10 Things Wrong with the Bible

In honor of Dan Savage, who is apparently being harassed on Twitter for criticizing the morality of the Bible, I have put together a list of 10 things I think are wrong with the Bible:

1. It condones slavery (Colossians 4:22, book of 1 Timothy).
2. It suggests collective punishment is appropriate (Numbers 14:18, Romans 5:12).
3. It sets precedents for segregation (Deuteronomy 22:3).
4. It states that God has used ethnic cleansing as a tool (Joshua chapters 6-13).
5. It disses bacon (Deuteronomy 14:8).
6. It teaches men that women should be subject to them (1 Corinthians 11:8, 14:34; Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 4:18).
7. It implies that daughters are the property of their fathers (1 Corinthians 7:37).
8. It stigmatizes sex between consenting adults (Deuteronomy 22:13).
9. It suggests that rape is a crime that should be solved by marrying the victim (Deuteronomy 22:28).
10. It makes failing to believe the Bible a thought-crime punishable by eternal suffering (Mark 16:16; John 5:24; Revelation 21:8).

OK, number 5 is arguable, but I needed to get to 10.

Why People Don't Commit Vote Fraud in Person

Have you ever considered how one would go about fixing an election by having people cast fraudulent votes in-person at polling places? Here's a brief explanation of why it hasn't, and probably never will, happen.
First, the number of fraudulent voters needed to swing an election is enormous. Sure some elections are close. The Presidential contest in Florida in 2000 was one of the closest elections in recent history, decided by about 500 votes. However, such close elections are not of much use when considering potential fraud, because it is unpredictable whether any given election will be decided by a small number of votes. Indeed, close elections more typically resemble the Presidential election in Ohio in 2004 (which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed was "stolen" in a June 15, 2006 Rolling Stone article), which was decided by over 100,000 votes. But, let's give those claiming voter fraud is a real problem the benefit of the doubt, and assume that a good margin of fraud can be achieved with 10,000 improper votes.

Once one decides to commit fraud, the second problem is organizing it. Let's assume one would recruit people who would vote multiple times. They couldn't return to the same polling place each time, or else they'd be recognized. They'd have to move from polling place to polling place. Assuming it took less than 30 minutes to travel between venues and cast their votes, this would limit the number of fake votes they could cast to on order 20 per day. So, one would need at least 500 people to cast those 10,000 votes.

The second problem, then, is organizing a conspiracy of hundreds of people who are to commit voter fraud, without anyone noticing. Let's say that someone tries, despite the obvious risk that one deadbeat vote fraudster might squeal. A few more things would need to be organized:

• One has to recruit hundreds of people to cast fraudulent votes, and ensure that they are more competent than James O'Keefe's minions.
• One has to identify thousands of people on the voter roles that are unlikely to vote themselves, who can be plausibly impersonated, and who no one working the polling place is likely to know.
• One has to arrange for fraudulent voters to move from polling place to polling place so they can cast their votes.
• One must compensate the fraudulent voters not only for their time, but also so that they won't decide you are a cheap bastard and expose your scheme to the public.

The difficulty of implementing such a scheme without getting caught is almost certainly why voter fraud is so rare --- in well-studied elections, fewer than 1 in 100,000 votes was fraudulent. In Ohio in 2004, that would translate to fewer than 50 out of 5 million votes.

But let's say that you are convinced that someone will try such a scheme. Why on Earth would you believe that Voter ID laws would prevent the problem? After all, two thousand underage kids obtained fake IDs so they can enter bars in Tempe, Arizona alone. Wouldn't the mastermind organizing the in-person voter ID scheme I outlined above be able to manage a similar feat?

No, voter ID laws are not about safeguarding elections. They are about trying to prevent "undesirable" people (e.g., the poor and the young) from voting. Only by implementing more barriers to voting can one hope to impact the millions of votes needed to swing an election. It is the Voter ID laws that are part of a fundamentally anti-democratic push to shape who votes, and thus steal elections.

Suggestions for How Theists Can Think Productively about Science (or, Why I Can't Stand Intelligent Design)

Science proceeds by continually proposing ideas about how nature works, and evaluating their validity through comparisons with observations and experiments. This process has been a spectacular success. The most tangible evidence of this success is technology: vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia, water treatment plants, electricity, transistors, the internet, cell phones, engines, airplanes, satellites, global positioning systems, etc.

Using the same principles that produce technology, science has also developed an explanation of the history of the Universe. The Big Bang, stellar evolution, planet formation, and the evolution of life provide a narrative that leaves little room for God to intervene. God might have acted to set the laws of the Universe into motion before the Big Bang. God might continue to act by manipulating the quantum bits of the Universe. However, these assumptions would imply that God has constrained Itself to appear to work within natural laws that It developed, such as the knowable probabilities inherent to quantum mechanical equations.

One should feel free to be skeptical of elements of scientific theories, but only up to a point. Scientists are well aware that their theories are not complete - quantum mechanics and general relativity are mathematically incompatible; scientists aren't sure what happened to initiate the Big Bang; we have no good physical model for consciousness. However, no change in the underlying theories will change the results of past experiments, much less will it make our technology stop working. Thanks to repeated, independent evaluations of our theories, we can be certain that scientists have good descriptions for many fundamental processes in the Universe.

With the above ideas in mind, Intelligent Design seems like exactly the wrong approach for a religious person to take to science. First, it is not scientific, because it relies on a supernatural explanation. Science proceeds by making predictions that can be tested by observations and experiments. For a prediction to be scientific, it must be possible to prove it wrong. A supernatural being can do anything, and so can provide no such falsifiable predictions. Intelligent Design has no role in science.

Second, by seeking to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge with God, Intelligent Design focuses on precisely the wrong set of things. The things that we don't understand about the Universe will never give us insight into the mind of God. Instead, we should consider what we do understand about the universe to inform how we think about God (or Its absence).

So, let scientific knowledge be used when seeking for insight into the mind of a Creator (if there is one). One might ask:

• What do the trillion galaxies, each containing billions of stars and planets, tell us about our own world's place in the Universe?
• What do the genes that we share with fruit flies tell us about what it means to be human?
• What does the apparent cruelty of natural selection tell us about the role of suffering?
• What does the self-sacrifice of the societies that evolved within ants, bees, and humans tell us about the origins of morality?

If there is a Creator, shouldn't the detailed information it imparted into the natural world be a crucial part of theological thinking?

Suggestions for How Atheists Can Think Productively about Religion (or, Why I Can't Stand Richard Dawkins):

• Keep in mind that science provides explanations for how the universe works, possibilities for how our world came to exist, and insight into what the human life form is. It does not, however, provide any guidance about morality. That we have to invent ourselves, through philosophy, art, and literature.
• It's meaningless to point out that religious people have committed most of mankind's atrocities. There are more religious people than atheists; atheists have proved themselves to be complete assholes too.
• Almost all the religions we can learn about were invented in the context of a successful society, and therefore has something useful to say about morality. We have to evaluate each on a case-by-case basis, but should not dismiss them out of hand. Scientology is an exception.
• Traditions all exist for a reason. Some of those reasons are good; some are now obsolete; some are bad. Identifying and celebrating the good traditions can make all our lives better.

An Attempt to Develop Empathy, Despite Privilege

I am pretty sure that nothing I've done is harder than being poor.

I've done quite a few things that people would say are hard, and that might have impressed people. I was an Eagle Scout (no, stay with me, that's impressive in some circles). I applied to and got into a number of colleges. I took courses that included science labs. I passed a lot of midterms and finals. I got into graduate school. I passed my qualifying exams, and wrote a thesis. I wrote papers and successful funding proposals. I gave lectures. I won a couple awards. I moved to pursue opportunities. I figured out how undocumented software, which some engineers wrote, worked by reading thousands of lines of source code. Along the way, I changed a bunch of diapers, cooked dinners, cleaned house, and helped comfort teething children.

The thing is, I'm privileged in many ways. My family, friends, and even society prepared me for every challenge that I have faced. Moreover, when I failed at something (for instance, I'm a pretty poor athlete), they helped me find a new path on which I could succeed. I'm also lucky, which is a form of privilege. My talents lie in math and physics. So, society is willing to pay good money for me to learn and work in fields that use them. I don't seem to have inherited any addictive genes; I've never had to struggle with quitting anything.

I have never been poor, so I have to imagine what it would be like. Learning to read and to do math is tough for many. I can't really imagine what it would be like if my parents and friends also struggled with learning those things; if my parents couldn't afford tutors; if my schools lacked resources to give me personal attention to help me to learn; if I was hungry while trying to learn; or if society looked at the statistics for my neighborhood and expected that I should fail.

I did some moderately stupid things as a kid, mostly involving non-permanent insults to other peoples' property. I didn't get caught, so there were no consequences. I can't imagine what it would be like if society had been waiting to pounce on me if I failed. We have policies, like Stop and Frisk in New York, that are designed to pounce on the poor. Society has run the numbers, and realized that poor people are more likely to be involved in crime. So, the police constantly check up on young people, who everybody knows are wired to make mistakes, in order to catch them and incarcerate them when they make mistakes. I don't doubt that doing so will prevent some crimes. But, I can't imagine how many opportunities would have been cut off from me if I was caught making a mistake while being poor.

I can't imagine the stress of being a parent while being poor. Parenting is enough work, with all the lack of sleep, the things to clean up, the worry about illnesses and injuries (real and potential), and the lack of personal time. What is it like to add to that, not being able to afford food, or day care, or heat, or a roof over our heads. That is real stress. That is truly hard.

I'm sure I've only scratched the surface. But even with my limited ability to empathize, I can say with fair certainty, Being poor is harder than anything I've ever done.