COVID-19

I have a simple-minded suggestion. Test everyone. Then quarantine those who have COVID-19, and let everyone else go about their business. In Wuhan China, where the outbreak has mostly run it's course (according to the Chinese, anyway), the percentage of people infected was 0.11%. Right now the number of people known to be infected in the US is on the order of .001%. Even if you assume that ten times this many people are now infected but not tested yet, you still only have to quarantine on the order of 100,000 people. A lot but easily doable.


I know we don't have enough test kits. But this is a solvable problem. We know how to make them. I would bet that if this were made a major project with money available, we could make enough test kits to test everyone in the US within a week. Of course doing all the testing, and processing all the results would be a major logistical problem. But logistical problems are something the US is good at when we put our minds to it. We won WWII. We built the atomic bomb. We put men on the moon. This is small potatoes in comparison.

I know this is not a perfect solution. There would be people who refuse to be tested. We probably can't force them. Logically they should be quarantined as though they were positive. But there are moral and political issues with this. Also, there are the people we simply can't contact. These people are effectively self quarantined. Finally, there are people who have been exposed, but don't (yet) test positive. I suspect testing would have to be repeated after a week or so. This would depend on how many cases emerge among those who test negative and aren't quarantined.

Another problem that makes the logistics worse is that you have to do all the testing the same day. Otherwise people are infected but not tested yet, can infect people who have already tested negative. The good news is that you don't have to disinfect the whole country. The virus can persist in the environment for only about three hours, and then it's safe to go out.

If all this sounds too daunting, just consider the alternative. What we're doing now is about to destroy the economy. Many businesses will never recover. Those who do will take a long time to return to normal. If the current state of affairs continues too long there is the risk of a total breakdown of society.

What Happened to Micropayments

One of the main forces responsible for the loss of privacy on the internet, at least in the relatively free countries of the west, is advertising. The root of the problem is this: everyone expects that surfing the web will be free. How did this happen? It is a combination of factors.

In the early days of the web, and also in the early days of any particular product, web sites were and are generally experimental, and the designers were loath to charge for letting the public play around with their new ideas. Even Google and Facebook were like that in their early days. Everybody knew, at some level, that they would eventually have to find a way to monetize their product, but that was always something to worry about later.

When later comes, it is obviously almost impossible to expect people to pay for something that they have been getting for free. This is especially true given that people already pay a fairly hefty fee for monthly internet service in their homes. And it's absurd to expect the ISPs to pay content providers without charging higher fees (but I'll have more to say about that model later). The other problem is figuring out how much to charge to read a news article (for example) on the web, and how to manage the payments.

Once the internet reached a certain level of popularity and availability, and especially after the introduction of portable devices (phones and tablets), it was clear that print journalism was pretty much dead. No one wants journalism itself to die, of course, but journalists won't work for free, so what can we do? One daily issue of the New York Times costs $2.50, but it contains hundreds of articles. What should it cost to read one article? A penny? $2.50? A monthly subscription fee? Many professional publications do use the subscription model in order to get unlimited access, but no one wants to pay $10/month just to read one article.

Enter the miracle of advertising. Just like the good old days of print, advertisers will pay you to put ads on your web pages. What's more, they will pay you extra if you can tell them something about your readers, and help to target their preferred demographic to your appropriate articles. They will also pay you in proportion to the popularity of your pages, so in order to increase that you have to pay the aggregators like google to feature your articles in response to queries. This becomes a huge all-consuming monster that feeds off of your personal data. So everybody except you is making money from your data. Of course you do benefit by getting to surf the web for "free". What are the downsides to all this?

First off, there is the blizzard of ads you get on almost every web page. Some of them come with video and audio playing, and it's difficult to figure out how to stop it, short of muting the audio altogether. I am not interested in ads, and if I do notice one, that only makes it less likely that I'll ever buy that product. Even more annoying is the wasted time. The text I want to see would load almost instantaneously, but now I often have to wait 30 seconds or more while all the ads load. They all come from different sites, with high resolution graphics, and each one changes the page layout, so that I have to wait until the page settles down. Occasionally the ads have bugs that may even hang the browser.

Of course some people like the ads, and even those who don't pay much attention to them may find that they enhance the browsing experience by the jazzy addition of color and motion. But consider this. Every ad that you see comes with code that can, and often does, collect information about everything you do on the page, including your keystrokes, and so on. And it can send the information to anyone it wants. Have you noticed how many web pages want to know your location these days? Do you ever wonder why?

All this collection of information about you allows them to show you targeted ads. That is, you'll see more things that you are likely to want or need. This may seem like it's a good thing, but actually it's a bit of a mixed bag. When you buy something you don't need, you are not only cluttering your life, but you are harming the environment both by potentially discarding it into a landfill, and by supporting the pollution and consumption of natural resources associated with its manufacture. Moreover, you are spending money that you might really need for other things. There is nothing really wrong with this, assuming you have real discretionary income. There was a time, not too long ago, when many people did have real discretionary income, but nowadays, most people seem to be struggling to get by, even in a family with two full-time jobs.

One thing you can do is install an ad blocker in your browser. But many sites now detect the use of an ad blocker and force you to turn off the blocker on their site before they will let you see it. This feels a lot like the endless battle between diseases and antibiotics. As soon as we develop an antibiotic that controls a particular disease, the disease finds a way around it.

It seems like there must be some way to make money on the internet without resorting to a blizzard of advertising. The most common model is the subscription. Some publications won't let you read anything without a subscription. But if I just want to read one article, I certainly don't want to pay $10 a month. And once you sign up they make it extremely difficult to cancel. Some sites will let you read two or three articles a month for free, but after that you have to subscribe. This actually works pretty well, but since most people don't subscribe, they have to supplement their income with ads anyway.

The subscription model seems to work pretty well for streaming media, like movies and music. Most people are OK with subscribing to a single source of music, like Spotify, because it can play pretty much any song there is. Movies are another matter though. There are dozens of movie sites now, and they all own the movies they show, so that it you want to see a movie on Netflix, you have to subscribe to Netflix. It would be prohibitive to subscribe to all of the sites that have interesting content. It turns out many people are now sharing their passwords with friends and relatives. I'm sure the media companies will find a way to fight back against this soon.

A more appealing model is to simply pay as you go. On Amazon you can rent a movie for about $5 without a subscription. This is a lot less than the cost of a movie in a theater, and several people can all watch for the same $5. Plus you can watch it multiple times if you want.

What if there were a way to pay a very small amount to visit a page? Personally I would pay 5 cents to visit a page if at first glance it looked interesting. According to one statistic, the average person visits 89 web sites per month. At 5 cents each, this amounts to $53/year. A $10/month subscription is $120/year, and that's only for one site. So $50/year for all the sites combined seems like a pretty good deal. If you write an article and one million people read it, then at 5 cents each, you get $50,000. Not bad for a day's work. And you don't have to fuss with getting ads onto your page, and your readers don't have to see them.

Suppose you could download a "bag" of nickels from your bank. This wouldn't cost you anything. Each nickel would be signed by the bank, and contain your account number, plus a unique number to prevent copying. Websites could ask for one, or maybe more, nickels, and you could instruct your browser as to your personal rules for granting such requests. In addition to limiting the number of nickels that could be paid without approval, you could require that in exchange for payment, the site would not be allowed to display any ads. You could also demand that the site not collect any personal information about you or your usage of the page. Eventually the nickels would end up back at the bank, which would deduct 5 cents each from your account, and pay it to the current holder. In essence the nickels act pretty much like little checks. Plus they can also be passed around among other holders. If you have a web page, and you get a nickel in payment, you can use that nickel to pay for other web page visits.

Unfortunately, even if a scheme such as this could work, it doesn't really solve the fundamental problem of personal privacy. It may prevent web pages and their advertisers from collecting your personal data directly. But it doesn't reduce the monetary value of your data. In the ad-based system, web pages wanted to maximize their traffic, because advertisers would pay more for high-traffic pages. Now they want to maximize their traffic because it pays them directly. Naturally the more they know about their potential users, the more they can target and manipulate their traffic.

Many people happily give their personal information to social websites like Facebook without much thought as to what might be done with it. The very structure of Facebook makes it difficult for them to completely protect access to your data, even if you specifically request that. Many "apps" run on the Facebook platform, and some may pretty much require at least some of your personal data. Facebook can do its best to vet the developers of apps, but it is impossible to actually guarantee that they don't misbehave. Furthermore Facebook may feel that it is safe to sell "anonymized" statistics about it's users. But this is just the information that the most malicious actors want. If you want to sway an election, you want to develop a "map" of users who are most likely to be susceptible to a certain kind of appeal.

But it is not my purpose here to detail this type of abuse. I do want to mention another kind of payment plan that we really really want to avoid. I mentioned earlier that "obviously" your ISP doesn't pay the websites you visit. What if they did? Now that net neutrality is gone, your ISP could block access to these sites unless you subscribe to some package of sites for which you pay an extra fee. Eventually, they could cut off access to the unpaid web altogether, so if you wanted your site to be visible, you would have to get syndicated by the XYZ channel. Perhaps the old "black" web would still be available in some limited form, for an extra fee.

I have to believe that something like this is the wet dream of the big ISPs. It makes the internet be like cable TV, and don't forget that many people get their internet from the same company as their cable TV, so this is a model that they already know and love. I don't imagine that a scheme like this could be imposed overnight. Nobody would stand for it. But somehow it could happen in small steps that each seemed good by itself. Hopefully a strong net neutrality law could avoid this.

Scott Adams endorses Trump!

In a recent post (here) Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert comic strip) announced that he has decided to support Trump. He is not allowing comments on his post, but his rationale is so misguided that I feel compelled to respond, so I'm putting it here.

I guess I should stop reading Dilbert now. Too bad comments are disallowed on that post.

His main beef about Hillary seems to be the estate tax. Big deal. Yes it's double taxation, but so what. Lots of things are double taxed. Corporate dividends are double taxed (the corporation pays tax on its profit, and then you pay tax on the dividends, which come out of profits). Second, who is harmed? People who didn't earn the money in the first place. Third, it doesn't matter because nobody actually pays estate tax anyway. Rich people all have their money in trusts, if they care.

Furthermore, there is no surprise that the platform uses weasel words about taxes. It would be nice if it could be open and transparent, but since nobody wants more taxes, you are never going to see a nice list. The fact that you can find it at all is the best you can expect.

The more important point is that he doesn't seem to realize that Trump is certifiably insane. He is not qualified to "lead" or "persuade" or anything else. Just because Scott Adams doesn't know how to solve ISIS doesn't mean that it's an even call between Hillary and Trump. Hillary probably doesn't know either, so there's some chance she'll screw it up, but not without giving it careful consideration. We know for sure that Trump doesn't know, and it is almost 100% certain that he'll screw it up, because most likely he will do something completely idiotic. He is just a spoiled, narcissistic, overgrown child after all. And keep in mind that congress offers almost no restraint these days on the president's use of the military.

Finally, if Hillary wins it's true that many of us won't exactly be celebrating, but we will all breath a sigh of relief that at least we'll still be able to vote again in four years. But if Trump somehow wins, we will definitely be crying and thinking about going to Canada.

Suicide Bombers

Suicide Bombers

I don't know if it's true, but I have heard that the waiting list at ISIS to be a suicide bomber is so long they can't make bombs fast enough. I'm thinking the draw must be something like this, modeled on the time-share sales method used here.

Ring...ring...Hello...Congratulations, you and your entire family have been selected to spend an eternity of bliss in heaven with Allah, blessed be he. Plus, you'll be greeted by 72 virgins. All you have to do is attend a brief meeting with one of our friendly salesmen, after which we're sure you'll want to begin your stay immediately.

But more seriously, it seems like terrorists in general, and Islamic terrorists in particular, must be suicidal to begin with, because they almost always end up dead, often by their own hand, if not by the police. If you are not a Muslim, you don't get any special percs for killing other people, not to mention that in Christianity, suicide is a sin. Still, you might decide that as long as you are going, you might as well kill some "bad" people while you're at it, like abortion providers or racist police.

But if you are Muslim, and suicidal, a different kind of logic may enter your mind. Not only can you end your suffering by dying, you can get guaranteed entry into heaven, not only for yourself, but for all your close relatives, if you die a martyr by killing infidels in the pursuit of jihad. Most other people in the US and Europe are not only infidels, but they openly break almost every tenet of sharia law, so by killing as many as possible, you are surely a hero of the faith.

Now even if we could somehow wipe out all of the extremist political groups in the middle east and elsewhere, this is not going to prevent Islamic terrorism. The people involved will go underground, and the religion will continue, in all its forms, both extremist and otherwise. The web sites promoting violent jihad will not go away.

So what can we do? It seems impossible to prevent suicide. Suicide is a much more common event than many people realize. Unless you are famous, your suicide will likely receive little publicity, partly because suicide is considered an embarassment to the family. So it seems like the best thing would be to eliminate the chain of logic which leads to a life in heaven. Muslim groups in the US invariably claim that Islam is a religion of peace. This remains to be demonstrated, given its recent history elsewhere in the world. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, the Bible is at least as violent and non-peaceful as the Koran, but it has become mostly peaceful rather recently, by conveniently "deactivating" those parts that call for war, genocide and death.

So how about we plead with Muslims to make sure they all agree that you do not, in fact, go to heaven for killing infidels. Imams should preach it, parents should teach their children, and friends should tell their friends. If they refuse, on the grounds that you actually do go to heaven for killing infidels, then obviously we have a bit of a problem, peace-wise. Alternatively, they may think it silly, because no Muslim in the US would think that, we would need to have a conversation about why that might not be true.

Lets say they do make this effort. I predict that some individuals would openly disagree, asserting that they know better, and that you really do go to heaven. This raises lots of questions about whether we can identify such individuals, and, having done so, what could be done about it. But if we could succeed in getting even this one potential problem on the radar, that would be a huge success, and I predict that other related problems might well come out of the woodwork on the way.

The Magic Show

I wrote this in response to a discussion on another list regarding the "Church of Reality". I was trying to make the point that it is not at all obvious what reality is.

Reality is like a magic show. If the magician is good, all the illusions look absolutely real. Everybody in the audience agrees on what they saw. In a modern audience, everyone knows it was a magic show, and that the magician is just an ordinary person who used illusions and technical tricks to create what you thought you saw. But imagine that we're in a different time and a different place, where part of the audience believes that their eyes don't deceive them, and what they saw is all real. For them, the simplest explanation is that the magician has special powers.

When they leave the theater, the magician goes on to another city and never returns. But there is no reason to to doubt that some of the things that happen in the world are controlled by secretive magicians that they never actually see. It is perfectly obvious to everyone that the earth is flat, the sun and stars go around the earth, and objects in motion invariably slow down and stop. They measure the behavior of the sun and use it to predict when to plant their crops. They don't know why it follows the path it does, but they can certainly predict where it will be in the sky at any given time.

But there are these stubborn people called scientists who refuse to believe in magic, and worse yet, they tell us that nothing we see is actually real. They are always making everything more complicated. When you show them something, they always want to take it apart into smaller and smaller pieces. They never really seem to understand it, but they claim that the tiniest pieces are what is real. They say stuff like “an object in motion stays in motion, and only slows down because of friction”. This doesn't even obey Occam's razor. Then they say that the perfectly hard walls and floor that we can see and feel are mostly empty space. And the little teeny pieces they said everything was made of? Apparently those aren't real either -- instead they are some kind of probability wave. Or maybe it's both. Nobody is really sure. And get this: ninety-five percent of the universe is made of stuff nobody can see. The scientists can't find it, even with their fancy equipment, but they insist it's there somewhere. Sheesh. This is just crazy stuff.

Scientists are never happy with what they've got. Whatever they told us was real last year turns out to be wrong this year. Now the tiny pieces might be even tinier wiggly 11-dimensional strings. But some of them aren't happy with this either. There are some who think that maybe the universe is some kind of cellular automaton with cells the size of the Planck length. Some philosophical types think the universe is some kind of mathematical model, in which everything that can exist does exist, subject only to mathematical consistency. And then there are the loonies who think that the universe could, in theory, but a computer simulation.

Three Thought Experiments On Free Will and Responsibility

A Gun At Your Head

Suppose that a man holds a gun to your head, and tells you to rob a bank or he will shoot you. Regardless of what you think about free will, you can still decide not to rob the bank and be shot. But if you do rob the bank, you won't be responsible because you were coerced.

A Space Alien Controls Your Brain

Suppose there is a space alien in orbit around the earth in an invisible space ship. Suppose that he has some very advanced technology such that he can reach into your brain and control everything you do. He has you rob a bank. Presumably it is clear that you do not have free will, because your actions are controlled by something outside your body. But since nobody knows about the space alien, you will be held responsible for robbing the bank.

Simulating the Future

It is, of course, impossible to simulate (and hence predict) the exact future of everything, because that would require a computer bigger than the entire universe, and it still wouldn't run in real time. But it is still possible to predict localized futures of isolated simple systems for near futures, with high probability. Otherwise we couldn't do science.

The system I describe here is certainly beyond our ability to predict today, but may well be possible some day. You enter a room containing a screen and two buttons, labeled A and B. You are instructed to wait five minutes and then push one of the buttons. As you enter the room, a computer scans your body and various relevant properties of the room. After four minutes, the computer displays “You will push button A” on the screen. After another minute, you push button B. You do this because you believe you have free will, and you think this proves it.

What's wrong with this picture? The computer must simulate the entire five minutes. The simulation must include the display of the result that occurs after four minutes, because it is one of the inputs to the simulation. But it hasn't finished the simulation yet, so it doesn't know what to put into the simulation at that point. If you think this through, you will realize that it is impossible to write such a program.

However, if we take away the screen, and just print the result on a printer outside the room, the problem goes away. There is no reason to believe that such a result could not be computed with better than 99 percent accuracy. When you leave the room, and see the result, you may find it hard to believe that it was printed before you pushed the button, but I'll just leave this for you to ponder.

Is Atheism a Religion

This is something I wrote for another web site, but seems appropriate to post here as well.

Who Cares?

Before trying to answer this question, I thought it might be best to decide who benefits from one answer or the other. The question seems to arise in debate between theists and atheists. At some point the theist asserts that atheism is a religion too. Then the atheist, who had planned, going in, to ask if the theist really believes in a talking snake, takes the bait and ends up spending the rest of the debate defending his or her own beliefs as fundamentally different from theism. And the theist, who, by some strange logic, has accepted the idea that more than half the world believes in some completely different religion, can go home comforted by the idea that atheism is just one more. So mark this one up for the theist.

Now think of the benefits that would accrue if atheism were a religion. First of all, its institutions would be tax-free. As a religion, atheists would no longer be society's outcasts. As it is, atheists are always rated the scariest, most hated group - more so than Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus. But as a religion, maybe Christians would allow their daughters to marry atheists. Even Scientologists want to be a religion. And in that debate, the atheist can simply say yes, you're right, atheism is a religion -- now lets get back to the talking snake.

So with all this going for it, why don't atheists simply declare themselves to be a religion and be done with it? In fact, some do. There is a Church of Reality. The Humanists hold Sunday morning meetings that seem very similar to church services. But in the final analysis, it just doesn't work. Nobody believes that atheism is a religion. Most atheists go ballistic at the suggestion that their belief system is comparable to the absurd mythologies of organized religion. And theists generally don't believe that you can have a religion without a god, even though there are religions, like Buddhism, that have no god. Even that debater probably doesn't really think that atheism is a religion -- it was just a rhetorical device to help win the debate.

So if neither side believes that atheism is a religion, are we done? Isn't the answer no? It may just be that this is the best answer we can give. Still, this nagging question keeps coming up in debates, and to answer it with “nobody believes that” somehow doesn't cut it. So it would be nice if we had a simple, logical analysis that would answer the question definitively. In order to get that, of course we need ...

Definitions, definitions, definitions

At the very least, we'll need definitions for religion and atheism. Since the answer to the question will depend on how we define the terms, it may be difficult to make definitions that both sides agree to. But lets see what happens.

Religion is Theism

Suppose we simply define religion as belief in a god or gods, i.e. theism. Then if atheism is a religion, we would have theism equals a-theism, and this is nonsense. Surprisingly, this doesn't end the debate. When the theist claims that atheism is a kind of religion, what he really means is that atheists aren't really atheists. In this argument, the atheist instead believes in the god of science, or the god of logic, or the god or rationality. This amounts to a definition of god, of course, and under this definition the term atheist becomes vacuous, since everybody believes in something. So the definition of religion as theism is either trivially true or trivially false. Moreover, it leaves out the religions, like Buddhism, that have no gods.

Religion is Faith

Religious people commonly agree that they are willing to live without evidence for God, because they have faith. Atheists are OK with this because they have neither belief nor faith in God. Now the theist may claim that the atheist has faith in science, and since faith is the essence of religion, atheism is a religion. At this point, the atheist can make a couple of different counter-arguments. One is to play with the words faith, belief and trust. In this argument, faith is the kind of blind belief that the religious have, whereas trust is the relationship that one has with science. This is a weak argument, however, because these words are all pretty squishy. One could spend the rest of the debate coming to some agreement over their precise semantics.

A better counter is simply to say that atheism has nothing to do with what someone does believe, only what they don't. This really ought to answer the question. Since the atheist has no faith, atheism is not a religion. But the theist may not give up so easily. Since the atheist cannot prove that god does not exist, it can be argued that the atheist must have a kind a faith in the non-existence of god. The atheist can counter this with the claim that faith is not required. No atheist thinks it is 100% certain that there is no god, but that a logical analysis of the evidence shows that the probability is very low. Furthermore, it actually is rather trivial to prove that the major monotheistic gods (Yahweh and Allah) are logically impossible.

Religion is Dogmatic, Close-minded, Emotional and Irrational

This may sound like a blatant accusation leveled at theists by atheists, in order to compromise their position in a debate. But before you leap to this conclusion, it turns out it's not that simple. First of all, many theists would agree with some of these claims. Secondly, many atheists may be guilty of some of these attributes as well, even though they may try to deny it.

Consider dogmatism. The word itself is most commonly associated with religion. Every organized religion has its central dogma, which is the stories that comprise its sacred texts. One cannot remain a Christian and deny the story of Jesus. So there is no question that religion is dogmatic. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows people to accept certain “truths” and move on. Are atheists dogmatic? One could regard “there are no gods” as the dogma of atheism. However, this doesn't really seem right. First of all, most atheists arrive at this conclusion of their own accord -- it is not imposed upon them. Second, most atheists do not regard it as a certainty, but as subject to revision by possible future observation. Sometimes theists will assert that atheists are dogmatic because science is sometimes dogmatic. Although it is true that dogma is often found in science (for example “Darwinian evolution is a central dogma of biology”) science is not actually part of atheism. I think we can conclude that dogmatism is a characteristic that distinguishes religions from atheism.

Are theists close-minded? Yes, of course. They might feel offended by this characterization, because they don't feel close-minded in areas other than religion. But it is simply implied by faith. Faith trumps everything. No argument can change your mind. Are atheists close-minded? Theists sometimes say so. They see so many compelling arguments in favor of god, not to mention the masses of humanity that are religious that in their mind it is close-minded not to at least “try it”. Perhaps they don't realize that most atheists have already tried it and found it wanting.

There is another way in which atheism might be regarded as close-minded. If one day there were evidence for some kind of god, we wouldn't easily accept it. We would make every attempt to debunk it. We would prefer to doubt it until it was proven to be valid beyond all reasonable doubt. And even then, we wouldn't respond by going to church to worship and pray. We would study it like any other natural phenomenon, such as attempting to communicate if that seemed appropriate. Personally, I would count this as a kind of open-mindedness, but your mileage may differ.

Is religion emotional? Emphatically yes, and proud of it! Theists sometimes use this as a kind of proof of God's existence. They will say “I feel God's love”, or “I love Jesus”, and then ask how they could love or be loved by something non-existent. Another favorite is “it is important to fear hell or you can't be moral”. Their next step is to to accuse atheists of being cold and unemotional and furthermore of using faulty logic because it fails to take account of emotion. All of these claims are false of course. The details are beyond the scope of this essay, except to point out that logic certainly can take account of emotion, but you can't draw conclusions directly from emotions. Just because something feels true doesn't make it true.

Are atheists emotional? In general, they are just as emotional as anybody else. Are they emotional about religion? Most atheists try to keep emotion out of their arguments about religion. But otherwise, I think there is plenty of emotion involved. Much has been written recently about the “angry atheists”. This may be somewhat overstated, but I think it is there. In addition, there is often pride and passion about being “enlightened”. And, of course there is fear of punishment by the religious majority, especially in theocracies. I think it would be fair to say that atheists are more emotional about their position than theists often are. So in this respect, atheism is kind of like a religion.

Is religion irrational? It might seem that faith is irrational by definition. Despite this, there are theists who feel that their religion is completely rational. Others, however, admit that they are irrational, and say that this is a good thing, arguing that rationality is not the only way to discover truth. Somehow they never quite get around to explaining what the other ways are. They seem to involve either accepting a logical argument as true even if it is shown to be false; or accepting something as true because it feels like it must be true.

Atheists, on the other hand, put rationality on a sort of pedestal. It's kind of like the coach of an amateur sports team, trying to comfort the players after a loss by saying “winning isn't everything”. The professional player, however, says “winning isn't everything -- it's the only thing”. Atheists are the professional rationalists. It is worth examining this more closely in order to avoid certain misunderstandings that may arise. Lets say that a theist makes some assertion about his god. The atheist may have a kind of visceral reaction to the effect that “I know that must be false -- what should I say?”. There follows a heated discussion which is inconclusive. Later, the atheist manages to construct the definitive proof that the assertion was false. We can see that this proof is a kind of rationalization of the original gut reaction. The theist can, with some validity, claim that the atheist is just as irrational about his belief in no gods as the theist is in his belief in his god. The reality is that this is just human nature. Rationality is the end result of a complex emotional and social process. The difference is that the atheist can get there, and the theist cannot.

So religion is demonstrably dogmatic, close-minded, emotional and irrational. While atheists are also emotional, it takes a real stretch of reasoning to find them dogmatic, close-minded or irrational. So by these characteristics, it would appear that atheism is not a religion.

Religion Is Belief in the Supernatural

Not convinced yet? Here is one last argument. In the stone age, people apparently couldn't form the idea of things following mechanical rules, or even the idea of one thing controlling other things. To them, everything was “alive”, and the non-human things were “gods”. So the sun god wasn't a separate entity that controlled the sun. The sun was a god. Later, as people learned to control some things themselves, they got the idea that there were more powerful human-like beings who controlled the things they didn't understand, which was still pretty much everything. These gods lived on the earth, but somewhere inaccessible to men. Later yet, as they developed hierarchical power structures of their own, they decided there was just one chief god. This god was still human-like, but lived in the sky somewhere. He still controlled everything, spoke to people regularly, and did miracles. This idea of god is still with us today. As science progresses, people no longer thing he controls everything, but, depending on who you talk to, he still controls some things, and may speak to people, and perform minor miracles. He still lives in a place that is inaccessible to humans. Since humans now have access to every place on earth and in space, this place must be somewhere that is not part of the natural world. We call this the supernatural.

Lots of other phenomena also seem to exist in the supernatural, like ghosts and ESP. Religious people don't necessarily believe in all of these, but most believe in a heaven and hell that are in the supernatural, where dead people go. Also souls may live partly or wholly in the supernatural. There are religions that have no gods, but as far as I know, they all believe in something supernatural. In my mind, this as the essential definition of religion.

Needless to say, atheists do not believe in the supernatural. An atheist might believe in ESP, since that doesn't necessarily have to do with gods, but if so, it would be as a natural phenomenon, not supernatural. I could stop here, and say that this proves that atheism is not a religion. But I can't resist going on and showing that...

The Supernatural Either Doesn't Exist Or Is Irrelevant

At one level, the proof of this is completely trivial. It is true by definition. The natural world consists of everything we can observe. So something supernatural is something we cannot observe. That means it can have no effect whatsoever. There is nothing to prevent the existence of such a thing. Think of it as some kind of parallel universe. Real scientists talk about such things a lot these days. But if it is truly unobservable, then it is irrelevant, since it can have no effect on anything. It might as well be non-existent. QED.

So if a theist agrees that there is no evidence for god, so you just have to have faith, that is actually nonsense. No-one can know what to have faith in if there is no evidence. Now you can start discussing what he thinks the evidence is. Theists commonly believe that god influences their minds in some way. Lets say he helps guide moral decisions. Regardless of what you think about how the mind/soul works, it can ultimately connect to your mouth, tongue, and vocal chords, and you can discuss moral decisions with me. This would give me a channel to god. This shows that god, if he exists, cannot be entirely supernatural.

At this point, you can begin to evaluate the evidence and see if it makes a convincing case for the existence of a god. If not, then the theist cannot fall back on the faith argument. He can, and probably will, disagree about the quality of the evidence. Perhaps someday brain science will show that all of the purported godly influences on the mind actually originate in the brain. Will that end the argument? Probably not. But I do hope that I have made a convincing case here that atheism is not a religion.