model at all? I don’t think that Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, or other major faiths have gone through a Christian-style reformation. They’ve changed and evolved in their own ways. So has Islam, for that matter.

Either way, I wouldn’t stay up nights waiting for a 21st century Islamic reformation.

Do Christian movies deserve their criticism?

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Christianity, Movies, Pop culture

Explicitly Christian movies don’t seem to get much love from the smartest, most respected critics. Yet critics and other experts venerate Christian-themed works of art from the past — Leonardo’s Last Supper, Michelangelo’s Pieta, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and so on.

You might say that critics are harder on new, unproven work than on established masterpieces or that they can accept Christianity from a dead artist, who can’t stand up and challenge non-Christians (or secular “Christians in name only”) to devote their lives to Christ.

But I think that something else is at work.

It seems to me that Christian movies like, say, God’s Not Dead (and novels like the Left Behind series) tell stories pitting modern Christians against non-Christians, while the greatest works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and so on focused on events from the Bible and Christian lore.

A scene of a self-sacrificing Jesus or a suffering saint can have deep emotional power. A work of art based on such a scene can move people regardless of their religion or lack of it.

But Christian vs. non-Christian stories often seem to employ an us-vs.-them structure that is likely to alienate today’s non-Christians, especially if the stories offer today’s non-Christians as bad guys.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the recent, modern and contemporary Christian art most universally loved — by Christians and non-Christians — is gospel music, which often concentrates more on the glory of Christ than on denouncing non-Christians.

What’s God really like?

Tags

cosomology, God, Religion

Maybe it’s just me, being a writer and all, but I find clues about a creator by looking at his creation. So when I want to determine what kind of personality God has, I look at the universe.

Clearly, God thinks big. He’s created countless galaxies that revolve through endless space. He likes to have a lot of everything and spread it out over a big span.

But space isn’t the only thing that’s big. NASA says that the universe is at least 13 billion years old. Clearly, God was thinking beyond seven days of creation when he triggered the Big Bang. He built the universe with big time in mind.

At the same time, he thought small. Infinitesimal, in fact. God has designed the details of existence down to subatomic particles. Walls of steel are made of stuff so tiny and insubstantial that it barely exists. Surfaces that seem slickly flat turn out to have endless bumps and dents. Everything in the universe is made of smaller things, and nothing is quite as solid or simple as it seems.

Nor has God stopped there. He likes variety. The Environmental Literacy Council says that there are 300,000 species of beetles — or maybe more. The Earth may have up to 100 million species of living things. Add in the nearly infinite variety of minerals, liquids, gases, and other substances (remember, boys and girls, that no two snowflakes are alike), and you’ve got quite a lot of diversity. And that’s just one planet.

What’s more, the universe is constantly shifting. The hardest rocks expand as warm daylight strikes them and contract in the cool night. Living things are always looking for other things to eat, drink or mate with. The mighty stars, sources of all energy and life, eventually die out. Gravity moves galaxies. Clearly, God likes activity, motion and change.

He also likes rules — but he allows change and variety there as well. The laws of gravity are a universal constant, providing that what goes up must come down, but we build rockets that can escape Earth’s heavy pull and escape into space. Everything that lives must die, but if you eat right and exercise and watch where you step in traffic, you’ll probably die later rather than sooner. God made the rules, but he made them flexible and dropped in an exception here and there.

So it’s hard for me to believe in preachers who insist that God wants all people to believe in just one creed and conduct themselves according to one inflexible way of life. The God of my universe has a bigger viewpoint than that.