The oppression of the majority

I wonder what it is about the mere existence of atheists that is so terrifying to some Christians.

Now, right up front, I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about all Christians, here.  I have friends who are devout Christians, and friends who are members of various other faiths, and mostly we all get along pretty well.  But it seems to me that there is a growing number of Christians, mostly of the evangelical stripe, who are threatened by people like me -- atheists/rationalists/secular humanists who won't just shut up and let the dominant majority religion run things, as it has for the last thousand years.

This all comes up because of two news stories from last week.  In one, Anthony Foxx, mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, declared May 2 not only to be a "National Day of Prayer," but a "National Day of Reason," stating that "it is the duty and responsibility of every citizen to promote the development and application of reason."   Seems an innocent enough statement, right?

Nope.  The backlash was immediate and vitriolic.  Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women of America, blasted Foxx's move as anti-religious in general and anti-Christian in particular, ending a screed on Fox News with the quote, "You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism.  And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."

Then, there was the story that appeared in Breitbart News that claimed that Christians in the military were in danger of being court martialled if they "shared their faith."  The whole thing apparently started with a demand by Mikey Weinstein, of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that commanding officers enforce the long-standing no-proselytizing rule, explained as follows by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen:

Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one's beliefs (proselytization).  If a service member harasses another member on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, age, or disability, then the commander takes action based on the gravity of the occurrence.  Likewise, when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case-by-case basis.

Breitbart, and later Fox News, interpreted this as a "Christian cleansing of the military" by the Obama administration that would lead to the abolition of chaplains, and ultimately to court martial of any Christian in the military.  (Weinstein himself was called an "anti-Christian extremist.")

The story was accompanied by the following photograph, in case the plight of the poor, oppressed Christians didn't yank at your heartstrings enough:

Okay, can we just clarify something, here?  You Christians are still in the majority.  Virtually every position of power in the United States government is held by a self-professed Christian.  You have used your majority status to institute legislation that compels public school students to treat your holy book as if it were science.  You have mandated prayers before governmental meetings, and are determined to try to work prayer back into classrooms.  "In God We Trust" is still on our currency, and "one nation, under God" still in the Pledge of Allegiance.  People are still sworn in with their hand on the bible.

How, again, are you oppressed?

The problem, of course, is that you're unused to being challenged, and you're mistaking having someone push back against your hegemony with being persecuted.  You have been, for centuries, in sole control of everything in the United States and western Europe, with government and religion so deeply entangled that it was often hard to see where one started and the other ended.  But now, what has some Christians spooked is that people like me are becoming more numerous.  A recent poll put the number of atheists and agnostics in the United States at 20% -- a new high -- and put Protestants in the minority for the first time ever, at 48%, although Christians as a whole are still an overwhelming majority, at 76%.  The increase of non-belief, to the point that we're too numerous to subdue into silence, is terrifying to a group that has long held unquestioned dominance in every sphere of American life.  There are more self-professed atheists now than ever before in history, and we're refusing to do what we've always done -- which was to hide.

The ironic thing is how unfounded those fears are.  While atheists, agnostics, rationalists, humanists, secularists, and free-thinkers -- and those who hold to all other gradations of disbelief -- are often vocal in their disavowal of Christian ideas, very few of them have any grudge against Christian people.  The vast majority of the aforementioned nonbelievers think that Christians, and members of other faiths, are free to believe whatever they want, as long as they accord the same right to us.  And that's the critical point, here; we just want the same freedom that you have had for the last thousand years -- to be open about our convictions, without fear of repercussion, and without having to put up with religious folks demanding that we do things their way, or else.

So, to that subset of Christians who desperately want to appear oppressed because you're finally not getting your own way, I'd like to end by saying: no need to be afraid.  We atheists have no intent to do to you what you'd like to do to us.

Calling a fraud a fraud: James McCormick and the bomb dowsers

I know I tend to write about frustrating topics -- my usual fare is illogic, irrationality, gullibility, hoaxes, and general foolishness.  And it's got to be wearing, at times, to read a non-stop parade of human craziness and credulity.  So it's heartening to me that today we'll start the day with a positive story -- a story of the triumph of science over woo-woo nonsense.

You may have heard about James McCormick, the man who developed a "bomb detector."  The device, he said, worked on the same principle as a dowsing rod; it was a metal antenna that sits in a hole in a plastic sleeve, and it detects the "electromagnetic disturbance" created by the bomb and swivels toward it.  (The whole thing is described in detail in Phil Plait's wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, in an article called "Dowsing for Bombs" that then appeared in Slate.)

You can see how such a device, if it worked as advertised, would be invaluable to the military.  The problem is, it didn't work.  The whole thing was basically just a plastic handle with a ten-dollar Radio Shack antenna glued into a rotating plastic cylinder.  But the military was suckered right in -- to the tune of between $16,500 and $60,000 per device.  Well, it wasn't long before the people in charge realized that they'd been sold a bill of goods; as Plait said, the devices "might as well have been crayon boxes full of rocks.  They were useless."

And, they cost lives.  The Iraqis began to use them at terrorist checkpoints, and (of course) their reliance on them caused them to miss bombs -- including one incident where terrorists sneaked two tons of explosives past a checkpoint, right past McCormick's dowsing rods, resulting in 155 casualties.

Well, the military finally wised up, and McCormick was arrested and charged with fraud.  And last week, he was convicted.

This should be a cause for celebration by skeptics the world over -- that finally, a major governmental institution has seen to it that science triumphs over the peddlers of woo-woo.  But I do have a question, however, that tempers my jubilation.

Why stop at McCormick?  If what he was doing is fraud -- in the sense that he was knowingly hoodwinking the gullible, making claims that were demonstrably false, and becoming filthy rich in the process -- then so are the homeopaths.  So are the psychics, the astrologers, the faith healers.  And yet we still have psychics like Theresa Caputo, the "Long Island Medium," who is booked for readings two years ahead and allegedly charges $400 for a thirty-minute reading over the phone.  (I say "allegedly" because she doesn't reveal her fees publicly; all we have to go by is claims by former clients.)  We still have astrologers like Susan Miller, "astrologer to the New York City fashion set," whose astrology website gets six million hits per month.  (If Skeptophilia gets six million hits in my lifetime, I will die a happy man.)  We still have faith healers like Peter Popoff, who was roundly debunked by James Randi and yet who still attracts tens of thousands of hopefuls to his "healing ministries."

We still have homeopathic "remedies" sold online -- and over the counter in damn near every pharmacy in the United States and western Europe.  Worse, there are groups like "Homeopaths Without Borders" making sure that their useless, discredited sugar pills and vials of water get distributed to needy (and poorly educated) people in places like Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala, where they are used by the ill in place of actual, effective medications.

How is James McCormick guilty of fraud, and these people are not?

Oh, I know the difference is in who McCormick defrauded.  "Don't piss off the military-industrial complex" is a pretty good guide for life.  But even though the woo-woos of various stripes aren't ripping off the US Army -- they're just ripping off ordinary slobs like you and me -- the principle is the same.  They're making claims that are unscientific bullshit, are charging money for their useless services, and yet they seem to get away with it, day after day and year after year.

Okay, I know I said I was going to be positive, here.  And honestly, I'm glad that they nailed McCormick -- he richly merits everything he gets.  And perhaps this will act as a precedent; maybe the fact that the courts stood by reputable, testable science, and identified fraudulent woo-woo as such, will be one step toward pasting that same label on other deserving targets.

The bottom line is: the good guys won, for a change.  Let's hope that it's a trend.