What? MORE on that 9/11 Cross?

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Fellow Patheos blogger Rebecca Hamilton has recently posted about the World Trade Center Cross. This is a 17-foot-tall, cross-shaped piece of rubble found in the World Trade Center aftermath of the 9/11 attack. Out of all that wreckage from buildings built of steel I-beams welded together at right angles, it’s not too surprising that the intersection of two beams had broken to make a cross-shaped piece of steel.
The cross wasn’t even found at the Twin Towers site but rather at 6 World Center, but it has become a religious relic for some Christians.
Rebecca is puzzled by the fuss from atheists and proposes two explanations: (1) atheists are thin-skinned whiners “set on harassing, insulting and attacking Christians at every turn in an attempt to drive us underground and silence us.” Or (2), atheists are vampires and are repulsed by the sight of a cross.
I’d like to respond with a tweaked version of a post that I wrote for last year’s anniversary of the attack. Perhaps we can clarify atheists’ motivations.
The cross shape could just be a coincidence (the explanation favored by atheists), or it could be a sign from God (what some Christians propose). If the latter, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the only evidence of God participating was his calling card. In the rubble. And this evidence of God-not-doing-anything is now highlighted as a holy relic.
Hmm—that it’s just a coincidence is starting to sound a lot better from the standpoint of the Christian.
This cross is now a controversial addition to New York City’s soon-to-be-completed National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
American Atheists and New York City Atheists are suing to have the cross removed. Their remedy is to return it to St. Peter’s Church, two blocks from Ground Zero, where it had been for five years until moved to the museum in July 2011. Since half of the museum’s financing has been provided by the government, returning it to the church sounds a lot easier than giving equal time to all the worldviews that don’t have a cross as their symbol.
There was another controversy associated with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011. New York Mayor Bloomberg declared that the commemorative ceremony would be religion-free.
Sounds good to me. There are plenty of secular reasons for the ceremony, and religious people can remember the event in their own way as best suits their religion. People of any faith (or even no faith) can feel pain. Why should only some get a publicly-funded platform?
And when you do try to include religions, there’s bickering over who was omitted.

Some evangelical Christian leaders said they were outraged that an interfaith prayer service planned by the Washington National Cathedral did not include a Southern Baptist or other evangelical minister.

The New York City ceremony, which has been held annually on the anniversary, is punctuated by moments of silence (six times in 2011), plenty of opportunity for prayer.
But for some folks it has to be more overt. Benjamin Wiker said:

Perhaps the mayor could have come up with an entirely innocuous prayer that all the clergy could offer without offending anyone, say something like this: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, and our country. Amen.”
Who could possibly object to that?

Oh, I dunno. Maybe atheists, not that they apparently are worth worrying about. Buddhists. Those who check “Spiritual” instead of a specific religion. The almost 20% of Americans who are “Nones” (those who don’t identify with any religion). And since this “God” is pretty obviously the Christian God (one person of the Trinity), probably the Jews and Muslims as well. And anyone else who’s not a Christian. And anyone who respects the Constitution enough to realize that the First Amendment helps all of us, the Christian and non-Christian alike, and bristles when it is insulted.
Aside from that, I think you’re good.
Back to that article:

Since Engel v. Vitale [the 1962 Supreme Court case that rejected school prayer] a series of court cases have struck down, one after another, any religious expression in the public square, thereby setting one clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) in direct contradiction to the clause that directly follows it (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

Not really. You want to express a religious sentiment in the public square? Knock yourself out. This is the essential distinction that is forgotten: the public can, within limits, say anything, religious or otherwise, in public. The constraint is on Congress (expanded beyond just the federal government with the Fourteenth Amendment).
And isn’t that the way you’d want it? Christians can send their children to public school and know that they won’t hear a Mormon or Satanist prayer. Christians can go to a City Council meeting and not see Allahu Akbar (“God is Great”) in Arabic script on the wall. Christians can go into a courtroom and not see a Shinto or Hindu god of jurisprudence glaring down at them. A win-win.

In disallowing any public appearance of religion in the 9/11 memorial “service,” [Mayor Bloomberg is] simply taking Engel v. Vitale yet another step. No prayer in public schools. No prayer in public period. The Establishment Clause (so secularists would have us believe) demands that religion be silenced.

Wow—what’s hard about this? Just keep Christianity out of the tax-supported part of society. Pray in private or in public, or encourage prayer all you want—just not in the official capacity as mayor. (Or president. But the National Day of Prayer is another story.)

The whole point, in historical context, was that the Federal Government should not positively sanction one Christian denomination over another (as England had established the Anglican Church as the state church), and also negatively should not interfere in the free exercise of any denomination (as England had persecuted both Puritans and Catholics).

Ah, so it’s all about Christian religion, you say? In your mind, perhaps, but that’s not what the Constitution says.

So it is that a particular New York mayor uses the Establishment Clause to root out Christianity, and the Free Exercise Clause to publicly affirm Islam.

Dr. Wiker is apparently still hot under the collar about that whole “Ground-Zero Mosque” thing (officially called Park51). Let me give my two cents on that.
(1) May a Muslim group build two blocks from the Twin Towers site? Yes. Assuming the city’s other requirements are met, the government can’t reject the project simply because Muslims are involved or that the building would have a prayer space.
(2) Should a Muslim group build there? No. In my opinion, the respectful course of action would have been to find another site far from Ground Zero. This is a missed opportunity for a prominent Muslim community to yield and show that it understands the issue and is sensitive to it.
This is the distinction that Wiker seems to be missing. If Mayor Bloomberg defended point 1 above, then he simply demanded that the law be followed. If he’s treading into religious favoritism, however, that would be a problem. Is he? I’ve seen no evidence supporting this.
But that’s the point. That’s where the Constitution helps everyone, including the beleaguered Christian. The government is forbidden to give preferential treatment to Islam (by favoring a Muslim group over others) or to Christianity (by including Christian prayers at the 9/11 anniversary commemoration or Christian symbolism in the Memorial Museum).
It cuts both ways. And that helps all of us.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/10/11.)

10 Reasons to Just Say Nay to the Naysayer Hypothesis

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Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story, they’d say, “I was there, and that’s not the way it happened!” They’d shut it down. An incorrect version of the story would not have survived.
Let’s consider this alternative world, where those in the inner circle tried to snuff out any false statements about Jesus. It quickly falls apart under examination.
Here are ten reasons why I say nay to this Naysayer Hypothesis.
1. There would have been few potential naysayers. True, the gospel story reports thousands witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but these wouldn’t be naysayers. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing every miracle recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. A proper naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry, and there would likely have been just a few dozen.
2. We imagine a handful of naysayers who know that the Jesus story is only a legend, but that was in the year 30. Now the first gospel is written and it’s roughly forty years later—how many are still alive? Conditions were harsh at that time, and people died young. Many from our little band of naysayers have died or been imprisoned by this point.
3. A naysayer must be in the right location to complain. Suppose he lived in Jerusalem, and say that the book of Mark was written in Alexandria, Egypt, which historians say is one possibility. How will our naysayer correct its errors? Sure, Mark will be copied and spread, but there’s little time before our 60- or 70-year-old witnesses die. Even if we imagine our tiny band dedicating their lives to stamping out this false story—and why would they?—believers are starting brush fires of Christian belief all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Damascus to Corinth to Rome. How can we expect our naysayers to snuff them all out?
4. They wouldn’t know about it. Two thousand years ago you couldn’t walk down to the corner bookstore to find the latest Jesus gospel. How were our naysayers to learn of the story? Written documents at that time were scarce and precious things. The naysayers would be Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity. They wouldn’t have associated much with the new Christians and so would have been unlikely to come across the Jesus story.
5. There was another gulf between the naysayers and the early Christians: the Gospels were written in Greek, not the local language of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the naysayers. To even learn of the Jesus story in this community, our naysayers must speak Greek, which is hard to imagine among the typical peasant followers of Jesus. How many could have done this? And to influence the Greek-speaking readers of the Gospels, a rebuttal would have to have been written in Greek—not a common skill in Palestine.
6. Imagine a naysayer knew the actual Jesus and knew that he was merely a charismatic rabbi. Nothing supernatural. Now he hears the story of Jesus the Son of Man, the man of miracles, the healer of lepers and raiser of the dead. Why connect the two? “Jesus” was a common name (or Joshua or Yeshua or whatever his name really was), and supernatural claims were common at the time. His friend Jesus didn’t do anything like this, so the story he heard must be of a different person. So even when confronted with the false teaching, he wouldn’t know to raise an alarm.
7. Consider how hard is it today for a politician, celebrity, or business leader to stop a false rumor, even with the many ways to get the word out. Think about how hard it would have been in first-century Palestine. How many thousands of Christians were out there spreading the word for every naysayer with his finger in the dike? Given the sensational story (“Jesus was a miracle worker who can save you from your sins!”) and the mundane one (“Nah—he’s just a guy that I hung around with when I was growing up”), which has more traction?
8. Jesus himself couldn’t rein in rumors. He repeatedly tells those around him to not tell anyone about his miracles, and yet we read about both the miracles and Jesus’s fruitless plea. If he can’t stop rumors, why imagine that mortals can?
Or consider Joseph Smith. Here was a man convicted of the very occult practices that he then tells about in the Book of Mormon. Should’ve been easy to pull aside the curtain on this “religion,” right? Nope.
Look at Scientologists, cults, or any of the divisions of Christianity, both major (Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and minor (thousands of nondenominational churches and sects). Apparently, new religions start quite easily. The incredulous, “But what else could explain the New Testament but that the writers were telling the truth?!” doesn’t hold up when we see how easy it is.
9. One way to stop the gospel story would be naysayers, but a far better way would be to show the story as false. And the gospels themselves document that it was.
Jesus said that the end would come within the lifetime of many within his hearing. It didn’t (indeed, that this was going to be a longer process than initially thought was a reason that the oral history was finally written down, decades after the events). With the central prediction crumbling, what more proof do you need that this religion was false? And yet the religion kept on going. Obviously, religion can grow in the face of evidence to the contrary.
10. Christian apologists say that there were no naysayers, but how do we know that there weren’t? For us to know about them, naysayers would need to have written their story and have some mechanism to recopy the true account over and over until the present day. Just like Christian documents, their originals would have crumbled with time. What would motivate anyone to preserve copies of documents that argued against a religion? Perhaps only another religion! And it’s not surprising that the Jesus-isn’t-divine religion didn’t catch on.
This argument is popular but empty. Don’t use it.

If a million people say a foolish thing,
it’s still a foolish thing.

(This post is a modification of one originally posted 11/2/11.)

Photo credit: Military Videos

A Flawed Analogy to Morality

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Leah Libresco has responded to my recent post on objective morality. I’ll pull out some of her comments that need responses.

What I don’t understand is why Bob sees his conscience as worth listening to.

Leah imagines that I have a choice. My mind is programmed to give much weight to the moral evaluation that comes from the conscience. It’s not the only input—for example, I might not aid that old person who dropped a package if I’m carrying something fragile or important myself and can’t risk dropping it—but it’s a major input.
Leah goes on to wonder about mechanical brain implants or drugs that would override or mimic the conscience. Sure, that’s increasingly possible.
Here’s the parallel that comes to mind for me. Suppose I’m communicating with Leah using public key cryptography. I get a message from Leah that’s encoded with her secret key. What else can I do but assume that it’s really from her? Once I hear of a security breach (maybe some hacker is out there, mimicking other people), I will no longer trust signed messages like this. But until then, I have no choice but believe that it’s from Leah.
This brain-implant thought experiment would work the same way. “What’s that? My conscience says that I ought to hit that cute little baby? All righty!” If it looks and quacks like a conscience, I’ll assume that it’s a conscience. As you can imagine, I can’t see any way to verify what my conscience says against an external, objectively true answer. (But of course this comparison would be ridiculous. If I had access to an infallible source, I’d use that and not bother with my imperfect conscience.)
Maybe my view of how the mind works is more machine-like or more rigid than Leah’s. Am I missing how the brain is configured?
Leah imagines another experiment.

“Hey, Bob,” I say. ”I’ve got a pretty nifty computer program here. It can give you advice about what to do when you’re not sure about a moral problem. In long-duration clinical trials conducted here in the present, people who did what the black box told them whenever they asked it a question were more likely to have children than people who ignored the black box’s advice, people who weren’t given a copy of my black box, and people who were just given a magic eight ball hidden in a black box. (I had a devil of a time getting an IRB to approve all those control groups, but I wanted to be thorough). Would you like a black box of your own?”
I’m not sure why Bob should turn me down

Meh. Having more children doesn’t have much appeal. My DNA may have more interest in your offer, but I don’t care what it thinks. What shapes DNA and what motivates the mind are different things.

The box I’m offering him is optimized according to pretty similar criteria as the conscience he trusts because it was shaped by evolution.

My conscience has my mind on a pretty short leash—it’s just how the brain is wired. My mind listens to my conscience but doesn’t worry much about the origin of things. Improving fertility has little appeal.
Leah responds to one of my points by referencing some of the words I used.

“Rise above” presupposes some dimension of height. “Hone” implies some form that we’re getting closer to by paring away extraneous material. If you have a sense that more is possible, then you must have some expectation that an external standard exists, and that you have some kind of access to it (even if it’s as limited as our access to physical laws, which we have to painstakingly deduce).

Hmm—am I appealing to an external standard? Let’s think about this.
Morality obviously changes—slavery was moral (that is, acceptance was widespread) and now it’s not, legal alcohol was immoral and now it’s not, and so on. But Leah asks if I see not change but improvement. Sure, morality changes, but can we claim that it’s improving?
Society always sees the change as improvement—otherwise, why would it make the change?—but by what standard do we claim it’s an improvement? We look back with mild horror at what passed for acceptable morality in society in the past, but why think that what we see today is more than simply change?
Here’s another parallel. We’ve all seen jiggle puzzles (also called dexterity puzzles) like the one in the photo above. It’s a handheld box with a picture and a few small ball bearings. The picture has tiny wells that can each hold one ball bearing, and the goal is to carefully move the box to put certain ball bearings (they sometimes have different colors) into the correct wells.
Consider a popular model of morality that parallels a jiggle puzzle. Once we’ve correctly figured out a moral issue (say: concluding that slavery is wrong), we’ve placed that ball bearing in the correct well. That problem is resolved once and for all, the ball bearing isn’t going anywhere, and we can move on to worry about placing those other ball bearings.
But why imagine that this is a valid analogy? Why imagine that we were objectively wrong on slavery before and we’re right about it now? Sure, we think we’ve got it figured out … but different societies in centuries past thought that they had it figured out too, but they came to very different conclusions. “Morality” is a moving target.
My ongoing challenge to those who imagine objective morality: resolve an as-yet-unresolved moral conundrum (abortion, stem cell research, etc.). They can’t do it, and yet they hold on to their claim. One of us is missing something. Am I phrasing the challenge correctly?
The definition we’re using for objective morality is “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” If these values exist and are reliably accessibly to almost all adults, we should all be singing from the same songbook. Since we aren’t, I think the problem is that we’re not using the same definition of “objective.”
Any thoughts?

The true measure of a man
is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good.
— Samuel Johnson

Christianity Supports Same-Sex Marriage: the Movie

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This is a longer version of my recent summary of how Christianity, seen correctly, supports same-sex marriage. That summary was deliberately brief, but this video (my first) explores the topic in more depth.
I developed this in support of Washington’s upcoming referendum 74, but I’d like to pass it along in the hope that it will provoke conversation.

Many thanks to the great folks at the Living After Faith podcast for technical help with this project.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken …
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Objective Morality Reconsidered

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Leah Libresco at the Unequally Yoked blog has responded to my blog post about objective morality, as have many commenters. I’ll try to hit the ball back over the net and respond to some of these ideas.
A serving of vegetables that we need to get out of the way first is the definition of “objective.” I tried to nail down the definition that I wanted to use, but I still think many readers and I were not on the same page.
Here are three definitions that I see being used. Each is reasonable, but we need to agree on the one we’re using.
1. Objective means “strongly or viscerally held.” Christian apologists often use this. “By ‘objectively wrong,’ we refer to those things that we all know are just wrong,” they’ll say, and then give something hideous (torturing babies is popular) as an example.
2. Objective means “universally held” or “that which reasonable people can be argued into accepting.” Consider this statement: “Bob’s car is yellow.” No one cares much about this claim, but ignore that—suppose that you wanted extraordinary evidence. I could send you a photo of me in my car. I could email you the names of people who could vouch for this claim. I could show you my driver’s license (connecting my face to my name), my car registration (connecting my name to a particular car’s vehicle ID number), and then the yellow car in my garage (with that VIN). And so on.
I think that this is what the Declaration of Independence means when it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” “These truths” are such that someone either already accepts them or can be convinced that they’re valid.
3. Objective means “grounded outside humanity” or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “having reality independent of the mind.” 1 + 1 = 2 may be objectively true by this definition, for example. Leah’s example: “Russell’s teapot is orbiting the sun.” This claim is hard to prove, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s either true or false.
Each of these definitions has its place, and I can accept each. But now let’s focus on the topic at hand: objective morality. Objective morality by definitions 1 and 2—strongly held or universally held moral beliefs—certainly exists but I see no evidence for objective morality of the third kind. Return to William Lane Craig’s definition for objective morality: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” This is what I see no evidence for.
Consider this parallel to humans’ common moral instinct: our common appreciation of cuteness. Small, helpless, big-eyed things like babies or kittens provoke caring feelings in most of us. “Kittens are cute” is probably objectively true by definition 2. We can analyze why we feel this way (evolution probably selected adults who are drawn to help human babies and similar-looking things) but that doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that it’s a sense shared among most humans.
Why do we react instantly when we see someone in serious danger—stepping in to pull someone out of harm’s way, shouting  for help, and so on? We just do, and almost everyone would act in a similar way. We can analyze the action from an evolutionary or physiological standpoint, but again the point is that this is a shared human instinct.
About Leah’s debate with Hemant Mehta, who shares Leah’s sense of objective morality, she says,

I was trying to press him on where the yardstick or rulebook or whatnot comes from.

My answer is that morality is composed of an instinctive part (the Golden Rule, perhaps) along with a societal part. The first part explains the commonality among people, and the second explains the differences.
Obviously, the instinctive part doesn’t express itself identically in every person. For example, the popular TV series Dexter is about a sociopath (someone without this instinct) who was taught how to pass in ordinary society. Similarly, every person from Seattle doesn’t express an identical Seattle moral sense. These are tendencies, not immutable constraints.
There’s my answer, but how do proponents of objective morality answer this? I’d like to know more about the external grounding of this morality, and I wonder why it’s even introduced since it seems a far more fanciful explanation that no better explains the morality that we see in society.
Leah said:

[Bob is] claiming that we can’t even ask if [a widespread moral] consensus is correlated with anything, since there’s nothing for the consensus to be true about.

I’ll agree that there’s nothing absolute for the consensus to be truth about. When we say, “Capital punishment is wrong,” there is no absolute truth (the yardstick) for us to compare our claim against. Is capital punishment wrong? We can wrestle with this issue the only way we ever have, by studying the issue and arguing with each other in various ways, but we have no way to resolve the question once and for all by appealing to an absolute standard.
Let me bring up accessibility again. If there is objective truth about capital punishment but we simply can’t access it (as if God’s Big Book of Morals exists but we don’t have a library card for God’s library), the objective moralists have won a pyrrhic victory. Yes, objective moral truth exists, but if we can’t reliably access it, what good is it?

If Bob doesn’t think there’s some external standard that his personal understanding of morality can grow to more perfectly resemble, then I’m really baffled about how he approaches new questions. Is the goal just to more perfectly and consistently live out your essentially arbitrary moral preferences?

Again, I get stuck on this idea of an external standard. I’ve seen no evidence of such a thing.
As for “arbitrary,” my morals may be arbitrary in an absolute sense, but of course they don’t feel arbitrary in a throwing-darts-at-a-list-of-possibilities sort of way. I consult my conscience with moral questions, and it gives me answers. No need for an external anything. (If you say, “Wait—where did that conscience come from? Didn’t that get put in there by an external agent?” then I point to evolution as the source.)
If we were bears or Klingons, we’d evaluate situations differently. We can be horrified at the actions of other species, but by what external standards do we judge those actions objectively wrong?

As it stands, I don’t understand why Bob feels a particular loyalty to his arbitrary moral preferences. Any debating atheist knows that we’re running on buggy hardware [that is, we have lots of biases]…

As for loyalty, that suggests that I have a choice, but all I have is a conscience that tells me what’s right and what’s wrong. I have no higher authority to appeal to to check its imperfect moral claims. If Leah’s point is that we shouldn’t be too smug about what our fallible brains tell us, I agree. But these imperfect brains are all we’ve got.

There’s no reason for Bob to treat his moral preferences as any more sacred or central to his identity than his gastronomic preferences.

My moral preferences certainly aren’t any more sacred in an absolute sense (as if God tallied my morals but didn’t care about what I ate). But from my perspective, I think that my morals are more important. If you violate my moral sense, I might tell you that you’re mistaken or I might even take action to stop you, but not much happens if you violate my culinary sense.

Either [moral or gastronomic preferences] could be maladapted to his current environment, and it’s worth poking around to see if he can come up with something better. Does he really think we’re powerless in the face of these questions?

There’s evidence that evolution built us to think that rape and slavery are okay, as long as you’re on the giving end. We see this attitude in the Old Testament, for example. However, modern society teaches us something different. This is the instinctive moral sense being overridden by the societal moral sense. Sam Harris writes about this in his The Moral Landscape. As I understand this, he argues for an objective morality of the second kind—one that we can hone with science and reason.
Here I agree with Leah that we aren’t stuck with our evolutionary programming. We can and do rise above our instincts.
I’m left rejecting objective morality (again: I’m using the William Lane Craig definition, above) for two reasons. First, this resolves no puzzles. The natural explanation is sufficient. And second, I see no evidence for it. The dictionary doesn’t appeal to an objective element to morality, and I see no need to either.

Religion gives people bad reasons for acting morally,
where good reasons are actually available.
— Sam Harris

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Why Christianity Looks Invented

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Let me propose this axiom: a human-invented religion will look radically different than the worship of a real god. That is, human longing for the divine (or human imagination) will cobble together a very poor imitation of the real thing.
Let’s first look at a parallel example in the domain of languages. Imagine that you’re a linguist and you’re creating a tree of world languages. Each language should be nearer languages that are related and similar, and it should be farther from those that are dissimilar. Spanish and Portuguese are next to each other on the tree; add French, Italian, and others and call that the Romance Languages; add other language groups like Germanic, Celtic, and Indic and you get the Indo-European family; and so on.
Here’s your challenge: you have two more languages to fit in. First, find the spot for English. It’s pretty easy to see, based on geography, vocabulary, and language structure, that it fits into the Germanic group. Next, an alien language like a real Klingon or Na’vi. This one wouldn’t fit in at all and would be unlike every human language.
Now imagine a tree of world religions. Your challenge is to find the place for Yahweh worship of 1000 BCE. Is it radically different from all the manmade religions, as unlike manmade religions as the alien language was to human languages? Or does it fit into the tree comfortably next to the other religions of the Ancient Near East, like English fits nicely into the Germanic group?
You’d expect the worship of the actual creator of the universe to look dramatically different from religions invented by Iron Age tribesmen in Canaan, but religious historians tell us that Yahweh looks similar to other Canaanite deities like Asherah, Baal, Moloch, Astarte, Yam, or Mot. In fact, Yahweh was a Canaanite god, and the Canaanites worshiped him as well.
What could he be but yet another invented god?

Cruel men invent cruel gods
— Bertrand Russell

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/12/11.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia