Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Atheist Holidays
Dinesh D'Souza feigns ignorance.
Yes, I agree that many nominal Christians have also forgotten the message of Christmas. Even so I wonder: what's the atheist equivalent of Christmas? Darwin's birthday?To which Radley Balko, an agnostic, aptly replies:
[M]y “equivalent” of Christmas is . . . Christmas. You don’t have to believe in virgin births or god descending to earth in human form to appreciate time and camaraderie with friends and family, to enjoy the tradition and fellowship of Christmas, and to dig the warmth and opportunity to recognize relationships that are important to you with small tokens and acts of kindness.And let me add this: the notion that only Christians can celebrate Christmas is as goofy as the notion that only pagans can celebrate Halloween.
And by all means, let's celebrate Darwin's birthday, too. It's February 12th.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
On Reaping What You Sow
The new CW television show “Reaper,” in addition to being relatively funny, also raises an intriguing theological question. The premise of the show is that a 21-year-old slacker is the Devil’s bounty hunter. Apparently souls escape from Hell from time to time, and our hero’s job is to capture them.
Now, what makes it possible for the audience to root for a guy who works for the forces of darkness? I love anti-hero shows, but they don’t seem to find success on any channel besides FX and HBO. (Seriously, try to think of any successful anti-hero show on a broadcast network.) What makes Reaper's protagonist sympathetic is that what he’s doing isn’t really wrong. Evil people deserve to go to Hell, so putting them there is ultimately a respectable calling.
And thus the theological question: In what sense is the Devil evil? After all, he provides punishments for dead sinners, as well as strong incentives for the living to be good. Despite the alleged enmity between God and Satan, it seems an awful lot like God has simply kept the carrot in-house while outsourcing the stick.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Atheist Philoso-Chat
After my Al Sharpton post, I had a brief exchange with Gene Callahan in his comments section. Short version: Callahan claims that “God is justice” or something like that, and I wonder what that even means.
I was thinking of continuing the discussion with a new post here, but before I got around to it, my friend Luka got into it with Callahan in Julian’s comments section. Luka and I had an IM chat about it, and I decided I could save time by posting the transcript:
Luka: who the heck is gene callahan?No offense to Callahan intended. Maybe he’ll explain what he means in the comments section.
me: some blogger
name sounds familiar from somewhere, but i can't recall where
Luka: gotcha.
thnx
me: you just read his post about my sharpton post?
Luka: yeah. but first i had a little exchange with him on julian's blog
he linked to your response to him, from his blog
me: oh, to show some other foolish atheist's bad arguments?
Luka: sort of
but our convo was about the "but what does that even mean" strategy
you employed it in response to his claim that god is justice
i was saying that it's a fine way to go sometimes
me: yeah, say huh?
(was my reaction)
Luka: totally ridiculous claim about god
but he seems to think that it's basically never ok to ask what something even means
i think he's got at least a couple silly views
me: yeah. i would debate him further, but i don't know what he even means ;)
Luka: exactly! :-)
me: it sounds like he is defining God as the existence of reality. in which case i guess i'm a theist after all.
Luka: yeah, me too. it's like what that spinoza guy seemed to be doing. god = the universe or some crap. totally ridiculous and somewhat dishonest
me: because it's not what almost anyone actually means by God
Luka: right
me: "X does not exist." "Well allow me to redefine X as something that exists. QED."
Luka: yeah. it's absurd!
me: I should copy this chat and just post it.
Luka: go for it.
that would be funny
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Morality for Bullies
Arguing with Al Sharpton is like shooting fish in a barrel; evening mentioning his name on this blog makes me feel a little cheap. But this nameless blogger catches Sharpton contradicting himself so directly, so righteously, and with so little self-awareness, that I can’t help but quote him. During a debate with Christopher Hitchens on the topic of religion, Sharpton says the following:
When you raise the issue of morality, if there is no supervisory being, what do we base morality on? Is it based on who has the might at a given time, who is in power? If there is no order to the universe … then who determines what is right or wrong, what is moral or immoral?Mark that down: the problem with non-religious morality is that it appeals to brute force, to the principle of might-makes-right. Got that? Okay. Now here’s what Sharpton says only seconds later:
There is nothing immoral if there is nothing in charge.You see? We need God because we need someone in charge. You know, someone really powerful, someone truly mighty, who will tell us what to do.
Need I say more? Nah, I already did.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Is God the Decider or the Knower?
Dinesh D’Souza’s screed on how the VA Tech tragedy illustrates the deficiency of atheism is a steaming pile of offensive crap. Julian and Radley both give D’Souza a sound thrashing, but this response from an atheist VA Tech professor really nails it.
One of the most frustrating things about being an atheist is the tendency of theists to assume that without God, you cannot be a moral person, nor can you have opinions about right and wrong, good and evil, etc. This is such a non sequitur than I’m often unsure how to respond, except to say, “Well, um, I’m an atheist, and I think it’s wrong to kill people and stuff. So there.”
But perhaps a better response is to ask why existence of a god would make it any easier to arrive at moral beliefs. I think there are only two ways to go here: either God decides what is moral, or God knows what is moral better than we do. Both routes are problematic.
Take the idea that God decides what is moral. Morality just is what God says it is. Then the case for morality reduces to a kind of argumentum ad baculum: the reason you should be act morally is that you’ll be punished by the Big Bully in the Sky if you don’t. Otherwise, why should I care what God thinks? Sure, he’s big and powerful and all that, but why should that make his arbitrary decision about what’s right take precedence over mine? He says morality is A, B, and C, but I say it’s X, Y, and Z. The only reason for me to do A, B, and C instead of X, Y, and Z is because I’ll suffer otherwise.
Unless, of course, God has some additional authority – he’s all-knowing and unbounded in his thinking capacity, and he’s thus in a better position to discern what proper moral behavior would be. But this leads us to the second possibility above: God doesn’t decide what’s right, he knows it. This position seems more respectable than the first, but it clearly implies that morality exists independently of God. There are moral conclusions “out there” to be reached on the basis of knowledge and good reasoning; God is relevant to morality only because he has superior knowledge and reasoning skills. And if that’s true, then we could remove God from the equation and still arrive at moral views, albeit without as much helpful guidance. (Given the ambiguity of the guidance provided in the multifarious holy texts, I think this leaves us in pretty much the same situation as with a God.)
So it seems to me that the theist must either admit that his morality is nothing more than the desire to avoid punishment, or admit that morality can exist in a world without God.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
A Materialist Take on Religious Doctrine
Eugene makes the excellent point that passages from religious texts don’t tell us much about current religious practice. While the Koran includes many passages that appear to justify violence and war, the same is true of the Bible. And while modern-day interpretations of the Bible tend toward the peaceful, that was not always so, as the Crusades and the Inquisition demonstrate. As Eugene says, “Modern Christianity and 1600s Christianity use pretty much the same holy works; the difference in militance between the two stems not from the words as such, but from the way Christians understand those words.”
What Eugene doesn’t address is why, when faced with religious texts that can justify both violent and peaceful behavior, people favor one interpretation over the other. Why is modern Christianity relatively peaceful, while modern Islam is less so? My take on this is admittedly materialist: I think religious interpretation is largely determined by economic conditions. Christianity happens to have arisen in parts of the world characterized by capitalism. A capitalist system encourages positive-sum games, in which one person’s gain need not be another’s loss. Members of other groups can be seen as potential trade partners rather than rivals. The resulting attitude naturally tends to be more peaceful (though by no means entirely peaceful), and Christian texts have been interpreted in a manner consistent with that attitude.
Islam, on the other hand, happens to coincide with areas of the world that lack capitalist economies. Such economies are characterized by zero-sum games, in which one person can gain only if others lose. Members of other groups will tend to be seen as competitors for wealth and resources; their successes will be viewed as the cause of one’s own misfortune. The resulting attitude naturally tends to be more violent and militant (though again, not entirely so), with a corresponding interpretation of Islamic texts.
An alternative to my explanation, in which causality runs from economic system to religious interpretation, is that religion has shaped economic institutions. And this is undoubtedly true to some extent. In Europe, for example, the competition between state authority and church authority during the Middle Ages fostered the growth of freedoms that laid the foundation for capitalism. But notice that this explanation has little to do with actual religious doctrine; it was the existence of a strong Christian church, not Christian thought per se, that shaped economic institutions. At the time, Christian doctrine was not notably peaceful. To the extent that Christianity is a peaceful religion now, I suspect that’s more the effect of capitalism than the cause.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
No Need for Agnotheism
Jane Galt calls herself an “agnotheist,” which she defines as “an agnostic who puts a very, very low – yet non-zero! – value on P(God).” That’s a very good description of my own position. But did we really need a new word here? I suggest that Jane should bite the bullet and call herself an atheist.
As recently as a few years ago, I referred to myself as an agnostic for just the reason that Jane describes. I reserved “atheist” for absolute certainty of the non-existence of god, and “agnostic” for a degree of certainty less than 100%. But after many conversations with my old roomie Julian, I realized that was silly, because I’m not 100% certain about anything. I’m not 100% certain that unicorns don’t exist, yet I don’t call myself a “unicorn agnostic.” I’m not 100% certain there’s no such thing as ESP, yet I don’t call myself an “ESP agnostic.” When I say I don’t believe in unicorns or ESP, it means that I just don’t have any good reason to think they’re real, and so I proceed on the assumption that they aren’t. If P(unicorns) and P(ESP) are sufficiently small, they don’t merit having representation in your label. Why treat P(God) any differently?
A more difficult question would arise if your P(God) were substantially greater than zero, but not close to 50% – say, 10%. If I placed that high a probability on god’s existence, it might actually affect my life. At a minimum, I’d probably spend more time exploring the question. Maybe “agnotheist” could apply here, but “agnostic” seems to capture the degree of uncertainty just fine.
Besides, “agnotheist” doesn’t sound like its definition. I know it’s supposed to be a hybrid of agnostic and atheist, but with the “a-” prefix taken out, what’s left of the atheist is just a “theist” there on the end. That sounds like an almost-believer to me! If Jane had called herself an “agnotheist” without providing a definition, I’d have assumed her P(God) was around 40%. If Jane insists on adopting a new label, perhaps it should be "agnatheist" (note the vowel change).
(More thoughts on the P(God) spectrum here.)
Thursday, September 01, 2005
His Judgement Cometh, and That Right Sooner or Later
Via Hit & Run (and also Balko), I learn that some Christian fundies have blamed Katrina’s fury on the moral depravity of New Orleans, that modern-day Sodom. In addition to its usual culture of debauchery, New Orleans also plays host to Southern Decadence, a “Celebration of Gay Life, Music & Culture.”
What I’m wondering is… what took God so long? This Southern Decadence thing has been going on since 1972. Does the Omnipotent One have such a backlog of cases that it took him 23 years to get around to punishing the sodomites? And the annual Mardi Gras celebration has been going on much, much longer (though I don’t know how long ago the boobs-for-beads tradition got started). God sure took his sweet time before smiting these sinners.
Also, why such indiscriminate punishment? Given that Louisiana’s in the middle of the Bible Belt, lots of good Christian heterosexuals got the short of the end the stick. We know that God can mete out more specific punishments; why couldn’t he just turn the gay parade into a colonnade of salt? Apparently, God is a lot like that first-grade teacher who punished the whole class because of that one kid who put a tack in her seat.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Virgin Management
When I had lunch with Julian, Amy, and Tim on Saturday, the following intriguing question came up: If you were a Muslim, and you died and went to the Muslim heaven, how would you space out your enjoyment of the 72 virgins? Suppose that you actually find virginity desirable, and suppose that the virgins’ maidenheads are not magically restored periodically. If the afterlife has infinite duration, then no matter how long you wait to deflower your 72nd virgin, you’ll still be looking at an infinitely long virgin-less future thereafter. (More abstractly, the question is how to allocate your consumption of a finite non-durable good over an infinite period of time.)
To begin with, assume the existence of a discount rate, so that later periods are valued less than earlier periods (when viewed from the present). Even so, you would not choose to take them all in one night if virgins have diminishing marginal utility. You would save some virgins for the future, because the gain in value from regaining your appetite exceeds the loss in value from time-discounting. Still, under reasonable assumptions, eventually you’d use up your virgins. Your appetite for virgins presumably increases with the length of time since your most recent virgin; but unless your appetite continuously rises at a rate greater than your discount rate, you’ll eventually find it worthwhile to take the last virgin.
But does it make sense to have a discount rate when you’re dead? Discounting of the future presumably reflects our uncertainty about whether it will arrive at all. If you know your future will last forever, arguably you should weigh all periods equally. So what happens if we assume no discounting? Then we have a paradox: you might choose never to take the 72nd virgin. This will happen so long as your appetite always increases with the length of time since your most recent virgin. Even if the increase in your appetite is diminishingly small, the absence of discounting means you’ll wait any amount of time for the tiniest increase in satisfaction. To escape this conclusion, we must assume your appetite for virgins “tops out” after a certain amount of time – say, T years. In that case, there would be infinitely many optimal allocations of your virgins. One such solution would be to take one immediately, wait T years, take another, wait T years, etc., until you take the 72nd virgin after 71T years. But an equally good solution would involve waiting T + 1 years between virgins, or T + 2, etc. In fact, the intervals need not have equal length, and you could wait as long as you wanted before taking the first virgin.
Fewer solutions work if your appetite, after topping out at T years, begins to decline. In that case, you must space your virgins at intervals of exactly T to maximize your utility. How long you should wait before taking the first virgin depends on how great your appetite for virgins is when you arrive in heaven.
All of the above assumes that only the actual act of taking a virgin gives satisfaction, though the amount of satisfaction may depend on how long it’s been since your last virgin. Things change dramatically if recollection or anticipation is a significant source of one’s satisfaction. A person who enjoys looking back fondly on his experiences would rationally choose to take the virgins earlier – possibly in one fantastic orgy – so as to increase the duration of the pleasant memories. Of course, there will always be infinite time after the last virgin, so it could be countered that taking the virgins earlier will not increase the time spent recollecting. But I think it makes sense in this case to make comparisons of infinities, since one infinity begins earlier.
The real paradox of choice arises, I think, in the case where anticipation is highly important. If the joy of looking forward to taking a virgin were the primary source of your satisfaction from doing so, then your optimal plan would require always having one virgin ahead of you. Every period, you would have the choice of taking the virgin now or taking her tomorrow, and taking her tomorrow would always generate a greater sum of instantaneous utility and anticipatory utility (if we maintain the assumption of no time-discounting). But in that case, you would never actually take the last virgin – in which case your anticipation would be unjustified.
Monday, January 24, 2005
The Secularity Gradient
Does maintaining a strict separation of church and state presuppose the existence of a sharp distinction between religious and secular matters? For a long time, I have (implicitly) assumed such a distinction to exist. Now I’m not so sure.
The question came to mind when I heard about school choirs that perform Christmas celebrations composed of only the secular Christmas carols (“Jingle Bells” – OK, “Away in a Manger” – not OK). Now, as an atheist who celebrates Christmas, this doesn’t bother me much, although I admit that some of my favorite Christmas songs are the religious ones. The notion that Christmas has a secular component makes perfect sense to me. Halloween provides an even clearer example of how an essentially religious event can become almost entirely secularized.
Yet Christmas and Halloween both lie on a spectrum. The only difference between the two is the number of people who still regard them as primarily religious events. Note that Halloween’s secularity is questioned by two different groups – the modern-day pagans who still treat it as a holy day, and the fundamentalist Christians who decry it as a form of Satanism. We do not have a sharp line between the religious and the secular, but a gradient. If enough people adopted my attitude toward Christmas, then Christmas might move down the gradient into the “mostly secular” zone occupied by Halloween.
So how should these holidays be treated by the state? Ought teacher-led celebrations of both events be banned from public schools, on grounds that celebrating either violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment? Or should both be allowed, on grounds that both have secular components that all students can enjoy? Or should the courts adopt a wishy-washy balancing rule, putting judges in the position of deciding whether the secular component of any given event is great enough to overcome church-state concerns?
I don’t have an answer to the question, so I pose it to my readers. I will just add that I see one relatively simple way to finesse problems like these: implement a voucher system, so that parents can choose the degree of secularity to which their children will be exposed.
Friday, November 19, 2004
Ambiguity
I saw a sticker slapped on a newsstand this morning. It read:
GODISNOWHEREAt first I assumed the message was an atheist one:
GOD IS NOWHEREBut then I realized the message could have been spiritual in intent:
GOD IS NOW HEREA Google search turned up an evangelical website, and apparently the ambiguity was intentional. Clever… but I wonder if it’s really effective. And hey, is vandalism a Christian virtue?
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Marriage Options for Unbelievers
When it comes to marriage, what’s an atheist libertarian to do? What kind of ceremony is appropriate, and who ought to officiate? For an atheist, the obvious choice might appear to be a judge or justice-of-the-peace. But for a libertarian atheist, state idolatry is as objectionable as spiritual idolatry. Sure, libertarians recognize the existence of the state (while atheists do not recognize the existence of a god), but why go inviting the state into what is ultimately a personal commitment? And while many people, including libertarians, might choose to invoke the state’s contract-enforcement apparatus, that act is conceptually distinct from the act of wedding another person (as I argued here).
I was once briefly married. Since my wife-to-be was also an atheist (or agnostic), we opted for the justice-of-the-peace default. But I doubt I’d do that again. As we discovered during our first and only year of joint tax-filing, there are few if any benefits of legal marriage for couples without children. Indeed, we ended up paying a marriage penalty amounting to about $300 of our paltry incomes (yes, I filled out the “dummy” tax forms to find out what we would have paid if we’d been single). If I ever went down that path again, I’d be inclined to postpone the legal marriage unless and until children made it worthwhile. But without ministers or judges, what’s left? Ship captains?
Fortunately, help is on the way. This Slate article discusses the growth of “secular life ceremonies.” Most of the rituals described definitely fall on the faux-mystical side of the ledger – e.g., Celtic handfasting and summoning the spirits of North, South, East, and West to bless your union. Since when do paganism and animism count as “secular”? But at least the alternatives are growing, and that’s a good thing.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Lucifer, the Lord's Servant
Radley links to this pants-wettingly funny Onion article, from the Onion’s first post-9/11 issue. The article got me thinking about the economics of the afterlife again. The usual Bible story is that God and the Devil are enemies. But if you think about the functional quality of hell, it would seem that Lucifer still serves the Lord. God wants people to behave virtuously and eschew sin. The pleasures of heaven provide a carrot, the torments of hell provide a stick, and together they constitute a comprehensive incentive program. If Lucifer had really wanted to spite God, wouldn’t he have made hell a glorious paradise? Inquiring minds want to know.
This question seems so obvious that I figure somebody must have asked it before, but I don’t know who.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Bigots for Religious Tolerance
An audiotape with the voice of an Al Qaeda officer threatens more terrorist attacks – and criticizes France’s ban on Muslim head scarves in public buildings:
Two audiotapes purportedly of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant were broadcast on Arabic TV stations, one taunting President Bush and threatening more attacks on the United States, the other criticizing France's decision to ban Islamic headscarves in schools. ...The irony is rich. A leader of Al Qaeda, an organization dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, champions the Western value of religious tolerance. France’s policy is, of course, abominable. But isn’t this a case of the cast-iron pot calling the tarnished-copper kettle black?
The audiotape aired by Dubai-based al-Arabiya criticized France's decision to ban religious symbols in public buildings, including headscarves worn by Muslim women. The law is expected to go before the French Senate early next month.
"The decision of the French president to issue a law to prevent Muslim girls from covering their heads in schools is another example of the Crusader's malice, which Westerners have against Muslims," the recording said.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Economics of the Afterlife
Religious visions of reward-and-punishment in the afterlife fall into two basic categories. One category consists of what I will call “precipice” regimes, in which there are just two afterlife outcomes: heaven and hell. If you commit more than some threshold number of sins (possibly just one), you go to hell; otherwise you go to heaven. Many Protestant faiths seem to fall in this category. The other category consists of what I will call “gradient” regimes, in which there is a range of afterlife outcomes lying between sheer torment and pure bliss. In Mormonism (or so I am told), there are many different levels of heaven, and which one you reach depends on your behavior in this life. In Catholicism, how much you’ve sinned in this life determines the amount of time you spend in Purgatory. In Hinduism, your behavior now determines what kind of creature or class of person you’ll become upon resurrection.
Assuming that afterlife regimes are designed to deter bad (sinful) behavior, what beliefs about people’s preferences and choice mechanisms are implied by each type of regime? Let’s say you’re a deity who currently presides over a gradient regime, and you’re considering a switch to a precipice regime. Doing so will induce some individuals, who would have committed some number of sins under a gradient regime, not to commit any sins at all (if the hell-threshold is one sin) or to commit just under the threshold number of sins. That’s the upside. The downside is that individuals who have already passed the threshold will have no incentive to behave well. Since they’re already going to hell, they might as well commit all the sins they want. In addition, people sufficiently far below the threshold will have no incentive not to commit additional sins (unless there’s uncertainty about where the threshold lies). Thus, there’s a trade-off involved in the choice of regimes, and individual preferences and choice mechanisms will determine which regime is the more effective in deterring sins.
I hypothesize that precipice regimes are appropriate if you think that the utility of committing sins is relatively constant over time, whereas gradient regimes are appropriate if there will be occasional opportunities for sinning that are of such high utility that they cannot be resisted by many people regardless of punishment. The downside of a precipice regime is particularly high in the latter case, because many people will succumb to large temptations and then, figuring their souls are lost anyway, commit many more transgressions. On the other hand, if there are few super-sized temptations and many small-to-medium ones, the precipice regime might be more successful in deterring them, because people under a gradient regime will balance each additional sin against the minor reduction in afterlife status that will accompany it, and some medium-sized sins will be enjoyable enough to be worth it.
A precipice regime might also be more effective in preventing addictive sins, defined as sins with increasing marginal utility of commission: the more of the sin you’ve committed, the greater is your desire to do it again. Under a gradient regime, people who commit their first addictive sin will have an increasing inclination to do so repeatedly (unless the gradient becomes steeper and steeper as the number of sins rises). A precipice regime could not prevent the additional sinning, but it would stand a better chance of inducing people not to commit the very first sin.
Next up: mixed regimes, in which some sins are treated with a gradient and others with a precipice.
Monday, July 14, 2003
Revelation Rumination
What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic? The simple answer is that the atheist denies the existence God, whereas the agnostic neither denies nor affirms the existence of God. But the line between these two is not so easily drawn. Consider the “spectrum of non-belief,” which measures the percent likelihood that one assigns to the non-existence of God. Someone with a score of 0% is a true believer in God. Someone with a score of 100% would clearly be an atheist. But what interval on this spectrum corresponds to the agnostics? Where are the dividing lines?
Interestingly, I’ve found that self-identifying atheists and agnostics both draw the lines so as to maximize the size of their own group. Thus, atheists tell me than any score of greater than 50% qualifies you as an atheist, because you think it’s more likely than not that God doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, agnostics tell me that any score less than 100% (and greater than either 0% or 50% -- I haven’t quizzed them on that end of the spectrum) qualifies you as an agnostic, because you place some probability, however small, on the possibility of God existing. Since I’m at about the 99.99%mark, I would meet both definitions, thereby qualifying as both an atheist and an agnostic.
My friend Bob proposes a sensible rule: you are an atheist if the possibility of God’s existence doesn’t actually affect your life in any concrete way. In other words, if you received definitive proof of God’s non-existence tomorrow, would your behavior change? In my case, the answer is no, because my behavior is unaffected by that 0.01% chance. But even this rule is subject to quibbling. For me, the main reason my behavior wouldn’t change is that the probability is just too small. But we can imagine other reasons for God’s possible existence not affecting you. For instance, you might think that theological ethics and secular ethics make identical demands, and so even a large change in your score on the non-belief spectrum wouldn’t make a difference. Or you might observe (correctly, I think) that believing God might exist is a far cry from knowing what he wants from you, and thus your behavior must still be guided by secular reasoning. And both of these reasons for your behavior being unaffected by the possibility of God are perfectly consistent with agnosticism or even theism.
Incidentally, here’s a great article by Daniel Dennett on defending the rights of agnostics and atheists, whom he refers to collectively as “brights.” Thanks to Radley for the pointer.
Monday, January 13, 2003
Those Wacky Raelians
So the Raelians -- you know, the religious cult that claims to have created the first human clone -- believe that scientifically advanced extra-terrestrials manipulated DNA in order to create all life in Earth. Wow, that's really crazy. Don't they realize that life, along with everything else in heaven and earth, was actually created in just seven days by an omniscient, omnipotent being, who later had a mortal son, who died, was buried, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven?
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