“Religion ought to be like masturbation. It feels good, lots of people do it, yet we all agree public exhibitions are inappropriate.”
This piece of profanity—delivered appropriately on Halloween—comes courtesy of PZ Myers, a self-described “godless liberal” visiting U of T at the invitation of the Ontario chapter of the Centre for Inquiry, an international organization that promotes skepticism, secular humanism, and scientific thought.
An associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Myers has achieved notoriety for his online activities, primarily his award-winning blog Pharyngula which receives upwards of 75,000 visits a day.
To most Canadians, the concept of not teaching evolution in the classrooms seems bizarre; this isn’t the case in the United States.
Like any good scientist, Myers came prepared with data. A recent survey found that only 10 per cent of Americans believe that evolution took place without a deity guiding the process.
Almost 50 per cent reject evolution entirely. But what’s more worrisome to Myers is another survey that showed that 16 per cent of high school instructors share this same notion.
Evolution’s proponents have spent decades blocking the teaching of Creationism through the legal system. But as he observes, “ignoring the culture in which it is embedded is doomed to failure.”
To him, the real target is obvious: religion.
While raised a Lutheran, Myers found it difficult to take key doctrines seriously when preparing for his confirmation. For instance, “if I trust in someone who was killed—but not really killed—then I’ll be forgiven for grandma eating an apple a few thousand years ago?”
He scorns those who find science and religion compatible, seeing it as “epistemically empty and unverifiable.” It represents a competing but inferior way of knowing that must be rooted out of popular culture. This means “a little rudeness is called for.”
Says Myers: “We need to start screaming and yelling and telling these people that they’re nuts.”
A man who practices what he preaches, Myers recently got his hands on a communion wafer, pierced it with a rusty nail, and threw it in the garbage. To demonstrate his impartiality, he also added a ripped copy of the Qur’an and fellow atheist Richard Dawkins’ bestseller, The God Delusion. “Nothing must be held sacred,” he declared.
He received 18,000 outraged emails—before he stopped counting. So strong was the reaction that his university had a dedicated staff member to deal with outraged Catholics calling for his dismissal.
But when some went as far as to call his act worse than the Holocaust, it underscored to him that “religious beliefs are not only silly but deplorable.”
For a personality that evokes such strong reactions on the Internet, Myers’ talk was a rather staid affair. A solitary moment of discord arose when a cry of “we’re here to hear PZ” rang out from an audience member frustrated by the stream of enthusiastic questions that had brought Myers’s talk to a near standstill.
A few angry picketers or at least a tough question or two would have made the evening feel less like a sermon to the congregation.
Perhaps a broader question should be raised: are the right people seeing through the isolated controversies and getting his message?
As Myers sees it, “[fundamentalists] don’t listen to you anyways.” The important thing is to dislodge the complacency of non-believers and force society to “recognize that atheists are willing to fight back.”
