Wow, no. It is really disingenuous to conflate belief in the supernatural with commitment to human values like equality and morality. It is a trick of words, used to suggest that everyone is irrational about something, so who cares?

The problematic ideas of religion are not "belief" in morality and truth, indistinguishable from "belief" in equality and dignity. The problematic ideas in religion are the beliefs that magic is real, and that ancient folktales are true, against every indicator that can be observed showing that there is no reason to think so.

The actual line is between reason and unreason, between a system that works and can be shown to produce accurate understanding, and a system that is the not the least concerned with accurate understanding, and is very obviously not producing accurate understanding.

In a massive environment of our own construction, only accurate understanding can produce behavior that works. The rest is just spinning wheels.

What is new is gun culture.

The formerly dominant Gun Culture 1.0 — based in hunting, military, and law enforcement — has given way to a new group of individuals (including an increasing number of women) who have gotten into shooting through concealed carry/self-defense and the shooting sports. This has been referred to as Gun Culture 2.0.


Some significant features of Gun Culture 2.0 that are relatively new are the advent of gun niche media such as Guns & Ammo magazine, which was begun in 1958, and political advocacy by the NRA which began in 1975. Also significant was the Firearm Owners Protection act of 1986, which relaxed gun restrictions in the U.S., most significantly by opening up the Gun Show Loophole which allows sales without background checks.

Gun shows, gun magazines and gun political advocacy are now major factors in gun culture. They also serve as a demagogic circle for stoking fear of threats. For example, right now Guns & Ammo is featuring helpful articles like "Executive Protection Tactics: Like it or not, we're surrounded by deadly threats every day," and "Why We Don't Trust Research."

Modern gun culture is far more paranoid, insular and hyper than any since the the Old West, maybe worse. Gun Culture 2.0 is making sure that every problem looks like a nail and as many people as possible have the worst possible hammers.

No human brain is immune to malfunction.

Sensational shootings aside, most homicide deaths in the U.S. the victim personally knows the killer, and at least half of them arise from fights over property disputes, domestic arguments, insults or feuds. Thirty percent of female victims were killed by their husbands.

In other words, most gun homicides are crimes of passion, where people lose control of themselves, and do things they don't even understand themselves later. And as I said, no human brain is immune to malfunction - and meltdown.

Massive numbers of guns just ensure that meltdowns result in bloody deaths a whole lot more often.

Lax gun regulation and hyper gun culture have an effect on the numbers of people who want to kill a bunch of people and are able to. In our country they combine for maximum numbers of people who want to and are able to. In some other countries, firmer regs and laxer gun culture combine to result in fewer numbers of people who want to kill a bunch of people and are able to.

Regulation is a leverage point. It makes no sense to ignore it.

No, most killings are spur of the moment, in the heat of passion, and the killer regrets it the rest of his life. Planned killings, where they will find a way to do it no matter what, are rare.

If there weren't so many guns laying around, it would be much harder to commit the 50% of murders which arise from fights, and the 61% of gun deaths which are suicides. Without a gun to hand, there is a chance the hysteria will pass without killing anyone.

Yes, everyone who wants to kill someone else should have to resort to using a plane, or something else almost impossible and extemely difficult to accomplish. The difficulty of it will slow some people down.

Why not make killing others harder? Why make it easier?

Nobody thinks it's "GUN only," but less gun deaths can be achieved with less guns, and less gun death would be good.

You don't have to change that fact to make life a whole lot better for everyone. Even if we never figured out "the REASON," if it was harder to do, that would be much better. When something is very hard, only the most determined succeed at it and everyone else washes out. When killing is really hard, some killers won't bother, or try and fail. Viola, less killing.

We already know the reasons. Up until a scant 10,000 years ago people lived on the edge of survival as kill-or-be-killed tribal hunters and warriors. Millions of years of evolution selected us biologically for killing. Not everyone in the tribe had to be into killing, but a significant subset had to be or none would have survived. Killing is very strongly selected for.

Since the introduction of agriculture, writing, and eventually civilization, we have been able to learn ways to curtail killing, but we have also learned ways to ramp it up with industrialized warfare. Killing is deeply embedded into most human cultures as a glorious triumph - so long as the victim is out-group to the culture, ie. an enemy of one kind or another.


Most societies throughout history, up until very recently, have had a lot of killing built right into the system. Warrior cultures like the Vikings and the Teutonic peoples routinely raided neighboring villages or the coasts of England, burning and pillaging and killing as they went. Vast civilizations ground each other to dust on the battlefields.

And, murder between individuals has been a common occurrence almost every single society has had to make rules to deal with.


We only invented NOT killing about five minutes ago, historically speaking. It takes a long time to figure out all the different ways the killing has to stop. We were still grinding each other to dust in world wars only a couple of generations ago, and have maybe not even figured out how to do stop doing that yet. Time will tell.

However - sensational killings aside, the numbers on gun violence - in fact all crime - in the U.S. are going down. Overall crime rates fell an incredible 45% between 1990 and 2012, largely because technology has made it much more difficult to get away with.

So, it takes a lot of error correction to overcome biologically dictated behaviors, but the great advantage of behavior is that it can be changed. We have already learned a lot of great tools for living without killing, like democracy and facial recognition software. We have to keep working on it. One additional tool, which other countries use to great success, is firmer gun regulation.

It is a mind fuck.

This is just as offensive to reason as the whole hell thing.

An uncaused omnipotent sentient invisible intercessory being is actually far less likely than coincidences.

This belief is creating a tremendous amount of suffering.

Your beliefs are a bit nicer than hell, but they are just as patronizing.

Wow, even Richard Dawkins doesn't claim to KNOW there isn't. Capital letters KNOW is not the typical atheist position.

Yet, there seems to be just one actual reality which we all are in.

Not to a person. "Offensive to reason" means that it does not stand to reason. In other words, it does not seem to be true.

There is no evidence of an intercessory deity, and all attempts to produce verifiable evidence of divine intervention have failed. People seem to be using confirmation bias and the placebo effect and wishful thinking and a great human tendancy to attribute agency to create the appearance of an intentional will at work where there is no actual evidence of one.

It's not personal. Coincidences can be observed to occur.

You are not the only person in the world.

The idea that cause and effect are ordered by a moral sentient being is one, devaluing reason, and two, causing untold amounts of agonizing over "why God did this."

Captal letter KNOW is not supportable by reason. You could be incorrect.

Yeah. So, obviously, not everyone is correct.

Evidence that only works for one person does not stand up to reason. Individuals believe whatever they want of course, but as a society we should be striving to understand what is real and what isn't, and acknowledge that intercessory deities are not supportable by reason, and that the claim that they are are at work in human lives does not seem to be true.

Unfortunately, everybody just believing whatever they want is causing a lot of error.

Belief has nothing to do with it. It is empirical. Coincidences can be observed. Intercessory deities managing reality so that coincidences are intentional or have moral purpose cannot be observed. That is why coincidence stands to reason and intercessory deities don't.

You are not the only person. There is no question that in tragic circumstances many people agonize over "why God allowed this to happen." Attributing agency and agenda to tragedy just increases the suffering, and fails to recognize the observable cause and effect at work.

One of the unfortunate side effects of unreason is infantilizing humans.

This is why it is so important to act with reason - to attempt to avoid being incorrect to the greatest degree possible. Using reason allows humans to analyze the real cause and effect at work and apply solutions that actually produce predictable outcomes.



It a pleasure speaking with you, thanks again!

Once again, it is not personal. It doesn't matter how much you like a theory inside your head, or what you personally think "makes sense." What matters is which claims can be supported by evidence.

The theory of relativity was borne out in 1919 by evidence that the perihelion of Mercury's orbit precesses around the Sun at an excess of 43 arcseconds per century. This was verified by scientists around the world during a total eclipse of the sun. Additional evidence has poured in for decades, from observations of all kinds of astronomical phenomena, and confirmed by thousands of scientists. This is why the theory of relativity is considered to be very accurate.

We were not talking about belief, we were talking about evidence. If there was no evidence to support relativity, or evidence that only made sense TO ME, it would not be considered accurate.

Your claim that there is evidence TO YOU is meaningless. For all we know, you would accept any old stupid thing as evidence. You could be relying on confirmation bias and the placebo effect and agency attribution as evidence, and if that is the case, then you are simply wrong about God "doing" things for you.

You may not care if you are wrong, but it matters.


As I said, individuals will think whatever they want, but there is no reason for our society to act like this might be true when there is no evidence at all to show that it is true. Acting like claims of an intercessory deity, and other unsupported claims, are true, is causing a lot of problems.

Why is it acceptable to pronounce things as true when they don't seem to be? When people do this, it is important for for society to denounce it for what it is - apparently wrong. The claim that this universe is designed and managed by some kind of being is about a million miles from what it looks like.

And to have these totally unsupported claims presented as if they are just as valid as truth is a crime against humanity.

Juice that might not be real is worthless. Longing for it only serves to distract you from appreciating the juice you are in.

You are in a box with everyone else. There is one reality.

2 + 2 = 4 is pretty boring. Should we accept claims that 2 + 2 = 5 to liven things up?

I do not really think the term "random" applies, or not much. "Random" in this context is a misnomer applied by theists, used to suggest that the only alternative to "God doing it" is that everything which occurs is totally spontaneous and happening for no reason at all.

However the shape and configuration of our universe - at least at the macro level, at every moment since the big bang - has arisen from a direct chain of cause and effect because of the forces at work and the properties of matter. If there is one thing that a physical chain of cause and effect between forces and matter isn't, it's random. Things transpire as a result of how they were caused.

I would say the same applies to life. Everything that lives is a direct link in a chain of descent circumscribed for the most part by what worked and what didn't. If there is anything the direct result of trial and error isn't, it's random.

I would say it means that matter can become amazing. How much more meaningful could anything be?

Nobody is a criminal before they do the crime. Maybe this would result in fewer proto-criminals, sitting around polishing their guns while furiously fuming about how much they need guns because of the horrible threat of (X). They aren't criminals yet, but they are ticking time bombs.

The one thing shooters all have in common is gun culture. It's time to start disrupting it.

In Buddhism, the "three mind poisons" are greed, fear and ignorance. What we perceive as "evil" actions by humans often seem to arise from these. I would add that human actions which harm others can also arise from a pathology - malfunctions in the ability of the human brain to properly process empathy or social obligation.

There are also causes of harm which are not "evil," like natural disasters, which happen each for their own particular reasons of physical cause and effect.

For the most part, things happen and it is our human propensity to label which results in "evil."

I don't see why that would be a problem. For millions of years before humans there were just animals on the earth, and none are known to have possessed the cognitive abilities to assign labels like "good" or "evil" to what occurred. Yet, they thrived, generation after generation, feeling good or feeling bad as dictated by circumstance and stimulus response, without any need for knowing what good or evil is. Obviously that kind of understanding is not required.

What we call "evil" can be a great teacher, but there is no reason to think evil things are made to happen for the purpose of our edification, or because without them we would be unbalanced or unappreciative. The fact is that all kinds of things happen, for their own specific reasons. As we developed higher levels of cognitive ability, we needed concepts to understand happenings and distinguish adaptive behavior from non-adaptive behaviors. The distinction was invented for our benefit, but by us.