“You’re so smart?” the Christian apologist says. “You think you can read God’s mind? Then tell us what life on earth should look like if God created it.”
I’m glad you asked. If an omnipotent and all-loving god created human life here on earth as a way to develop us into better people who would deserve eternity in heaven, our world would look like “Leave It to Beaver.”
“Leave It to Beaver” was a popular American sitcom that originally aired 1957–1963. It showed the adventures of Beaver Cleaver (to the right in the photo above, with his TV parents and older brother Wally).
Who graduates from God’s classroom?
First, let’s view life from the Christian perspective. Jesus makes clear that few will make it to heaven.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13–14)

Making it through that small gate is our purpose in life. I’ve heard Christians give different metaphors for our world. God made a challenging life on earth as a test to see which people are made of the right stuff. Or it’s a proving ground where the good souls get a chance to prove their worth. Or a crucible where the dross burns away to improve our character and prepare us for heaven.
But let’s imagine life as a classroom. God apparently is so poor a teacher that he only graduates a few of his students.
If you were the president of a college, you might think that if 80 percent of the freshmen graduate, that’s a decent fraction. It’s too bad about the rest, but it’s not possible to make that fraction zero. But God could. God would know exactly what the problems were and how to fix them. Is it a lack of motivation? A lack of funds? Classes not relevant or interesting enough? With God in control, he could create colleges with a 100 percent graduation rate.
God isn’t president of an ordinary college; he’s president of the Ultimate College—life. What fraction of people graduate from God’s college into heaven? Not even half.
Is this the best of all possible worlds?
Eighteenth-century German polymath Gottfried Leibniz argued that this must be the best of all possible worlds. How could God allow all the bad that we see in the world—famine, plague, violence, and so on? Leibniz simply assumed that God would give us the best of all possible worlds, that God couldn’t improve one part without making the overall worse. QED.
This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy—assuming God exists and then (surprise!) it all falls into place, with us unable to critique God’s super-smart plan.
Let’s respond to Leibniz. God can’t make things better than what we have now? Let me suggest some ideas.
Tips for God
Here’s how an omnipotent and all-loving God could better organize life. I propose a world with a 100 percent graduation rate where everyone gets into heaven. It would be a world with gentle correction for errors, like in “Leave It to Beaver.”
To see what that world would look like, here are some of the plot summaries from that sitcom:

• Beaver and Wally are in charge of the neighbor’s cat, but then a dog chases it away (“Cat Out of the Bag”).
• Beaver discovers his old teddy bear and reluctantly discards him after his father and brother tell him he’s too old for dolls. Beaver changes his mind, but he’s too late to save it before the garbage truck comes. He tries to get it back (“Beaver’s Old Friend”).
• Beaver is scheduled to receive an award at school and argues with his parents about whether he needs to wear a jacket and tie (“Beaver’s Football Award”).
• Beaver must write a book report on The Three Musketeers and decides to watch the movie on TV instead of reading the book (“The Book Report”).
• Beaver and a friend are in charge of the class cookie fund, but another student steals three dollars (“The Cookie Fund”).
• Beaver rips his suit pants and lies about it. He’s scolded for the lie and then tells the truth when he rips the pants of his other suit, but his parents won’t believe him (“Beaver’s Bad Day”).

There are 234 episodes. In each, the stakes are low, and there is learning at the end. Beaver gets a little wiser as he’s gently nudged toward adulthood. Not everyone reaches their goals in each episode, but nothing particularly bad happens. Sure, embarrassment during a date or punishment after a mistake is traumatic, but it’s not cancer. Things are black and white, just like the show itself. It’s life with training wheels.
Contrast Beaver’s life with plausible plots from our reality:

• Little Suzie gets smallpox and then dies (“Suzie’s Bad Day”).
• Frank is at work when he feels an earthquake. He makes his way home, but he’s too late—a tsunami has swept away his entire town, including his family (“Frank’s Bad Day”).
• Jamey is tormented by homophobic bullying in school and online. He hangs himself at age 14 (“Jamey’s Bad Day”—a true story).

The Christian demands, “Aren’t you the arrogant one? You think you can tell God how to arrange the universe?” But of course that’s not the question. We don’t take God as a presupposition and then rearrange the facts to support it. Instead, we just follow the facts. And this world certainly looks like a world without a god.

The best thing about believing in a crazy, illogical,
manmade, totally fictional afterlife
is that you will never find out you were wrong. 
— Ricky Gervais

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/8/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia
 

The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re now well past 25 arguments and still going.

Stupid Argument #39: Were you there?
This may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line to infect students’ minds. In Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to the scientist that summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Where you there?” The implied evidence-free conclusion is, “Because if you weren’t, God was!”
Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”
Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers noted that Ham’s “Were you there?” is designed simply to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. He recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.
“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science relies on instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.
Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly. If Ham wants to play games, he needs to expect the same:
Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”
Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”
Ham: “No you weren’t!”
Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”
To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.
And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?
(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)
Stupid Argument #40: Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones.
This argument is an attempt to wriggle away from Bible verses that are unpleasant or that contradict each other. “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones” is advice from Josh McDowell’s New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (page 48). McDowell makes clear that difficult isn’t the issue at all—it’s contradictions that are the problem. They’re not difficult to understand, only to reconcile. For example, the epistle of James says that salvation is by works but Romans says that it’s by grace. The trick, McDowell tells us, is to find the interpretation that you like in the constellation of competing verses, bring that one forward, and either ignore the others or reinterpret them to be somehow subordinate or supportive of your preferred interpretation. That’s not quite how he puts it, but that’s what he means.
The quest for the “clearer” passage has become a quest for the most pleasing one.
The mere existence of what McDowell euphemistically calls “difficult” passages is an unacknowledged problem. How could verses conflict in a book inspired by a perfect god? If conflicting verses exist, doesn’t that make the Bible look like nothing more than a manmade book? How could God give humanity a book that was at all unclear or ambiguous? What does it say that 45,000 Christian denominations have sprung up over varying interpretations of a single holy book?
And no, “I’ll just have to ask that of God when I see him in heaven” won’t do because the Bible has no purpose except to be clear and convincing to people here on earth. (This argument is discussed in more detail here.)

See also: Five Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass

 
Stupid Argument #41: Appealing to polls to resolve scientific issues.
Polls of the population can be interesting and informative—percent of prison population that are atheists vs. Christian, fraction of Republicans vs. Democrats who are Christian, gender mix of Christians or atheists, the biggest issues troubling voters, the most/least religious parts of the country or world, how many Americans think the end times have arrived (41 percent, by the way), and so on.
The problem arises when polls are used to drive government policy. Public opinion should make no contribution to the scientific facts used to guide policy. Of course, elected officials must answer to their constituents, but the opinions of non-scientist constituents still count for nothing on any question of science. Politicians make policy, and scientists give us science’s best approximation to the truths of nature. “We should do nothing because acknowledging climate change is scary” is a policy option, but “Climate change is a hoax that can be ignored” isn’t.
Creationism in public schools is another area where science steps on toes. Americans are embarrassingly clueless (or willfully so) about evolution. 42 percent accept strict Creationism (God created humanity in the last 10,000 years), and an additional 31 percent accept guided evolution (evolution was tweaked by God). (Acceptance of evolution rises with education, which highlights the nonscientific agenda behind Creationism, but that’s an aside.)
Answers in Genesis said about this wide public acceptance of Creationism, “Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.” No, the disparity is between a population that to a large extent accepts the agenda of conservative and religious leaders on one hand and science on the other. Nonscientists don’t get to invent science.
The Discovery Institute tried to give a veneer of scholarship to the debate with its “Teach the controversy” campaign. If we’re talking about science, why can’t we present claims of both sides and let the students decide?
I wonder if they’ve thought this through. How would such a science class be graded? Would pastors be brought in to grade the tests of students who don’t like evolution? Would an answer, “I feel that the answer is …” automatically be correct? And how many “controversies” do we teach—does only the biblical idea of Creation get to come in, or are we throwing the door open to humanity’s hundreds of origin myths?
Texas governor Rick Perry put it this way, “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”
Oh? And which one is right? How do you know? If you already know, why don’t we just teach that one instead of wasting class time teaching both?
“Teaching the controversy” isn’t what we do in science. We teach science in science class, not discarded theories like astrology, alchemy, or Creationism. And, of course, within science, there is no controversy! This is a manufactured issue, and polls of citizens do not make science.
Continued with part 13. Find the complete list in one place here. 

“Who is the right god?” is like asking,
“What is the last decimal digit of pi?”
There are ten possible answers and none of them are right.
— commenter Greg G.

Photo credit: Garry Knight, flickr, CC

Strange Notions is a web site that aims to be “the central place of dialogue between Catholics and atheists.” Shortly after it was created, I was invited to submit one of my posts, which I understand was the first atheist contribution. I applaud that goal, and I was honored to have been be asked.
I offered my “10 Reasons to Just Say Nay to the Naysayer Hypothesis.” A day later, Father Dwight Longenecker, author of the Patheos blog “Standing on my Head,” wrote a reply. Here’s my response.
You’re welcome to read my post about the naysayer hypothesis for full details, but let me summarize it here.
The Christian argument
Many apologists say that Christianity surviving its early years is a testament to its truth. If the gospel story (written or oral) circulating in the years after the death of Jesus wasn’t true, there would’ve been people who would’ve objected. They would’ve said, “Hold on—I was there, and that’s not what happened.” These eyewitnesses would’ve been able to shut down a false story. An eyewitness account would’ve been much more credible than that of someone who simply passed on a story.
Rejection of the naysayer hypothesis
Let’s imagine that. Let’s imagine that Jesus was an ordinary rabbi and that there were eyewitnesses of him not being a miracle worker. The apologist claims that Christianity would’ve been squashed. And let’s be clear here, they can’t be content with a lukewarm, “Well, naysayers might have shut down Christianity.” That’s hardly a foundation on which to build the remarkable claim that God created everything and that Jesus was his emissary on earth who was raised from the dead.
I argue that this naysayer hypothesis is false. That is, we can easily imagine naysayers in the early years of Christianity and the religion surviving just fine. There’s much more in that post, but briefly: the handful of people who followed Jesus closely enough to know that he didn’t do any miracles would’ve been unable to spend their lives stamping out the brush fires of Christianity popping up throughout the eastern Mediterranean. They wouldn’t have even been a part of the Greek-speaking Christian community to know about the error. And why imagine that they would’ve cared enough to devote any meaningful time to eradicating Christianity?
Since rumors take on a life of their own today (for example, it took over two years for the fraction of Americans who believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks to drop below 50 percent), why imagine that the poorer communication of the ancient world would’ve stopped false rumors any better?
My response to a response
One more bit of housekeeping before we get to the response. Here are the facts that I think Dwight and I share.

1. The gospels and epistles exist. We can agree on what each English translation says.
2. These books were written in the first century, and Christianity is a first-century movement.

Dwight seems to have additional starting assumptions, but I can’t think of any that I’d share with him. In particular, I don’t take as fact that anything in these writings is true. And that’s only prudent—we accept that the epic of Gilgamesh exists, but we don’t immediately take its claims as history. You want to claim that Gilgamesh is actual history? Or the Iliad? Or the Bible? I’ll listen to your argument, but remember our starting point: that these books exist and their age, nothing more.
Dwight makes clear that my problem is

basic false assumptions, rooted in some very elementary ignorance of the facts of New Testament scholarship, historical scholarship, and what actually happened. Of course, if false, these assumptions make [Bob’s] conclusions irrelevant.

With that scolding ringing in our ears, let’s soldier on.

We don’t ask if there were any naysayers around to disprove the gospels from 70 AD onward. We ask whether there were any naysayers around when the gospel was hot and fresh when the apostles were preaching—first in Jerusalem and then around the Empire.

That’s fair. For simplicity, I wrote about just naysayers responding to the gospels, but yes, the fuller hypothesis imagines naysayers at the beginning of the ministry. (There would be less for these supposed naysayers to work with if they were responding not to the gospels but only to the oral version.) This touches on points 2 and 3 in my argument, but it does nothing to refute the overall argument.
Next, he spends a surprising amount of time arguing about the date of the gospels.

He repeats the tired old idea that they must date from after 70 AD. The only reason for this dating is the modernist scholar’s assumption that Jesus could not have prophesied the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which happened in 70 AD. Why? Simply because prophecies of the future are impossible. Why? Because they say so.

I’ve heard this argument many times from conservative scholars. He sees Acts written before 65 AD, and Luke before that, and Mark before that. However, this isn’t the scholarly consensus. (I write more about the dating of the gospels here.)
But this is a red herring. I don’t much care when you date the gospels. My concerns still stand: you have decades of oral history before the gospels were written, then centuries of turmoil within the Christian community before our earliest full copies in the fourth century. That’s not much firm ground on which to build Christianity’s incredible claims.
Dwight then argues that there were naysayers, but that they were ineffective.

Let’s look at the facts: when the gospel was hot and fresh in Jerusalem in the days after the Resurrection there were plenty of people there who knew Jesus, knew what had happened, and were ready to dispute with the disciples.

Yes, that is what the story says. No, that doesn’t make it history.
Dwight talks about the bit in Matthew where the Jewish leaders say that disciples must have stolen the body, but why imagine that that story circulated days after the death of Jesus? All we know is that it appeared in a gospel decades after the death of Jesus. And I’m still scratching my head trying to understand Dwight’s point. Why imagine that the naysayers would be motivated to stamp out this false teaching? Why imagine that “That’s nonsense!” would stamp out a religion? Has it ever?
Let me propose an alternative explanation that explains the facts nicely without having to conjure up a supernatural claim. Jesus was a charismatic rabbi. Maybe supernatural stories were told about him during his lifetime, maybe not. Paul writes his epistles two decades after the death of Jesus, within which the gospel story is very minimal (I’ve written about the gospel of Paul here). Like a transplanted species that thrives, Christianity adapts and takes on elements of its new Greek environment, a culture full of supernatural stories. The Jesus stories grow with the retelling, and the gospels are snapshots at different places and times within the eastern Mediterranean.

Our point is not that there were no naysayers but that there were plenty and that they still couldn’t disprove what the apostles were saying.

(It’s not that Dorothy had no obstacles to returning to Kansas but that she had plenty and that she and her friends still overcame them.)
It’s a story. Both the Wizard of Oz and the gospel are stories. Yes, the gospel trots out naysayers and then says that the church withstood the attack. Show that the gospel is actually history, and then that argument will be compelling. Until then, not so much.
Conclusion
Let me try to summarize Dwight’s rebuttal:

1. The action started right after the crucifixion, not at the writing of the gospel. You’re right, but that doesn’t affect the argument.
2. You dated the gospels wrong. I doubt it, but let’s use your dates.
3. The gospel story documents that naysayers existed who, despite their best efforts, could do nothing to defeat Christianity. So what? This means nothing until you show that the gospel story is history.

Dwight concludes by comparing me to someone explaining why there are no lunar landing deniers in NASA.

You may come up with ten astounding reasons why there are no lunar landing deniers at NASA, but it might just be because there was a lunar landing and the people at NASA—along with most other people—accept the simple facts of what really happened.

Yeah. We should accept the simple fact that Jesus was raised from the dead by the omnipotent creator of the universe (an Iron Age polytheistic deity) who demanded a human sacrifice to assuage his sense of injustice that humans are imperfect, like he made them to be.
Or not.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run 
by smart people who are putting us on 
or by imbeciles who really mean it.
— Mark Twain

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/23/13.)

Aaron turned his staff into a snake in front of Pharaoh to show that he and Moses were God’s representatives. Why not a public demonstration today to show that you’re channeling God’s power? Pastor Yaw Saul from central Ghana promised to replicate the staff-into-snake trick, but it didn’t turn out as planned. After hours of effort in the market square, the public lost patience. Perhaps inspired by the command in Deuteronomy, “a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death,” they drove him away by throwing fruit and water bottles.
Balancing act
You must promise, but not too much. That’s the challenge with religion. Promise too little and there’s no attraction. What’s the point in following a god who promises nothing more than an improved complexion and twenty percent fewer weeds in your yard?
But promise too much—that is, make promises that can actually be tested—and you risk getting found out. That was Pastor Saul’s error.
William Miller made the same mistake. He predicted the end of the world on October 22, 1844. When the next day dawned uneventfully, this became known as the Millerites’ Great Disappointment. More recently, Harold Camping predicted the Rapture™ on May 21, 2011 and the end of the world five months later. John Hagee also predicted big things after his four blood moons. Oops—all were too specific.
Almanacs, fortune tellers, and talk-to-the-dead mystics are in the same boat. If they deliver too little, what’s the point? “The winter will be cold” or “This time next year, you will be older” or “A beloved relative says Hi” doesn’t attract many fans. But too specific a prediction and you rack up a list of errors that even the faithful can’t ignore.
One way to avoid this problem is to be ambiguous. The predictions of Nostradamus are famously hammered to fit this or that event from history. (Curiously, no one ever uses these “prophecies” to predict the future. Isn’t that what prophecies are for?)
And, of course, the Bible is ambiguous and even contradictory. Exodus has two conflicting sets of Ten Commandments. Whether you want to show God as loving and merciful or savage and unforgiving, there are plenty of verses to make your case. Jesus can appear and vanish after his resurrection as if he had a spirit body, but then he eats fish as if he doesn’t. Jesus can be the Prince of Peace but then say, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
How can such a religion survive? Wouldn’t its contradictions make it clear to everyone that it was just a collection of writings without divine inspiration?
Contradiction as an asset
Let’s skip over the Bible’s consolidation phase that ended in roughly 400 CE. The hodge-podge of books chosen from a large set of possibilities was accepted as Christian canon, and we can debate about what sorts of compromises or rationales were behind the final list. But the odd amalgam that resulted has a silver lining: a contradictory Bible can make Christianity stronger. Because it contains both answers to some questions, it is able to adapt to new and unexpected challenges.
Take slavery during the U.S. Civil War. From one pre-war book published in the South:

If we prove that domestic slavery is, in the general, a natural and necessary institution, we remove the greatest stumbling block to belief in the Bible; for whilst texts, detached and torn from their context, may be found for any other purpose, none can be found that even militates against slavery. The distorted and forced construction of certain passages, for this purpose, by abolitionists, if employed as a common rule of construction, would reduce the Bible to a mere allegory, to be interpreted to suit every vicious taste and wicked purpose.

And, of course, others used the very same Bible to make the opposite argument.
Rev. Martin Luther King used the Bible to support his argument for civil rights, and Rev. Fred Phelps used the same Bible to argue that “God hates fags.” I’m sure that as same-sex marriage becomes accepted within America over the upcoming decades, loving passages will be highlighted to show that God was on board with this project all along.
The Bible hasn’t changed; what’s changed is people’s reading of it. The Bible’s contradictory nature allows it to adapt like a chameleon. Play up one part and downplay another, and you adapt to yet another social change.
Contradiction as a strength—who knew?

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. 
Basically, it’s made up of two separate words—“mank” and “ind.” 
What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.
— Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts (1993)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/6/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Today is the National Day of Prayer. How about a National Day of Actually Doing Something instead?
The president issues the obligatory proclamation every year. In 2013, he said, “Prayer brings communities together and can be a wellspring of strength and support,” and so on. In 2015, “Prayer is a powerful force for peace, justice, and a brighter, more hopeful tomorrow,” and blah, blah, blah.
We’ve had a National Day of Prayer since 1952. What good has it done? In 1952, the world had 50 million cases of smallpox each year. Today, zero. Guinea worm and polio should soon follow. Computers? Cell phones? GPS? The internet? Science delivers, not God.
I can appreciate that praying to Jesus can help someone feel better, but so can praying to Shiva or Quetzalcoatl or whatever god you’ve been raised with. In terms of actual results, praying to Jesus is as effective as praying to a jug of milk.
I understand how the National Day of Prayer helps politicians suck up to Christians, but how it coexists with the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), I can’t imagine. Last year’s proclamation ended with “I join all people of faith in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection as we seek a more just world.” I’m not sure why all people of faith would want to appeal to an obviously Christian god.
Julia Sweeney’s departure from Christianity
My own departure from Christianity was pretty gentle, and I learned a lot from the painful road taken by Julia Sweeney (creator of “Letting Go of God”). As she gradually fell away from first Catholicism, then Christianity, and finally religion, she realized with a shock how ineffective prayer had been. Prayer lets you imagine that you’re doing something when you’re actually doing absolutely nothing. Her prayers had helped her feel like she was helping people—whether the person on hard times down the street or the city devastated by natural disaster around the world—but in fact those prayers had been worthless.
Not only does prayer do nothing in cases like this, but it is actually harmful. The pain that people naturally feel when they hear of disaster—that emotion that could be the motivator for action—is drained away by prayer. Why bother doing something yourself when God is so much more capable? When you “let go and let God,” you’ve washed your hands of the issue and can go back to watching television, confident that the problem is now in more capable hands.
Prayer becomes an abdication of responsibility, while atheism can open the doors to action.
Where help actually comes from
Sweeney’s conclusion: if you want to help the victims of the tsunami in Haiti or the earthquake in Ecuador (or whatever the latest disaster is), you need to do something since God clearly isn’t doing anything. Contribute to a charity that will help, or demand that the federal government spend more to help and demand the tax increase to pay for it. If it’s a sick friend, Jesus isn’t going to take them soup and cheer them up … but you can.
Prayer doesn’t “work” like other things do. Electricity works. Your phone works. An antibiotic works. But prayer doesn’t. As the bumper sticker says, Nothing Fails Like Prayer.
Even televangelists make clear that prayer is useless. Their shows are just long infomercials that end with a direct appeal in two parts: please pray for us, and send lots and lots of cash. But what possible value could my $20 provide compared to what the almighty Creator of the universe could do?
Televangelists’ appeals for money make clear that they know what I know: that praying is like waiting for the Great Pumpkin. People can reliably deliver money, but prayer doesn’t deliver anything.
Instead of a National Day of Prayer, how about a National Day of Actually Doing Something? Many local United Way offices organize a Day of Action—what about something like that on a national level?
Doing something makes you feel good, just like prayer, but it actually delivers the results.

Prayer is like masturbation.
It makes you feel good but it doesn’t change the world.
— Don Baker

(This is a modified version of an article originally posted 5/3/12.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia