Racism and Religion

Belief in God and the afterlife is precisely as immoral, and precisely as offensive, as racist belief, and for precisely the same reasons.

This sounds like a rather offensive and bizarre statement, doesn't it? How the heck can a good Christian or other religious believer, just for being a believer, be lumped together with Nazis and racists and other evil jerks of that stripe?

To explain what I mean by my opening sentence, I will have to explore a couple of fundamental questions about Racism. Why is racism morally wrong? And is it morally wrong to hold racist beliefs even if one does not act on them? In other words, is it evil to hold racist beliefs even if one is not actually personally shoving Jews into gas chambers, lynching black people, or refusing to hire people with Hispanic surnames?

Racism is wrong because the underlying theory is factually incorrect, to the best of our scientific knowledge as a species. Contrary to what racists believe, people do not fundamentally differ in matters of intelligence, moral fiber, laziness, or worth as human beings in any significant or systematic way related to race. We differ far more individually from other members of our respective races than our race differs on average from other races. This is according to the best of our scientific knowledge in areas such as genetics, biology, neuroscience, and so forth.

The same goes for most other forms of discrimination. Skin color does matter when applying pancake makeup. It does not matter when applying for a job. Gender matters when making babies, but not when making bond trades or dinner. Ethnic origins matter when deciding whether or not to get tested for Sickle Cell Anemia, but should not be used as a test of fitness for political office.

Racism is treating race and ethnicity as if it matters in subject areas where, to the best of our scientific knowledge, race does not matter. Racism is morally wrong because it is factually wrong. If Nazis had been correct in thinking that Jews were disease-ridden subhuman vermin bent on destroying human society and profiting off of its destruction, then they would have been perfectly morally justified in marching Jews into gas chambers, simply as a form of self-defense. If Confederate plantation owners had been right in believing that blacks were subhuman creatures without the natural intelligence or moral judgment to be fit for anything other than life as a slave, then they would have been perfectly morally justified in enslaving them. If present-day racists are right in believing that all Hispanics are lazy, uneducated wetbacks without the qualifications, ability, or work ethic to make good employees, then they would be perfectly justified in refusing to hire them.

But because those theories about the biological nature of racial groups were and are factually incorrect, those beliefs, and the actions based on those beliefs, were and are morally repugnant. Jews are people just like the rest of us. Blacks are no more or less deserving of freedom than anyone else. Hispanics have amongst their number the usual mix of good and bad employees. Racial distinctions are meaningless, except in a tiny handful of very narrow scientific matters directly related to the minuscule differences of DNA that give rise to the visible phenotypic differences that are used to define race. In gross physical appearance, and a handful of obscure medical details, race and ethnicity matter...but in all political, moral, and economic spheres, race is a meaningless distinction. Gender is somewhat more meaningful, but still, outside of a handful of narrow contexts directly related to the physical and genetic differences between them, men and women are pretty much alike. None of those differences have the slightest bearing on any political, moral, or economic question.

Treating racial and ethnic differences as if they matter outside of those narrow contexts is the only workable definition of racism. The various political, moral, theological, and pseudo-scientific theories that claim otherwise are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly wrong. Demonstrably and provably wrong. Refusal to accept this fact is what makes racism and related beliefs morally wrong, it is a form of intellectual dishonesty, quite apart from any violent or economically exploitative side-effects that flow from trying to put those flawed theories into practice. Even if those beliefs are not acted on, those beliefs themselves, because they are still factually wrong, are morally wrong to hold in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If it's morally right to kill someone based on a true belief of the danger they pose, and morally wrong to kill them based on a false belief of a danger they pose, then it is not the killing that is wrong, it is the factually incorrect belief that is the true moral outrage.

So racist beliefs are morally wrong to hold, even if one does not act on them. It is wrong to think blacks are inferior, whether or not you are actually hanging them from trees. It is wrong to think of Jews as subhuman vermin, even if you aren't actually marching them off to Auschwitz. It is wrong to think of Hispanics as inferior, even if you are not actually refusing to hire people with a Z at the end of their last name. It is the factually unsupportable belief that is the problem, and the moral wrong, not the actions which logically follow from such beliefs. If the belief is justified, so is the action. If the belief is not justified, neither is the action.

So now we apply this reasoning to religious beliefs. To the best of our scientific knowledge, there is no God. There is no possibility of an afterlife. The universe in general, and earth and life on it in particular, arose through completely natural processes with no divine inteverention whatsoever. Miracles do not happen, the laws of physics always apply. To believe otherwise flies in the face of quite literally everything we know about science, history, and the way the universe works. For one proof of this, see my previous posting on this blog.

Just like racism, religion's flawed theories have historically led to violence, oppression, and economic exploitation when someone tries to put them into practice. Specific religious beliefs, such as the inerrancy of Christian or Muslim scripture, the infallibility of the Catholic Pope, the status of the Jews as God's Chosen People, the sanctity of the Hindu caste system, and the innate sinfulness of women, have in the past led (with sad logical inevitability) to acts of horrifying violence and injustice. Practically every organized religion has amongst its official doctrines and scriptures at least some concepts that justify or encourage such acts of violence, even if those aspects of scriptures or doctrine are not generally adhered to in the present day.

So religion faces the same problems as racism: it is an unsupportable belief under the current state of scientific knowledge, and it has historically shown a tendency to lead to violence when these factually incorrect beliefs are applied to the real world.

But surely, you may object, religion has also led to the creation of great art, the commission of great works of charity, the building of hospitals, and so forth? Well, the Nazis built the Autobahn, southern plantation mansions were quite beautiful buildings, and I for one actually like the architecture of Albert Speer and the music of Richard Wagner. Racists and have created great works of art. That still doesn't justify their continuing to hold demonstrably false beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence.

And racism has even had a few positive social effects. The creation of a racist social order in the early American colonies was fundamental to the creation of a social order in which poor whites were granted the same sort of social privileges as rich whites, something which had not been possible in the previous class-based social order back in Europe. And it was this racism-catalyzed breaking down of social barriers within the white community that made possible the wide acceptance of the ideal that all (white) men were created equal, the omission of that unspoken but widely-understood parenthetical interpolation thus being the foundation of the later extension of such rights and privileges to the non-white and eventually the non-male population. And that's ignoring the positive aspects of Racism's retarded love child, Nationalism, which has contributed to many positive political and social changes, alongside the obvious negative influences it has also had. These positive social effects, however, still do not justify the fundamentally incorrect beliefs at the core of Racism, Nationalism, Sexism, and other unjustly discriminatory belief systems, a wrongness that render them immoral to hold in the face of contrary evidence, regardless of whatever few positive social aspects they may contain.

Of course, one could also counter that the oft-claimed bad effects of religion, the crusades and inquisitions, the jihads and witch-burnings, were not really caused by religion, but rather, were cases of religion being cynically misused as justification for naked acts of theft, conquest, and economic exploitation. And there's a monumental grain of truth behind that claim. The problem is, the exact same thing can, of course, be applied to the examples of Racism's bad effects listed above. Southern slave owners in the antebellum south benefited enormously from the socioeconomic effects of slavery, and it was their fear that an emerging abolitionist majority in the North might threaten that socioeconomic order that led to the Civil War...just as their ancestors' economic interest in finding a source of cheap labor to grow cash crops in the colonies had been the impetus behind the creation of the slave system in the first place. Formal racist theories can be said to have arisen to justify economic exploitation, not the other way around. The Nazis were quite open about the fact that they wanted to conquer, enslave, and economically exploit the “lesser” races of the world, and their theories about the evil machinations of the Jews can be thought of as mere propaganda, justifying Nazi exploitation of the Jews by claiming prior Jewish exploitation of the German people. And of course, that hypothetical racist business manager refusing to hire Hispanics thus faces less competition and opposition when he tries to hire his (presumably white) friends and relatives instead. Because racist and religious atrocities both equally can be excused as mere window-dressing for baser economic and political motives, the fact that the Crusaders were motivated by greed for lands and money as well as by the desire to earn forgiveness for their sins by liberating Jerusalem from the rule of Infidels cannot be used to differentiate between the bad outcomes of religious theories from the bad outcomes of racist theories.

Yes, both racism and religion have been used to falsely justify selfish acts of conquest, theft, and exploitation. One may argue that those tendencies in human psychology that lead to such selfish acts will always be with us, and thus eliminating religious or racist beliefs will not end, or even significantly reduce, the occurrence of such acts. And, sadly, this may be true. But surely removing a common justification for such acts will, at the very least, reduce the number of people who can thus be easily duped into fighting, killing, and dying to further some cynical leader's economic or political gain. The poor whites who bled on the battlefield on behalf of the Confederacy's slave owners were not acting in their own economic interests, but their flawed racist thinking led them to incorrectly think they were. The same goes for the poor Nazi foot soldiers in World War Two. And the same goes for those poor peasants who went off on Crusade, most of them dying in the process, supposedly for the good of their own souls, but really for the good of the Kings and Nobles who hoped to gain loot, new lands, and new feudal fiefdoms. Without that nice-sounding religious propaganda, how many of them would have gone along with such a mad scheme? Eliminating racism and religion will remove two powerful propaganda weapons from the arsenal of the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous, two sadly effective means of fooling their subordinates into dying on their behalf.

So if religious belief is exactly as unsupportable, exactly as incorrect, and thus exactly as dangerous, as racism, how should we treat religious ideals, and the people who hold them? Exactly as we treat racists. When someone says, “God bless you,” react the same as if they had said, “Heil Hitler,” in shock and outrage. When someone says they just got back from Mass, or the Mosque, or Temple, react as if they had said they just got back from a KKK cross-burning, in shock and outrage. Accord religious leaders and clergymen the same social cold-shoulder you would to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, or a member of the White Aryan Resistance. Refuse to vote for politicians who ostentatiously flaunt their religious beliefs, just as you would refuse to vote for a segregationist or Nazi. If someone wants to say Grace before eating dinner, get up and walk out of the room, the same as you would if they just uttered the N-word. Treat an invitation to a Bible Study class or any other religious ceremony as you would an invitation to a Nazi party rally or a cross-burning.

For in all these cases, what that person is doing is just as rude, just as immoral, just as evil, and precisely as wrong as if they actually were a Klansman, a Nazi, or any other form of racial bigot. Recall that, to the extent that racism has been ended in America, it was largely ended not by killing or imprisoning racists, but by non-racists in society refusing to politely ignore racist behavior, speech, and ideals; by non-racists calling racists out when they uttered racial slurs, or spouted racist beliefs, and by non-racists refusing to vote for candidates that pandered to the racist demographic.

This is not to say that government should censor religious speech or suppress religious beliefs. I do believe in freedom of thought, and that government has no role in suppressing ideals or ideologies, no matter how offensive or unsupported by facts, so long as those beliefs are not actually put into practice in a way that harms others. That is not government's job. Government should not censor racist speech, religious speech, or political speech, because government must remain neutral on such questions. Government must be the government of everyone, including the idiots and the assholes. On a more optimistic note, we NEED stubborn, pig-headed people who refuse to accept the current consensus of scientific truth, because it is those who refuse to accept the conventional wisdom who, at least theoretically, are able to generate new knowledge and correct past mistakes, by looking for better answers than the ones already found. And a handful of important scientific and historical truths were indeed first discovered by individuals seeking (usually unsuccessfully) to find scientific support for a religious or racist belief.

What I am saying, however, is that people who care about intellectual honesty and scientific truth should cease being “polite” when they hear or see religious speech or behavior. They should not fear to be “rude” when it comes to speaking out about just how ludicrous and factually incorrect religious beliefs are. They should shun the ostentatiously religious whenever possible, refuse to take part in religious ceremonies, refuse to swear religious oaths, refuse to pander to the stupidly religious around them.

Here in America, people who care about intellectual honesty and scientific truth are, depressingly, in the minority. We are in the situation faced by the Freedom Riders, spreading the word of non-racism across the Jim Crow south. We are likely to face harassment, persecution, and in extreme cases, personal violence. Of course, we shouldn't be quite so rude that we get burnt at the stake, or even slapped. But, whenever possible, whenever we can get away with it without being subject to personal violence, we should treat the religious exactly as they deserve: like the deluded, dishonest, disreputable and despicable people they are.

Finally got published

Well, that article I wrote for Christian Faith and Reason Online finally got published. That's the good news. The bad news is that they have canceled their plans for a hardcopy version of their magazine in favor of an online-only format. The worse news is that they seem to be a real mickey-mouse operation, never having come out with the September issue at all, barely having any articles for the October issue they finally came out with, and whoever codes their homepage uses tags that don't work for us Firefox users. Anyways, my article did at least make their "front page", not that there's much that isn't on their front page. The article in question is a revised and greatly expanded version of the quickie rant that was included in my previous blog post.

Atheist Diversionary Tactics: My Response

I just saw linked on Fark an article on some Christian Apologist website by some guy named R.C. Metcalf called Atheist Diversionary Tactics. In it, he snidely dismisses the current crop of books on Atheism as focusing too much on the nastier laws of Leviticus, attacking Christianity while ignoring the far-more dangerous Islam, and ignoring the demographic threat of the fast-breeding browner-skinned peoples of the Earth. Then he brings up Iraq for no clear reason.

Apparently, the original website once had a comments feature, but some of my ruder Atheist brethren got so annoying they turned off public comments. They instead put in a tiny tiny comment field that only lets you reply with about a paragraph and promised to read all comments and invite some of the more lucid responders to reply at length with an article to be published later on their site. As anyone who reads this blog knows (probably about three people including me, as with most blogs), brevity is not my strong suit. I'll find some other way to send this to them, but for now, I'm putting this up here. What follows is my response to Dr. Metcalf.

Your Article does touch on one of my own problems with many books on Atheism by my fellow Atheists. They spend too much time skewering the nastier bits of the Bible and historical atrocities such as the crusades and Spanish Inquisition. As Christians and others often point out, the vast majority of believers rightly reject the burning of witches and the stoning of Sabbath-breakers; and self-proclaimed atheists such as Stalin and Mao have compiled their own impressive body counts. Such historical muckraking by Atheists does have a point, as it is the dangers posed by people who take their theology a bit too seriously and literally (whether that theology is theistic or Marxist) that often makes us such angry atheists. But it is not what makes us Atheists in the first place. We are not Atheists because Christians or Muslims are often nasty people. We are Atheists because we believe that gods and the afterlife do not exist.

However, most believers are not actually all that conversant with the niceties of theology or the details of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for the miracles and other theologically significant happenings of the Bible and Koran. Darn few Christians know anything at all about the Koran or the scriptures of any other faith. Atheist books making more detailed cases against the theology of Christianity and other faiths exist, but just as science books written in layman’s terms sell better than books that are dense with data and equations, books on atheism with more simplistic arguments sell better than ones aimed at a more specialist readership. And books that sell well are more likely to be discussed in the blogosphere.

Also, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins in particular rightly point out that all those nasty bits in Leviticus are indeed still in the Bible. All those nasty bits in Sharia are still in the Koran. So long as “moderate” religious people still give lip-service to the idea that the Bible or the Koran, according to their affiliation, are the inerrant Word of God (or at least the Word of God and a generally-good guide to how to live a moral life), believers who actually read those books will come across those nasty bits, and a disturbing number of them will take them seriously. Christians who actually try to live out the nastier bits of the Bible may be limited to Fred Phelps and the Dominionist movement, but so long as Christianity and the Bible are with us, we will always have their ilk around to remind us what formal Christian scriptures really do say. So long as Islam is with us, we will always have believers who try to take the Koran as literally as the Koran itself demands they take it, with bloody consequences for the rest of us. Moderate religious sects, while posing little immediate danger to Atheists or other religious groups, are the incubators and protectors of extreme religious sects that pose a great danger to everyone.

After that one marginally good point, you bring up a pair of bad points.

First off, you complain that recent Atheist books tend to mostly pick on Christianity. This is due to the fact that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are writing in English for a Western Euro-American audience, an audience that is steeped in the Christian tradition. Other authors such as Aayan Hirsi Ali write with an Islamic audience in mind, and spend most of their time picking on Islam. Of the current crop of Atheist books, I confess that I have only read Dawkins’ The God Delusion, not the works of Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, or Ali. But at least in their speeches available on YouTube, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens do spend a good amount of time picking on Islam, particularly picking on Islamic terrorism and theocratic governments. Again, they arguably fall into the trap of complaining about bad acts by Muslims rather than about the existence of Allah or the truth of the revelations of Mohammed, but as I previously stated, they’re aiming their books at a general audience, not specialists.

Secondly, you harp on for several paragraphs about the demographic decline of Western nations and the population boom in the Islamic world. Such complaints by the likes of Pat Buchanan always make me distinctly uncomfortable, for they smell strongly of racism. At first, I thought it ironic that you were using what amounts to a Darwinian argument to oppose noted Darwinian Richard Dawkins and his ideological allies: “Religious people are reproducing more and threaten to outnumber Atheists, therefore Religious people are more fit in a Darwinian sense”. But I can’t recall a single instance in my experience of a prominent Atheist bemoaning the fact that we were being outbred by rival faiths. Perhaps they have but I don’t remember it, or perhaps Atheists aren’t quite so racist.

The west is in demographic decline not due to Atheism, but due to wealth, industrialization, and development. In a modern technological society, it makes Darwinian sense to have few children, but heavily invest in the education and well-being of each one. With their basic survival all but assured by modern healthcare, abundant food, and so forth, those investments are not likely to go to waste, and the children will be well-equipped to become wealthy themselves and attract high-quality mates. In a less technologically advanced society such as most of the Third World (or poorer areas of the First World, such as Muslim banlieues in France or black ghettoes in America), where basic survival is less assured, it makes more sense for parents to invest in quantity of children rather than quality. Many affluent religious groups in technologically-advanced societies such as the United States are also seeing a declining birthrate compared to previous levels.

Finally, you bring up the Iraq war for no clear reason. Like “New Atheist” author Christopher Hitchens, I personally support the War On Terror in general and the campaign in Iraq in particular. I have my own personal problems with some of the tactics and strategies chosen by our present political-military leadership in these struggles, but I agree that their aims are noble ones and I fervently hope for victory. My problems with their tactics and strategies are generally a complaint that we’re not doing enough, sending enough troops, or spending enough on reconstruction and propaganda (including raising the standard of living for ordinary Iraqis), to ensure victory in a reasonable timeframe. I bemoan the fact that many of my fellow atheists, apparently motivated by dislike for the overtly-religious rhetoric of President Bush in particular (and, for some of my European friends, for the too-heavily-religious United States in general), have an annoying knee-jerk reaction against the Iraq War and pretty much anything else that Bush and/or the United States have done in recent years.

In conclusion, while I agree in large part with at least one of your points, I think you misunderstand the current Atheist mindset. You also misunderstand your own fellow believers. I will always be fascinated by the gulf between the formal scriptures and doctrines of religious faiths on the one hand, and the actual beliefs of most ordinary believers on the other. Usually at least one of the two sets of beliefs is outright insane. And, just as you will rarely find two Democrats or two Republicans who are in complete agreement on all political issues, you will rarely find two Christians, two Muslims, or even two Atheists who are in complete agreement on all religious issues. And when you do, only one of them is actually thinking anything more profound than “I agree with him.”

Proof of the non-existence of God

I recently read a very good book, called The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. The book argues that Atheism is the only possible religious opinion of people with knowledge of science, a sense of intellectual honesty, and good morality. While it made several good points, I was a bit dissapointed that it didn't really touch upon my personal favorite argument against the existence of God. So I am writing out that argument below. Enjoy.

One of the basic assumptions of science is that miracles do not happen. That is, it is not allowable in a scientific hypothesis to posit a supernatural or magical cause for any effect. This is a very necessary first principle, because if it did not exist, it would be impossible to do science at all. Scientists could never be sure if an observed phenomenon, or an experimental result, is the consequence of blind laws of nature working themselves out, or the by-product of the conscious intent of some supernatural entity who is just screwing with us. Anomalous observations, fossils, and experimental results that might otherwise spark interesting theories and new hypothesis could too easily be explained away as a miracle. It would be impossible to EVER know if we had a true theory of the laws that nature itself obeys, or if we had been misled by miraculous events into a false picture of how the world works when whatever supernatural force caused those miracles chooses to not cause similar ones.

This does not necessarily mean that science assumes there is no God. Rather, science assumes that God does not normally intervene in the world by means of miracles, and if God ever does, it will be so blindingly obvious that no one could possibly think it was a natural event. Science assumes that God, if he exists, does not in any significant manner break the laws of physics, or allow them to be broken.

However, while this does not rule out God entirely, it does place some limits on the sort of God which can be considered to be consistent with science. A God who is constantly answering prayers and working miracles, such as curing diseases or helping Brett Favre win football games, is not compatible with science. A God who, in essence, lit the fuse of the Big Bang and then stood back and just watched things happen, can be considered to be at least somewhat compatible with science, at least until such time as we figure out what happened before the Big Bang, or come up with a more coherent theory of what natural processes may have caused the Big Bang to happen without supernatural assistance.

Such a God may be compatible with certain interpretations of mainstream religions, such as the Unitarian Universalist movement within Christianity. But it is not compatible with young-earth Creationist strains of Biblical Literalists, or even most so-called mainstream faiths who still believe in most of the miracles of the Bible and that God answers prayers even occasionally.

But there is one area of science that, I believe, has put the final nail in the coffin of even the least fundamentalist strains of mainstream Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith. And that area is neuroscience.

Neuroscientists do not yet fully understand the brain, but they are coming excitingly close in recent years. We now know enough about how the brain works to make reasonably certain guesses about what sort of theories and discoveries are capable of filling in the few remaining blanks, and what sort of theories and discoveries are exceedingly unlikely to come along, because for them to be true, pretty much everything else we think we know about the brain would have to be monumentally false.

Let me explain what I mean by means of an example from a more widely-understood area of science. We know with a high degree of certainty that the Earth is round and that it orbits the sun. Oh, of course, the Earth is not perfectly round, because the centrifugal force of its rotation causes it to bulge slightly at the equator and to be slightly flattened at the poles, but basically, it’s round. We know this because we have circumnavigated the Earth in an east-west direction by ship along several routes at varying latitudes, sent subs across the north pole under the ice, and sent aircraft around at a multitude of angles. We have also sent spacecraft to orbit the planet at high altitude in several directions, as well as sent spacecraft to the moon and other planets, even out of the solar system itself, and they have taken pictures that clearly show it to be a sphere (again, with some slight deviations due to centrifugal force). Many of those same spacecraft have looked back at the earth while en route to other planets, and we have seen the earth as it orbits the sun. Seismologists have also used their instruments to follow the vibrations of earthquakes as they pass through the center of a round earth to shake seismograph needles on the opposite side of the world.

Now, it’s just barely possible that all these observations and experiments are wrong, that our pictures have fooled us due to some bizarre form of optical illusion, that some strange non-spherical topology or error in navigation has fooled our planes and ships and subs into thinking they have circumnavigated a spheoid earth when they have really followed some crooked path on a flat earth, or an earth of some other fantastical shape. But so much else would have to be wrong with so many other areas of science, areas such as geometry, geology, optics, astronomy, navigation, and possibly even basic mathematics, that we can say with a colossally high degree of certainty that there is effectively no chance that we are significantly wrong about the shape of the Earth, or its status as one planet among several that orbits the sun. Oh, we may refine our figures for its exact circumference and shape to a few more significant digits, but for any really major changes to these established facts, pretty much everything we know about science would have to be so monumentally wrong, that it would be mind-bogglingly bizarre that any of our technology and devices that depend on those subsets of science actually work at all.

In a similar way, we are reasonably certain that the brain works by means of neural impulses and neurotransmitter chemicals, and that everything that goes on in brains is the result of definable physical processes. Every emotion, sensation, memory, and thought process is traceable to a physical process inside the brain, to neural pathways of neurons firing in sequence, to chemical neurotransmitters activating receptor sites and causing more neural pathways to fire. These physical processes involve matter and energy, in the form of chemicals, chemical receptor sites on cells, osmotic barriers, and even flows of electrons very much like electricity in wires.

At death, all these physical processes stop. That’s what death is. If our memories are physical processes in our brains, how can our memories survive death and the cessation of those processes? How can we experience emotions if the neurons responsible for those emotions are dead? How can we experience the passage of time without a brain?

Consider a computer, such as a laptop or desktop. It has various software and data in its memory. Now take that computer and run it through a chipper-shredder. Grind up the resulting fragments until they are a fine powder. Burn that powder and grind up the ashes further. Now take the ashes up in the Space Shuttle, and sprinkle them out the window so they fall into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up one more time on re-entry. This will pretty effectively reduce them to their component atoms. The atoms and such molecules as remain will drift down through the atmosphere, with the more solid ones falling to ground as the dust particles at the center of raindrops or snowflakes. Wait a couple of centuries. Some of the copper molecules from the wiring inside that computer will now be included in hemocyanin molecules in the blood of lobsters off the coast of Maine. Some of the carbon molecules from the plastic casing of the computer will be part of cellulose molecules in a tree in the Amazon rain forest. And so on for the other atoms that once were a computer. Now try to run the software on that computer, or retrieve the data. This is a laughably impossible proposition, of course.

The same is true for human beings. Take a dead human and cremate them and scatter the ashes. Or bury them and let worms and insects and bacteria decompose them. The result will be the same: their component atoms and molecules will be returned to the biosphere and recycled, and all trace of their former status as part of a human being will be lost forever. It is precisely as ludicrous to think that the memories in that dead human brain, or the emotions it felt, can be somehow recovered or reconstituted, as it is to try and play Minesweeper or recover a text document on a computer that has been shredded, burnt, and ground into dust.

Of course, with computers, you can copy and share your data and software to other computers, and they can be preserved. Can this be done with humans? Not with current technology, of course, but someday, maybe we will be able to download memories from one person to another, or allow others to experience our emotions as we do.

But try another thought experiment. Say that some bright scientist creates a process to clone a person, force the clone to grow to adulthood quickly, and then download an exact copy of the original person’s current mental state into that clone. The clone would look exactly like the original person; have all their same memories, the same emotional attachments, the same personality, the same foibles and character flaws. Would it be that person?

First, assume that the process of reading the brain of the original person is a destructive one, and the brain has to be diced or otherwise destroyed, killing the original donor. This might still be an attractive process for some people, especially if the new clone could be stopped in aging at a youthful appearance, yet have downloaded into it the mind and memories of an elderly person. But imagine if the process was as simple as getting a CAT scan, a non-destructive process leaving the original person undamaged and unchanged.

Would they be the same person? Of course not. After the procedure, they could go their separate ways and have entirely different experiences from that time on. They may be identical people at the moment the process is completed, but they are not the SAME person. Thus regardless of whether this identical clone is created while one is still alive, or their brain pattern is stored and a new clone created hundreds of years after their death, the clone is not the original person, merely a copy.

All of this has fatal consequences for the idea of life after death. An awful lot of doctrines and dogmas and traditions can be cut out of most religions, and still leave behind something recognizable as the original religion. The various Christian denominations, the subflavors of Islam and Judaism, the various Buddhist sects and traditions, all can be considered as groups who cut out part of each others’ beliefs, or insert new ones, to create new faiths still broadly recognizable as part of the larger tradition; Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so forth. But I can think of no religion that does not have some form of belief in some form of life after death. Heaven, Hell, Sheol, Paradise, reincarnation, Nirvana, even continued existence here on Earth as some form of ghost or spirit, every religion believes that there is something essential about a person that survives their death, and still has some trace of that person’s identity, self-awareness, personality, and usually their memories as well. No religion I know of can survive having the concept of an afterlife removed from its doctrine and dogma, and still be recognizably considered as being the same religion.

If all of our emotions, memories, sensations, and thought processes are, in a fundamental sense, physical processes inside our brains, physical processes involving matter and energy, physical processes that cease at death, then there is zero possibility of life after death. Dead people cannot remember anything, since they have no neural pathways to store those memories, the neurons that made up those memory pathways are dead. Dead people cannot see, feel, smell, taste, or hear, since both the sense organs and the neurons that processed that information are all dead and gone. Dead people cannot experience any emotions, have any thoughts, experience the passage of time. They cannot love, they cannot hate, they cannot feel pleasure or pain. All the brain cells that handle such processes are dead, decayed to dust or cremated and blown away by the wind.

Some religious people claim that this doesn’t matter, that God will provide them with a new body and a new mind in heaven, perhaps one made entirely of “Spirit” or energy of some kind, one that will not age or die again. They claim that God will effectively download a copy of your consciousness and memory as they are at your moment of death into this new heavenly body, whether this process is immediate or delayed by quite some time. But remember what we established with the thought experiment involving the cloned consciousness above: that will not be the same person, merely an identical copy.

Even if there was a God capable of doing this, it would raise a shocking moral question. Go back to that cloned consciousness thought experiment. What if the person being cloned was a convicted criminal? Would it be moral to lock up the clone for the donor’s crimes? Or if the donor was a celebrity or hero of some type, would it be justifiable to give the clone the same honors and awards due to the donor? Not only would a supernaturally-reconstituted copy of a dead person’s body and mind not be the same person, but it would be a horrific miscarriage of justice to punish that copy for the failings of the dead person, to roast the copy in hell forever, or whatever your religion of choice has in store for bad people, just because the dead person that copy is a copy of did something considered evil.

Some religious people have a different objection to the above line of reasoning. They hold the belief that, yes, the body dies and is not resurrected, but that some separate entity, a spirit or soul, does survive after death, and it is this spirit or soul that carries on into the afterlife without alteration or cessation of existence, perhaps being inserted into a new heavenly body or reincarnated in a new earthly one, perhaps not, but having the necessary quality of continuous existence to get around the moral and scientific problems introduced by my above line of reasoning.

But this brings up new problems. Mainly, how does this soul interact with the physical body? In order to do the things that religious people want souls to do, they have to both be influenced by, and influence, the physical body itself. For example, a soul has to be able to “read” the neural impulses in the brain, to be able to experience the world. Souls cannot themselves “see”, or else there would be no blind people. Souls cannot “hear”, or there would be no deaf people, and so forth. It might be somewhat possible to posit a soul that can read the state of a physical brain and experience what that brain experiences, without too many problems with violating physical laws, although the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle may cause some problems. Nevertheless, let’s agree that this question is at best (or worst) an unresolved one given the current state of scientific knowledge, and move on to the other half of this problem.

How can the soul influence the body? In order for a soul to, for example, order a person to “say something”, it would have to cause a series of neural impulses to be generated that would not otherwise be generated. It would have to somehow cause electrons to flow, or cause chemicals to be released, perhaps even create chemicals and release them into the brain. Regardless of the exact mechanism, it has to influence ordinary matter in some form, either moving it, or creating it. This would require a soul to have a physical presence, that is, to include some matter, or equivalently, to possess or have some sort of energy in the ordinary scientific sense, rather than in the mystical “life energy” sense.

Now, it is just barely possible that some sort of “life energy” exists, and is energy in the same sense that electromagnetic energy is energy. After all, two of the four fundamental forces known to science were only discovered and understood in the 20th century, and gravity is still incompletely understood at best. The so-called “Dark Energy” that features in some recent cosmological theories may be a fifth fundamental force, but that is not yet clear. So there may be a sixth. But a physical form of energy, even one as-yet unknown to science, is not what religious people mean when they talk about souls. I doubt religious people think souls have a quantum-mechanics carrier particle like photons for electromagnetism, or gluons for the strong nuclear force.

If it doesn’t, then there is no scientific way that a soul can interact with matter, as any such interaction would violate several very fundamental laws of physics. The laws that would be violated are so fundamental, so well-established, so basic, that for them to be overturned by some new theory of “soul physics” would be far more surprising than some new theory of geotopology demonstrating that the Earth is not round and doesn’t orbit the sun. EVERYTHING we know about Physics would have to be wrong on such a fundamental level that I cannot conceive of any way that any of our technological wonders that rely on these laws being true could possibly continue to function. Everything we know about neurology and biology and medicine would have to be equally wrong, and the mere fact that any of our medical treatments work would be a coincidence of a monumental scale.

Life after death is an impossibly ridiculous concept. Whether we’re talking about reincarnation, drifting about as ghosts, or eternal bliss in heaven and eternal torment in hell, everything we know about physics, biology, and neuroscience says that life after death is a categorical impossibility.

If there is no life after death, all the major religions I know about have to be wrong on a very fundamental level, because all of them have some concept of an afterlife so deeply embedded in their doctrine that it cannot be excised without altering the overall fabric of that religion beyond all sense of recognition. If these religions are wrong on that fundamental a level, then the various deities they worship do not exist, at least not in the form that those religions hold dear. Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, and Yahweh do not exist, at least not in the forms recognized by Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism, respectively. There can be no reincarnation, so the various eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Shinto are similarly incorrect on a very fundamental level. And there can be no ghosts or disembodied spirits, so even most tribal animism and new-age cults are clearly wrong.

There is still some dim prospect of a vague Deist God existing, but a God who created the universe and then never interfered in it again, not even to the extent of looking after the souls of the departed, cannot answer prayers. Such a God is hardly worthy of the sort of intense worship and praise heaped upon the deities of the various mainstream religions, probably wouldn’t care if we did, and definitely wouldn’t do anything to reward those who did or punish those who didn’t. A “personal relationship” with such a Deity, of the sort that born-again Christians claim they have with Jesus, is a laughable concept. And if and when scientists come up with a theory that convincingly explains how and why the Big Bang happened, even that dim possibility of a Deist god will disappear.