I am pleased to report that our Fox Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown, hosted by myself and Mitch Pileggi from X-Files, was officially renewed today for another cycle of six one-hour episodes. The show currently is airing reruns on Friday nights at 10:00pm on Fox Family. I am uncertain if we will be in the same time slot or another, but will let you all know when the new shows are ready to air. I was informed by our friend, supporter, and VP at Fox Family that we can be even more daring in this next batch, including bumping up against religious claims. So all those ideas and potential guests you provided me months ago will now come in handy. Other ideas and potential guests are welcome.

This reminder from the Rationalist International of Giordano Bruno's death 400 years ago today, a reminder to us all of the lengths to which some people and institutions will go to protect their "truths."

RATIONALIST INTERNATIONAL
Bulletin # 31
17 February 2000
Editor: Sanal Edamaruku
Address: P.O.Box 9110, New Delhi-110091, India.
Telephone: +91-11-2253255, Fax: +91-11-84539526
E-mail: edamaruku@yahoo.com

Today Is The 400th Anniversary Of The Martyrdom Of Giordano Bruno

Today, 17th February 2000, is the 400th anniversary of the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno who was burnt alive at the stake in Campo de' Fiori square in Rome. Bruno wass. He was killed by an order of the Holy Office, in the Holy Year of Jubilee under the reign of Clement VIII, pontiff of the Holy Roman church. Late in the 19th century, a statue to the cause of freethought was erected on the site of his martyrdom, where his death is commemorated every year with a public demonstration, which was forbidden only during the period of fascism.

Bruno, Italian renaissance philosopher, scientist and poet, was born in 1548 at Nola, near Naples. Originally named Filippo, he took the name Giordano when he joined the Dominicans, who trained him in Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology. An independent thinker, he fled the order in 1576 to avoid a trial on doctrinal charges, and began the wandering that characterised his life.

Bruno visited Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, and London, where he spent two years, from 1583 to 1585, under the protection of the French ambassador and in the circle of the English poet Sir Philip Sidney, during which he composed "Ash Wednesday Supper" (1584) and "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds" (1584), as well as the dialogue "On the Cause, Principle, and Unity" (1584). A major part of his work, however, seems to be lost. Some believe that it is kept hidden in the Vatican archives.

In 1585 Bruno returned to Paris, then went on to Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt, where he arranged the printing of his many works. It was on the invitation of a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Moncenigo, that Bruno returned to Italy. The same Moncenigo denounced Bruno to the Inquisition in 1592, which tried him for heresy. Turned over to the Roman authorities, he was imprisoned for some eight years while questioning proceeded on charges of heresy. Refusing to recant, Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo de' Fiori, undressed with a nail piercing his tongue, on February 17, 1600.

Bruno is considered a forerunner of modern philosophy because of his influence on the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and his anticipation of the theories of 17th-century monism.

The Associazione Nazionale del Libero Pensiero 'Giordano Bruno' is organising this year, together with like-minded organisations united in the Secular and Libertarian Committee, a three day programme with speeches, music and theatrical presentations from today till 19th of February culminating in a great demonstration at the Campo de' Fiori square.

Rationalist International Bulletin # 31 may be reproduced, forwarded or quoted from, by recipients if they wish. Please acknowledge the source while reproducing: "Rationalist International Bulletin # 31".

In December I hosted a symposium on Carl Sagan at Caltech with William Poundstone and Keay Davidson, his two biographers, discussing his life and impact. Here's the URL:
http://www.booktv.org/ram/biography/review/0100/btv012900v_2.ram

Skeptical Inquirer
By Michael Novak

Sunday, February 13, 2000
HOW WE BELIEVE
The Search for God in an Age of Science
By Michael Shermer
W.H. Freeman. 302 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Michael Novak

Although Michael Shermer is a professional atheist -- public debater, television guest, editor of Skeptic magazine -- and although religious people frequently irritate him, he bends over backwards to be as fair as he can, and he makes important concessions. Having read this book in early draft, one of his friends, an atheist and a scientist, said to him: "You seem to be saying that it's okay for people to believe in God." Shermer concedes that he does -- as long as religious people don't claim to prove that there is a God. As long as they stay outside the bounds of what Shermer considers "reason," his attitude toward them is inclusionary; he even has a couple of them on his board of editors at Skeptic.

Shermer is a retailer of atheist thought, not a creator, and a journeyman debater rather than an inventor of new insights, but he is not without originality. For instance, with academic help, he conducted two empirical surveys exploring what people believe about God and why, and one of these sampled 1,700 readers of Skeptic magazine, a surprising number of whom do believe in God (while even larger numbers think well of the good effects of religion).

Shermer's studies show that those who believe in God generally do so for intellectual reasons -- a sense of design in the universe or harmony in themselves -- yet, ironically, hold that most others believe in God for emotional reasons, comfort, say, or consolation. (This finding seems typical of political beliefs, too; most people, even in print, seem to suggest that their own views are rational and those of others emotional or self-interested.)

Shermer divides his book into two parts, the first on the surprising universality and persistence of belief and why people believe, and a brief survey of the 10 traditional arguments for the existence of God and their weaknesses. Shermer concludes that believers want to make belief in God rational but fail to do so; he argues that they should be content to have faith, to make a leap of faith. He points out to atheists that this instinct is part of human nature, and that the thesis that the increasingly educated world is becoming secular, the facts show, is false. He argues that it is likely to remain false; human nature tends toward religious belief. This, he insists, is not because religion gives true knowledge -- for Shermer, only naturalistic science does that -- but because it satisfies needs. For him, "faith" is not knowledge but hope, comfort, other satisfactions, all very good in their place.

In part two, Shermer tries to separate the two realms, religion and science, by confining each one to its place, and by offering some theories about why religion persists: the human storytelling impulse, the connections of stories and myth to morals, the persistence of oppression and hope for a messiah, etc. In his last chapter, he lovingly defends Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History against its critics; for Gould's poetic sense of the cosmos as a "glorious accident" and a brilliant, scintillating arena of chains of contingency and self-organizing complexes, contingently but deeply affected by their circumstances and their history, profoundly touches his mind and heart. Shermer is intent on keeping a sense of the sacred and the wondrous for atheism, too, and here Gould is a good friend. For Gould is not the old-fashioned rationalist in love with cold logic and its icy causal necessities but a newer sort of priest, whose vision is of fire, streaking meteorites, stunning happenstance, and darkling connections of chance.

Shermer is also forthright about his own biography: how he was a bored adolescent and then was converted to Christ, witnessed (albeit uncomfortably) to others during his college years at Pepperdine, and then was converted to atheism by later readings in philosophy and science. He retains a kindness toward his religious past, pointing out in various contexts how many acts of generosity and goodness spring from faith and must be counted in the balance against the historical evils typically attributed to religion by its secular opponents.

His book is unusually useful, but perhaps for a reason the author did not intend. It sheds unique light on the interior life of a well-informed atheist today, and may foreshadow a new spirit of amity and mutual inquiry. By Shermer's account, atheists, non-theists ("don't believe, don't deny"), and theists have a great deal in common. We all try to understand human origins and our place in the cosmos. "In fact," he writes, "science is a type of myth, if we think of myths as stories about ourselves and our origins (and not in the pejorative sense of myths as things 'untrue'). Many gain considerable emotional, even 'spiritual,' satisfaction from reading scientific articles and books by geologists about the creation of the Earth. . . and especially by cosmologists about the origins of the universe. Tens of millions of people watched Carl Sagan's 1980 Cosmos series with rapt attention."

I wish Shermer had shown as much care in trying to understand the arguments of, say, Aquinas as he does in ferreting out what Gould must have meant by "contingency." It takes some work to understand what "mover" meant in the 13th century and what it might mean in modern terms. Is not the "self-organizing complex" of Stuart Kauffman, whom Shermer describes as "one of the pioneers ... in explaining the self-organization of complex systems," a kind of "unmoved mover"? Not exactly, but the lead is worth following up; analogies spring to mind. Perhaps, too, one should not think of "movement" as physical but intellectual, like the unrelenting drive to inquire, and of "unmoved" as understanding at rest, when all questions have been answered. One should not so easily believe that intellectuals of the 13th century were as simpleminded as Shermer's replies to their arguments require.

Finally, it is a mark of Shermer's generosity of spirit that he pays respectful attention to two statements by Pope John Paul II, one in favor of evolutionary science and the encyclical "Faith and Reason." Yet here, too, Shermer finds "contradictions" where a little more study would carry him to a viewpoint from which he could see the distinctions at stake. For instance, when the pope praises "science" in one passage and warns against "scientism" in another, he means two quite different things. Science is a method for gaining important forms of knowledge; scientism is the reduction of all forms of knowing to scientific method.

Shermer certainly comes perilously close to the latter. Still, he tries valiantly to maintain a sense of the sublime, the sacred, even the mystical, as in describing his exchange of eternal love with his soulmate over lit candles inside Chartres Cathedral, or standing "beneath a canopy of galaxies, atop a pillar of reworked stone, or inside a transept of holy light," when "my unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint" and was "emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition, and unyoked from the rules written for another time in another place and for another people." The beauty of being Shermer is that he faces no Judge, undeceivable, transcendent of nature, and within him as well as beyond him; and stands in no long pilgrim community, struggling down the ages, falling, rising, and throwing cathedrals like Chartres up against the sky cathedrals. He is a free rider.

Michael Novak is the author of "Belief and Unbelief," "The Experience of Nothingness" and, with his daughter Jana, "Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions about God."

Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company

Pertaining to an earlier post where I briefly referenced a USA Today article about how many atheists and agnostics there are in America, here is the actual Study from the Barna Research Group. I post a second article I think may be of interest to this group.

Atheists and Agnostics Infiltrating Christian Churches

October 15, 1999
A new study from the Barna Research Group of Ventura, California shows that hundreds of thousands of adults who are atheists or agnostics attend Christian churches. Their presence in churches raises a question of interpretation: is their attendance reason to rejoice, because the "mission field" is being attracted to the church, or reason for discouragement, because believers and seekers are losing faith?

The survey data also question the commitment of atheists and agnostics to their faith stand. One portion of the study, conducted during the week following Easter, found that the number of atheists and agnostics who attend Christian churches swells to six times the norm on Easter Sunday. In a typical weekend, about 2% of atheists and agnostics attend Christian church services. On Easter Sunday this year, 12% of that segment - about a million and a half adults - attended a Christian church service.

The Barna study shows that roughly 7% of the adult population - approximately 14 million people - describe themselves as atheistic or agnostic. America has more atheists and agnostics than Mormons (by a 3 to 1 margin), Jews (by a 4 to 1 margin) or Muslims (by a 14 to 1 margin).

The study also discovered that many of these individuals describe themselves incorrectly. Many atheists are actually agnostics - they believe in some type of deity, but are indifferent about the existence of a divine being. (A significant share of those people believes that humans actually possess the power or qualities of gods.) Likewise, many self-proclaimed agnostics are actually atheists - individuals who contend that there is no deity of any type.

Many atheists and agnostics possess theological perspectives that parallel the beliefs of Christians. This may be due to past involvement in Christian churches or to the influence of the Bible (six out of ten own one, one out of three read the Bible during the year). Most atheists and agnostics believe that Heaven exists - although most of them also contend that one gets there on the basis of good deeds. Some believe that the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches (13%); that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life (17%); and that Satan is a living force that influences people's lives (15%). About one out of five atheists and agnostics (19%) pray to God during a typical week.

Demographically, Barna's research indicates that atheists and agnostics are dominated by men (64%), adults under 35 (51%), whites (71%) and residents of the Northeast and West (56%). College graduates are more likely than the norm to reject God (34% qualify as atheists or agnostics). Adults who say they are politically liberal were much more likely than conservatives to be atheists or agnostics. Notice, however, that one out of every five non-faith adults were politically conservative.

George Barna, president of the company that conducted the research, said, "Church leaders need to understand this group better. They come from two divergent perspectives: those who are indifferent about God's existence and those who doubt it altogether. Both groups, however, have many who are struggling to find meaning in life, to have significant relationships with other people, to influence the lives of others, and to live a moral life - the very types of issues that Christian churches strive to address. The better Christian ministries can help atheists and agnostics understand that the answers they are seeking are ultimately spiritual in nature, the more opportunities those ministries will have to enable them to find meaning through Christianity. Atheists and agnostics often have a dormant interest in faith, as evidenced by the three out of ten who say 'religious faith is very important' in their life today. The challenge is to make the Christian faith relevant, practical and comprehensible to them."

Survey Methodology
The data described above are from telephone interviews with a nationwide random sample of 2755 adults, among whom 192 described themselves as atheistic or agnostic. The maximum margin of sampling error associated with that segment is +8 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All of the interviews were conducted from the Barna Research Group telephone interviewing facility in Ventura, CA. Adults in the 48 continental states were eligible to be interviewed and the distribution coincided with the geographic dispersion of the U.S. adult population. Multiple callbacks were used to increase the probability of including a reliable distribution of adults.

The Barna Research Group, Ltd. is an independent marketing research company located in southern California. Since 1984 it has been studying cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. This research was funded solely by Barna Research as part of its regular tracking of attitudes, values and behavior.

If you would like to receive a bi-weekly update on the latest research findings from the Barna Research Group, you may subscribe to this free service (the Barna Update) at the top of this page. A Demographic Profile of American Atheists and Agnostics, Compared to the General Adult Population (base: 2755 adults)

Christians Are More Likely to Experience Divorce Than Are Non-Christians

December 21, 1999

(Ventura, CA) Divorce may not be popular, but it remains common in America. A new study by the Barna Research Group (Ventura, CA) shows that one out of every four Americans adults have experienced at least one divorce. One of the surprising outcomes to emerge from the study is that born again Christians are more likely to go through a marital split than are non-Christians. Using statistics drawn from nationwide survey interviews with nearly 4000 adults, the data show that although just 11% of the adult population is currently divorced, 25% of all adults have experienced at least one divorce during their lifetime. Among born again Christians, 27% are currently or have previously been divorced, compared to 24% among adults who are not born again. (Because of the large sample size involved, that difference is statistically significant.)

Who Gets Divorced?
What may be just as surprising are some of the statistics related to various population groups. For instance, while Baby Boomers have been widely criticized for their selfishness and their inattention to family needs in favor of career pursuits, the generation for which divorce is most prevalent is not the Boomers but the generation that preceded them--the Builders.

Thirty seven percent of the adults from that generation, who are presently from 53 to 72 years of age, have endured a divorce, compared to 34% among Boomers. In fact, one might argue that it was Builders who initially popularized divorce. Evidence of that is found in a comparison of the incidence of divorce among the Builders (37%) and among those of the generation that preceded them (the Seniors--18%). To date, only 7% of Busters have been divorced, but that is largely because most of them have yet to be married for the first time. Other surprises included regional, ethnic and denominational differences.

Divorce is much less likely in the Northeast than elsewhere. Only 19% of the residents of the Northeast have been divorced, compared to 26% in the West and 27% in both the South and the Midwest. A higher proportion of whites gets divorced (27%) than is true among African-Americans (22%) or Hispanics (20%). The eye-opener is that only 8% of Asians get divorced--just one-third the incidence found among whites.

Among the characteristics that do not seem to be related to divorce are educational achievement, household income, and political ideology.

Faith and Divorce
Surprisingly, the Christian denomination whose adherents have the highest likelihood of getting divorced are Baptists. Nationally, 29% of all Baptist adults have been divorced. The only Christian group to surpass that level are those associated with non-denominational Protestant churches: 34% of those adults have undergone a divorce. Of the nation's major Christian groups, Catholics and Lutherans have the lowest percentage of divorced individuals (21%). People who attend mainline Protestant churches, overall, experience divorce on par with the national average (25%).

Among non-Christian groups the levels vary. Jews, for instance, are among those most likely to divorce (30% have), while atheists and agnostics are below the norm (21%). Mormons, renowned for their emphasis upon strong families, are no different than the national average (24%). A related survey recently completed by Barna Research among a nationwide sample of Protestant senior pastors showed that just 15% of pastors have ever been divorced.

A Reaction to the Research
These findings were both expected and surprising, according to George Barna, president of the firm that conducted the study. "The national statistics have remained the same for the past half-decade. While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages.

Barna also noted that the impact of such widespread divorce has left its mark on young people. "One of the most striking findings in our recent survey among teenagers is that when we asked them to name their top goals for the future, one of the highest-rated was to get married and have the same spouse for their entire life. That's a remarkable goal--one that reflects their own exposure to, and rejection of, a family that has to survive divorce, for whatever reasons. Since millions of those teens have never had a healthy marriage modeled for them, we can only pray that they will have the strength of character and the support systems available to make their goal a reality.

Survey Methodology
These findings are based upon telephone interviews conducted throughout 1999 with random national samples of adults. In total, 3854 adults from the 48 continental states were interviewed. The estimated sampling error for the aggregate data is +2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

All of the interviews were conducted from the Barna Research Group telephone interviewing facility. Households were selected randomly through a random-digit dialing procedure (RDD), with just one adult interviewed per household. Quotas were also deployed to ensure accurate regional distribution and minor statistical weighting was used to ensure that the samples reflected national demographic norms. Multiple callbacks were used to increase the probability of selecting a representative sample of households.

The Barna Research Group, Ltd. is an independent marketing research company located in Ventura, California. Since 1984 it has been studying cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. This research was funded solely by Barna Research as part of its regular tracking of attitudes, values and behavior. Future data releases of this nature may be obtained at no cost by subscribing to The Barna Update, a free bi-weekly e-mailing of new data drawn from Barna Research Group studies. To subscribe, log onto www.barna.org and enter your email in the subscription field on the upper left-hand portion of any page.