No, theists (and I am excluding fundamentalists, Mohammedans, and seven-day creation literalists here), do not claim to know what happened at creation. They simply recognize that there was a singular moment of creation, at which point time, space, and all matter came into being: this is a point that anyone who is not vainly scratching out preposterous "string theories" agrees on. This does not "prove" that God exists, although it certainly points in that direction, and does not point in the direction of UFO's or flying spaghetti monsters (which is too bad, as flying spaghetti monsters would be very interesting). We need more to base a belief in God on than that, certainly. And I will try to post something on that tomorrow night. I have a million projects to do today, and have probably already spent more time than I should here.

And anyone who says that God created God is in need of some remedial logic instruction.

They don't take kids under their wing?

Really? Public schools don't count, then? As for the "centuries-long global child sex abuse ring" - you will have to provide a little evidence for that. And for cover-ups, is there any organization that airs its problems in public without external coersion? Besides, of course, the Nixon administration, which was pure and perfect in all of its dealings (shit, I am channeling Lazlo Toth again).

You do realize that the numbers involved here show much less malfeasance within the church than the general population? The reason it has gotten so much press is that people (particularly stupid ex-Catholic Irish-American journalists in Boston) expect (for some reason, probably attributable to a complete lack of knowledge of Renaissance history) the clergy to be perfect. They aren't and never have been, but in the whole, the problem is just not as big as the amount of press it has gotten.

RE: "we must look to whether or not the observable evidence points to a singularity of creation (prime mover, first cause, etc.), or even admits the possibility of one."

Sure, it admits the possibility of one, but it admits the possibility of UFOs and flying spaghetti monsters as well. If I'm getting you right, it sounds like you've decided that there might be a god, so let's all worship one.

I don't pretend to know what happened/existed before the big bang, and why should I, unless the science points to a plausible theory? The difference is that theists *do* pretend to know what happened at "creation", even as they have no more information than I do.

And if god invented everything, then what created god? Usually the answer is "god did". Are you happy with that kind of logic?

RE: "of course sexual misbehavior originated and remains the exclusive provenance of the church. You never find this stuff in government or big business or..."

Of course not. But govts and big business don't take kids under their wing as a part of their mandate. And to my knowledge they haven't been caught tacitly condoning a centuries-long global child sex abuse ring, or worse, engaging in a conspiracy to keep such an atrocity under wraps.

RE: religion and national IQ

This guy gets into the issue at the personal (as opposed to national) level, quoting academics who find a negative correlation of nearly 0.9:

http://govar.blogspot.com/2006/12/iq-and-religion.html

Which doesn’t prove that religion makes people less smart per se (although I’d imagine there’s a significant opportunity cost in devoting time to bible study vs. the range of other subjects), but according to my short search on Google Scholar, many studies have shown over even a fairly small sample group, religiosity is a reliable predictor of a statistically significant comparatively lower IQ.

Here’s a long list of academic studies with lots of different approaches that all come to the same conclusion, again on the individual level:

http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm

The study quoted here finds nearly the same .9 number when comparing national IQ and national level of religiosity:

http://w-uh.com/posts/031226a-religion_vs_IQ.html

And this one’s got an interesting scatter plot that shows something similar:

http://hypnosis.home.netcom.com/iq_vs_religiosity.htm

RE: Andy Kaufman (I had spelled it incorrectly): he was a 1980’s comedian that some people call dadaistic. He played characters that took extreme Right positions on controversial issues, and made fun of minority groups and women without ever getting out of character, which angered many who didn’t get the joke (if it was a joke).

http://www.google.com/search?q=andy+kauffman&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

RE: HIV and AIDS: I wish that the christians’ oft-refuted unscientific illogic about condoms were the only problem. But there’s a bigger issue in their insistence on a code of silence around the functions of the human body, and sex especially. Young people need accurate information about their bodies and sexual health. An adolescent in the developed world has access to the internet, to sex ed, and other sources of information about sex, even if their parents or their church are squeamish in talking about it.

But in places where information is difficult to obtain, kids are extremely vulnerable to early pregnancy, rape and sexual violence, forced marriage, and the whole range of sexually transmitted diseases. Thus you have countries with huge AIDS mortality leading to massive productivity losses and more poverty where people were already poor.

“Maybe they should be less promiscuous,” goes the logic. But telling a 16-year-old not to engage in or think about or learn about or sex is like telling a bird not to fly. You might find a few that obey, but the vast majority won’t.

Being drivers of many important humanitarian and development projects, churches are engaged in social engineering. They have a special responsibility to face the reality, and some of them do. But others, yours included, continue to deny the needed services, and worse, to block others from doing so as well, in the form of lobbying donor governments.

Good Lord you are into the scattershot approach.

Let us start with AIDS. I have heard this before: the Church is the cause of people dying of AIDS because it teaches them not to use condoms. So, we must assume that the people who are following the church's teachings are the ones dying of AIDS? Well, that can't be, because abstinence is safer than condoms. So...which is it? People have AIDS because they were listening to the church? Half-listening? Not listening?

Child-buggering conspiracy? Yes, of course sexual misbehavior originated and remains the exclusive provenance of the church. You never find this stuff in government or big business or...

Writing one's own moral code? Should we start by creating our very being as well? Because ultimately morality and ethics is rooted in ontology. If not it is so arbitrary that it might as well be created by each of us. Are you really up for that? It sounds wonderful, insofar as one might read Rousseau and sigh, "ah, yes," but it is an impossibility.

Anti-intellectual geezers in pajamas? The anti-intellectual card wears thin when you are talking of the likes of Ratzinger, Maritain, von Balthasar, McInerny (if a church can elevate an Irishman into this august company, it must be doing something right). And are you really willing to tilt at the windmill with the lance of materialism? You do realize that it is a completely closed system, is utterly deficient in any metaphysical method, and forces you back into accepting one of two possible conclusions - that time and the universe have no beginning (against observed nature) or that matter created itself out of nothing (not only a violation of the laws of physics, but a peculiar violation that seems to have only happened once). Like your athiests list of gods, I can list the entire physical universe on both of our columns, all of the results of observed scientific discovery and reason, but I also get the metaphysical tools to hold it together.

OK, you don't like my example. Provide your own, then, with evidence. I still am looking for the meat of the "smarter societies are less religious" argument. I suspect that it is not there.

Yes, they changed the rules, but not in the 16th century, rather the first, when everything changed so much they had to create a whole new Scripture. The sticker would be even more sensational. Also the Mormon example is a fairly common misunderstanding of their position. I am, of course, strongly anti-Mormon, but I will admit that they had a more nuanced position. You see, they never were sure if the stricture was against caffeine or not, because Joe Smith warned only against "hot beverages." It was generally assumed that he meant coffee and tea, and thus had a hard on against caffeine, but there were strains that included soup in the ban while drinking caffeinated cold drinks, seeing the heat as the warning.

And please tell me more about this Kauffman. I have never read him? Is there a particular book I should read?

I hope you don’t think I’m any less impressed with catholicism than any other cult; it’s just that catholicism is the main subject of your blog.*

But by dint of its enormous (albeit quickly waning, thanks to the equally cro-magnon evangelical movement) popularity, your chosen cult is certainly special in not only being the one that contributed the most to the early deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Africans from AIDS in the last 20 years, but also in being the one that made an enormous contribution to systems management theory in the form of a global child-buggering conspiracy that lasted, who knows, 500 years?

In response to the latter, once the veil of secrecy (always a productive force in human societies) was lifted back with crowbars and subpoenas, naturally the church responded with denials and non-statements until they had their asses handed to them in courts across the See.

As usual, the gayest people in the world are the most homophobic, and the most obsessed with the appearance of morality are the first to get caught with their pants down. I’m not trying to say that you’re some kind of a child-f__ker, too, but Dude! These are the cats you run with!

You’re as smart as anyone I know, Erik; if you want to live by a moral code, why not sit down and write one? Why do you need to kowtow to some invisible superman in the sky? Why do you need to subject yourself to the intellectual somersaults that are required to accept such puerile nonsense as creationism, virgin birth, Adam and Eve (such a lowbrow anti-woman meme!), talking snakes, walking on water, rising from the grave, on and on and on?

And if you are hell-bent on believing in a god (bad linguistic device, I know), why do you need a bunch of anti-intellectual geezers in pajamas to tell you the right way to do it? Are you craving discipline? Why not just hire a beefy personal trainer and get in shape?

Ya’ll got a virus of the mind, bro.

RE: Post-war Italy vs. a totalitarian regime: Statistical outliers aren't real useful as a test against the rest of the human societies we've known.

RE: Shrimp: They changed the rules? Awesome! I can see the yellow sticker on the covers of bibles at the 16th century book monger’s shop: “Revised edition: Now with more food options!” By humans, for humans, indeed. Reminds me of when the Mormons suddenly took away the stricture against caffeinated drinks because a few powerful elders wanted the cult to acquire a giant stake in PepsiCo.

*which I’m still not sure isn’t really written by Andy Kauffman.

I even more suggest that you have not done your homework. Let's take the obvious silliness of eating shrimp. You are ignoring the later lifting of that dietary law found in the Acts of the Apostles. It is a minor example, but the sort of thing that often passes as profound criticism of Christianity (often one sees other Levitical examples held up in the "why don't you do this too?" sense). It simply shows ignorance of how the doctrine developed.

Your argument of "that just goes to show that all these "gods" are made by humans doesn't follow from the premises, either.

Similarly the metaphysics that attributes religious belief to a throwing up of hands at the immeasurable complexity of the universe is based on the assumption (and it is an assumption, even though it is certainly socially convenient in most circles) that there is no God. Without that assumption we must look to whether or not the observable evidence points to a singularity of creation (prime mover, first cause, etc.), or even admits the possibility of one.

And I know you to be intelligent and well-read, but I am not finding evidence that you are using these faculties very well in the realm of metaphysics, as you do in political theory (more on that later). The magic and pointy hats stuff is cute rhetorical flourish, but it misses the point entirely. The Theist mind admits no magic (although our bishops are known to wear pointy hats) and must rigorously challenge all doctrine to the realities of the observed universe, otherwise it does indeed become the straw man who might as well be a Mormon, cargo cultist, etc.

By the way, I am pretty familiar with the writings of the last seven popes, and I don't recall a lot of bogeymen (OK, perhaps a couple in Pius IX, but he had to deal with some very real bogeymen threatening the peace and tranquility of Europe).

And, one last point for the night: Your statement that the higher the collective IQ of a given population, the less it relies on magic and pointy hats (which we will assume you mean religious thought) is a pretty strange assertion, based more on a mythology of so-called Enlightenment than any real facts. Are you really saying that Soviet Russia had a higher collective IQ than post-War Italy?

the link was to a website that lists a compendium of gods that christians don't believe in, alongside the same compendium of gods, plus one, that atheists don't believe in. shows you how alike we are.

when i speak of a tiny intellectual environment, i i mean that theists choose to live inside a closed system.

the universe and all its forces are vast beyond our power to comprehend (so far, at least). in response, theists choose to decide that it's actually simpler than that, and that all existence is mostly (unless you're the taliban, in which case, totally) explained in a single set of texts that were supposedly written by the tooth fairy or Selassie I or whatever your god du jour's name is.

yes, like you, every theist has her/his personal level of tolerance for other contributing explanations to the mysteries of the universe, and of course they take pleasure/comfort in ideas outside their holy book(s). but at the end of the day, when the brain gets tired of analyzing observable evidence, they throw their hands up in praise to an invisible, all-knowing spirit in the sky.

and why? because other people are doing it, too, so it must be good. the higher the collective IQ of a given population, the less it relies on magic and pointy hats. isn't there a lesson in that?

why be a catholic and not a cargo cult member or a hare krishna or taoist or a mormon? because the construct of catholicism is the one that suits you best socially.

and that just goes to show that all these "gods" are made by humans, for humans. and humans are but one of millions of species of one small planet in an uncomprehensibly vast sea of galaxies at any other corner of which it must be pretty darned funny to hear the bogeyman-filled ramblings of a pope, an imam, a tarot card reader, or other such witch doctor.

oh, and the bible says don't eat shrimp.

"Name me one national government that acts quickly and decisively and gets its policies vis a vis the rest of the world right, even half the time. There are none. Certainly not the USA. And you expect the UN to do it?"

But wasn't that the whole idea behind the UN-to do what national governments couldn't or wouldn't do, especially in the interests of preserving peace? Otherwise, there's no need for such a body.

I only have ten minutes right now, so discussion of the UNSC will have to wait, but let me point out a couple of howlers in your first paragraph:

1. Anyone who calls the Catholic Church a "narrow intellectual environment" and "anti-scientific" is not doing his homework.

2. Hitchens is a decent writer, for a sixteen year old. Very funny. Sometimes insightful, though rarely. But I suspect that you like him because you agree with his conclusion (and agreed before reading). You would be much better off sticking to Bertrand Russell on those grounds, though. However, I would be curious to read your take on Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson. I am assuming you have read them, no?

3. You link to a website that lists quite a compendium of Gods, which the author does not believe in. A rather cute exercise, but doesn't it strike you as odd that these folks go so far out of their way to proudly proclaim what they don't believe in and the nature of that which they don't believe? It all falls into the category of "he doth protest too much."

First off let me say it's funny that you turned out to be such a theist, Erik! With all due respect (none, in this case) Catholicism = Dungeons & Dragons. But hey, whatever makes ya happy I guess. I just wish that the people who choose to live in such a tiny intellectual environment could keep their anti-scientific precepts out of the public discourse. It would save a lot of lives in the developing world. You've got to read "God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, if only to strengthen your conviction to believe in fairies and magic toads or whatever.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I have lots of bones to pick with the UN, but not the same ones as you. I think it's an impossibly bureaucratic self-perpetuation machine stocked with about 4/5 fancypants do-nothings. And this comes from experience in NY HQ, Bangkok Regional HQ, and a couple of overseas missions. The John Bolten quote about taking away 10 floors of the Secretariat building was spot-on.

On the other hand, the UN also attracts some of the most dedicated, talented professionals I have ever met; non-ideological empiricists with amazing skill sets and a bird's eye view of the world's biggest problems. That's the other 1/5, I guess.

But it always cracks me up when people start castigating the UN Security Council (which is the arm of the org that we're talking about here) for its failures to stop conflicts. After all, there's no way in hell that those same people (usually on the ideological right) would ever allow the UN to cowboy up and raise a real army. And nor should they.

The UNSC is just another tool of diplomacy in countries' quiver, and it's used just as often by the Dick Cheneys of the world as it is the Sarkozys, if not more. How many conflicts does the UNSC prevent that we never hear about? We'll never know. Mission accomplished.

If you want it to perform better, you should support it, or try to change it. Saying the UN sucks is about as meaningful as saying that the human race sucks, or the government sucks. They always have and always will. But then what?

Keep in mind that there are hundreds of UN agencies and departments doing everything from coordinating agricultural extension work of NGOs to assessing the prospects for prevention and response to gender based violence in post-conflict emergency contexts (that's what my wife does for UNICEF), and these are functions that the private sector cannot or will not perform. Thus the international community (a.k.a. the "UN") bands together and offers competitive incentives for skilled technical experts in these fields to step in.

An organization made up of nothing but member states is only as strong as the power of the member states to organize and act. Like any public-sector organization, it's always going to under-perform. There's no competition, after all. It's not a well-oiled machine full of hypereducated 26-year-old geniuses like a Google or a KPMG, and it necessarily cannot be. Is there lots of room for institutional reform in the UN? Of course. The same can be said for any public-sector organization.

Name me one national government that acts quickly and decisively and gets its policies vis a vis the rest of the world right, even half the time. There are none. Certainly not the USA. And you expect the UN to do it?