November 4, 2011

The president of American Atheists, Inc. argues Christianity is detrimental to the United States, perpetuating scientific ignorance, impeding gay rights and stymieing stem-cell research.

"Your lives have been negatively impacted by Christianity because Christianity has decreed that scientific research on blastocysts that otherwise would have been discarded is bad," David Silverman told those gathered at the University of Pennsylvania during a recent debate entitled, "Is Christianity Good for America?" "Indeed, this position has directly reduced the anticipated life spans of every living human being by delaying the most important research in recent history."

His opponent – Dinesh D'Souza, president of The King's College in New York City, a New York Times bestselling author and a former policy analyst in the Reagan Administration - defended the world's largest faith, saying Christianity may have "fallen short" in some areas in recent decades, but has had an enormous positive impact overall.

"On the balance, many of our founders were Christian, but when I think of American Christianity, it's not a debate about did the founders go to church," D'Souza said. "It is rather where did our core ideas come from – our philosophical ideals, our economic principles, our concepts of rights and human dignity, the value of human life, the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement? What does Christianity have to do with those things? My answer is a heck of a lot."

In his opening statement, the president of the organization that filed a complaint last summer to block display of the "World Trade Center Cross" said Christianity is bad for the nation in three areas - society, science and sex.

Silverman said Christianity asserts itself with a "Bronze Age morality on society" without considering the damage it is doing. This is clear in the faith's "hypocrisy" regarding marriage, equality and gay rights. Christianity has decided the "first half of a sentence" in the Book of Leviticus warrants an effort to thwart gay marriage and "leave children alone, unloved and forgotten to the hands of the state."

"Christians claim to support marriage, but they get divorced more than non-religious people, according to The Barna Group," Silverman said. "So Christianity has a bad divorce record and actively prevents other people from getting married, as if it were some kind of expert. That is not good."

Christianity pushes itself in schools with events like "See You at the Poles" and "clandestine prayer clubs" – events organized to recruit other people's children into the faith, he said. Christianity also asserts itself at abortion clinics and at doctors' offices "where it creates barriers for other people who wish to terminate a pregnancy."

"The result is a direct attack on the well-being of women's' rights based solely on interpretations of some Bible passage to support their religion," Silverman said.

Although science has "proven the biblical account of creation wrong and everyone knows it," Silverman said Christianity tries "to infiltrate schools to silence the knowledge we have."

"They say God (created the universe and life), it's valid science and it needs to be taught in schools alongside proven fact," Silverman said. "They twist words, they pull strings and they do whatever they can to convince people. Now, 40 percent of the population, according to Gallup, believes the Bible is correct and everything that we know is wrong."

As a result, Silverman said there is a huge gap in American youth's knowledge of science compared to the rest of the world. This leads to Americans losing jobs to better educated people in other countries.

Christianity also attacks the "most basic human function – sex, even though everyone does it." Silverman said the Guttermacher Institute found 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex, "but Christianity says these people are all doing something immoral."

"They promote ignorance of condom use and abstinence-only education," Silverman said. "The result - more (sexually-transmitted diseases), more pregnancies and more strife for American people."

Silverman said Christianity fights progress, undermines civil rights, favors its own expansion and control and places itself above the health and welfare of women, children, teens and families.

"If someone came to you with hard data proving your work is hurting people in your country, I bet you would stop," Silverman said. "Christianity won't. It just denies and re-directs, never pausing for a minute to ponder how much damage it is doing. This is not good for America."

In his rebuttal, D'Souza said even if all of what Silverman said is true, it only proves that "Christianity has been bad for America in the last couple of decades."

"All the issues that he talks about -stem cells, abortion and gays - are a very recent development In America," D'Souza said. "So even by his own admission, Christianity was really good for America through the 1950s and 60s, but then some recent issues came up in which Christianity has evidently fallen short."

However, D'Souza said Christianity has had a significant positive impact on the nation during its history, noting most Ivy League colleges, such as his alma mater – Dartmouth College – began as Christian institutions. In addition to Ivy League colleges, Christianity played a key role in the nation's founding. The Continental Congress assigned Thomas Jefferson, not a devout Christian, the job of writing the document identifying the source of human rights.

"And this man of enlightenment, very familiar with Locke, very familiar with the social contract; when he sat down to write where our rights come from, he could think of only one source - the creator," D'Souza said. "The creator is the source and the only named source of rights in the view of Jefferson. We are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights…. So my point is there is a theology embedded in the Declaration of Independence."

D'Souza said the idea of checks and balances, the separation of powers and minority rights stem from the Christian theology that could be called a "low view of human nature" – an idea shared by philosopher Immanuel Kant who said, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." The Founding Fathers came to America bearing on their shoulders Athens, or classical reasoning, and Jerusalem - Judaism and Christianity.

"Every historian who knows anything about the people who came to America knows they came bringing with them a centuries-old tradition stretching back to Socrates and the Hebrew prophets and Christ," D'Souza said. "And those ideas are embedded in the country they built. So the reason we have liberalism, in the small sense of the term – the small "l" - the idea that we don't trust power, is because we look at human nature as sinful. Therefore, we have to divide power – legislative, executive and judicial branches. That's why we have checks and balances with people looking over each other's shoulders because absolute power, as Lord Acton put it, corrupts absolutely."

In a world in which slavery was a long a universal institution known in every culture – China, India, Africa and even among American Indians – D'Souza said Christians waged "probably the greatest moral crusade in American history" to end slavery.

"Only in the West did a group of people, motivated exclusively by Christianity, begin to call slavery into question – the Quakers and evangelical Christians," D'Souza said. "They began to say that if we are created equal in the eyes of God - a theological idea - it follows that no man has the right to rule another man without consent. And by the way, this notion became not only the basis for anti-slavery or abolition; it also became the basis of democracy. Why? Because representative democracy is based on the proposition that no one person has the right to rule another without consent."

The value of human life, however, is not a universal one. In many parts of the world, life is cheap. Even in ancient Greece and Rome, people placed unwanted children on hillsides to die, a practice that parallels modern-day abortion and infanticide, D'Souza said.

"What this shows is as our culture moves away from Christianity, practices previously considered barbaric are making a major comeback," D'Souza said.

Christianity is also at the roots of the Civil Rights Movement, D'Souza said, encouraging people to read King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

"Has it escaped your attention that he was the Rev. Martin Luther King?" D'Souza asked. "Has it escaped your attention that he quotes Thomas Aquinas and natural law; that he appeals, if you will, to eternal principles of right and wrong? In a sense, King is not pretending to be an original. What is he saying? He's saying, 'I have a promissory note.' Well, who gave him a note? Did southern segregation sign a note? No, he is appealing to the Declaration of Independence. He's appealing back to 'created equal.' He's saying that no American practice should trump that core Christian proposition. So, where would civil rights be without Christianity? We don't know, but it might not have been at all."

Finally, D'Souza said only a small percentage of Christians are agitating to change the biology curriculums in public schools. He also noted that most of the great scientists in history – Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and many others- were theists or Christians.

"Even today, I would argue science is making spectacular new discoveries that vindicate and support the idea of a creator that, if you will, give comfort to those of us who believe in a higher power," D'Souza said.

Although Christianity has contributed greatly to the United States, D'Souza said it's foolish to say everything is going well now. Surveys show many Americans are very concerned about the moral decline of the nation.

"One reason that people focus so much on these issues - prayers in schools and abortion; to me those are the symptoms," D'Souza said. "But they are pointing to a deeper dilemma – a sense that we as a country have lost our way. So we can't simply embrace the status quo without putting it under a moral lens. Christianity has done that in the past, it is doing that even now, and therefore I feel comfortable in saying, thank God for Christianity."

In his closing argument, Silverman said studies show Christianity has contributed to a rise in sexually-transmitted diseases, scientific ignorance, shorter life spans and a lower quality of life.

"I have shown that secular democracies don't have the problems we have, at least not to our extent, and I have shown that here in America that Christianity asserts itself with a cafeteria-style morality that it says is morally objective. The problem is that their objective morality is subjectively selected and therein lays the reason for the 33,000 different sects of Christianity."

Silverman said everyone would like to live forever, but every living thing dies and wishing that wasn't so doesn't make it true.

"This is why so many intelligent people believe the lies spread about religion," Silverman said. "We submit to religion's authority. We buy their books. We tell their stories and we tithe our paychecks – sometimes way too much, just so we can pretend to believe in eternal life. None of that makes it real. Is it a nice lie? Certainly. Does it make people feel better? Oh yeah. Does it make people violent or vitriolic or vindictive when the lie is challenged? Most definitely. Don't live your life, according to a lie, just because your parents raised you to do so. You have one life. Live it well. Look at both sides and think about it in-depth for a long period of time because Christianity is not only bad for America, it's bad.

In closing, D'Souza said no one knows what comes after death.

"The truth is I am scared of life after death," said D'Souza, author of "Life after Death: The Evidence." "There is the possibility of heaven, but there is also the possibility of hell. "

Furthermore, D'Souza said a study by the University of Virginia found people who pray, believe in the afterlife, are in committed, monogamous marriages and live by traditional Christian morality are the happiest people in the world.

"Why? Because Christianity supplies something that atheists can't find," D'Souza said. "Even Marx knew that when he said, 'Christianity is the opiate of the masses.' He knew it offers hope and consolation at the point of death that atheists can't give you. If you read Richard Dawkins and other atheists, you'll find they believe the universe is pointless. But what Christianity offers is an experience of the sublime, a sense that your life is part of a cosmic drama, a sense that you can hope for an existence beyond death – reunited with your relatives in a transcendent morality that we all know is within us."

D'Souza said Christianity offers hope, morality, cohesiveness, a sense of optimism and a glimpse into the experience of the sublime.

"One reason that David talked so much about sex is that in a secular society sex gives us that momentary glimpse into the sublime, but then it's gone," D'Souza said. "With religion, with belief in God, you can have that same sense of the sublime all the time, every day, and Christianity supplies that not just to America, but also to the world."