Posted on 05/03/2015 5:00:52 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Way too many of us believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of misanthropic myths.
A lawyer and an associate dean at Liberty University, a columnist for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the founder of WND’s Christian fundamentalist site Barbwire.com, Matt Barber might seem like an evangelical fringe character, but, clearly, he means to have his voice heard and his pronouncements taken seriously: his work appears under the portentous slogan RELATIVISTS BEWARE: TRUTH TOLD HERE.
Yet he is affiliated with Glenn Beck, so, in pursuit of Truth-Telling, he sees fit to publish such essays as “You Won’t Believe What the Devil Said to Me!” and “Sympathy for the Devil” — a Means to Destruction, in which the authors, in complete earnestness, write of a horned-and-dangerous Beelzebub as an existent being looming over their daily lives. One would be tempted to dismiss such scribblements as ridiculous, but six out of 10 Americans do believe in Satan. Christianity, that multilevered vehicle for the dissemination of “blind and naked ignorance,” has warped the minds of a majority of Americans, and Barber’s blog reflects (sadly) mainstream religious convictions.
By a tragicomic process of inversion, thus, we have to take Barber seriously, precisely because we would be inclined to disregard him as deeply un-serious, and thereby fail to appreciate the increasing threat that Christianity poses to our Constitutionally godless Republic. The latest reification of this faith-based menace: the proliferating “religious freedom restoration acts.” Nor should we forget the already shockingly successful stealth campaign underway to circumvent Roe v. Wade and deprive women of rights over their own bodies. Both RFRAs and restrictions on abortions are the products, largely, of evangelicals whose names should go down in infamy, but who, like Barber, at least out in the red states, bask in the light of benevolence as “people of faith.”
On April 26, in response to my recent Salon article denouncing the rancid mire of superstitious gobbledygook in which our presidential candidates are wallowing, Barber published “Will Christians Be Fitted with Yellow Crosses?” The arguments he makes against my exposé are as foolish as they are grounded in widely held misconceptions regarding atheism and the nature of reality itself, and so merit rebuttal – a task I find both pleasant and entertaining.
After a desultory prolegomenon in which Barber inveighs against “the secular left’s utter disdain for both our Creator Christ and His faithful followers,” fumes over long-overdue progressive challenges to various discriminatory laws he supports, and warns about “America’s cultural Marxist agents of ruin” and the “acidic bile” of “unfiltered ‘progressivism,’” he labels me a “God-denying goose-stepper” and “paragon of paganism” who “ably puts the ’bigot’ in anti-Christian bigotry.”
Accusations of “bigotry,” trotted out with the intent to silence, should still the tongue of no outspoken atheist. We attack not religious folks as people, but the irrationality inherent in their religion, which is nothing more than hallowed ideology, and therefore is, or should be, as much fair game as, say, socialism. Would Evangelicals heed calls to “respect” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (who has just announced his candidacy for 2016) and avoid engaging in “anti-socialist” bigotry with regard to his political views? Of course not. Nor should they, necessarily, if they disagree with him. Being a socialist, just like being a Christian, is a matter of choice, save one important fact: at least socialism constitutes a coherent ideology to which nothing resembling the benighted principle of “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd) has ever applied.
All those who, in the public arena, advance Christianity’s bizarre supernatural propositions about our world and our origins, and worse, use them to justify legislation, should expect relentless demands for evidence from rationalists. But before Barber or other faith-addled folks take to their keyboards and type out what is usually their first argument against atheism, I’ll dispense with it myself. Yes, we atheists freely admit that no one can epistemologically prove there is no God. But the strength of our convictions should match the validity of the evidence on which they are founded. Shelley put it succinctly: “God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.” Verse and chapter cited from a potentially unreliable translation of a supposedly holy book composed millennia ago by unknown humans cannot pass as “proof.” But if there is no real evidence to support belief in God, there’s plenty to assume He is nothing but a figment (if a vengeful and despotic one) of our overactive imagination — a product, mostly, of our fear of death. Again, it’s up to believers to justify themselves, not atheists.
But back to Barber’s blog.
Barber takes issue with my statement about “The electorate’s gradual, relentless ditching of religion.” This has been well documented in surveys, to which I link in my essay. Unable to refute them, Barber reminds us that that “over 80 percent of Americans identify as Christian” (which I had acknowledged), and then goes on to claim that “the vast majority of those who don’t . . . nevertheless acknowledge[e] the transcendent reality of a Creator God.” A Gallup poll conducted last year blows apart this contention: 42 percent of all Americans now believe God created the universe, down from 47 percent in 2000, with 19 percent (up from 9 percent in 2000) of all Americans holding that God had nothing to do with it. So even among those purporting to believe in him, the “God as Creator” idea is losing out.
Barber then chooses to embarrass himself with a declaration that confirms he should stick to batting in the Little League of modern-day thinkers:
Every man, woman and child understands through both general revelation and human reason that this unfathomably intricate, staggeringly fine-tuned universe didn’t create and fine-tune itself. It’s a tiny minority of angry, self-deluded materialists like Jeffrey Tayler who deny this self-evident truth.
Many believers might indeed find such a boner-studded profession of ignorance credible (and surely Barber does, given that he earned all three of his degrees at religious institutions), but secularists who read grown-up books will immediately see how it contradicts what physics and biology tell us about the cosmos. The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions. (And it’s still expanding.) Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection. This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.” (For more information, Barber might wish to set aside his magic book and delve into the oeuvre of the theoretical physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, and, of course, Dawkins’ own “The God Delusion.”)
Scientists are working hard to plug the lacunae in our knowledge. Answers will come from physicists and biologists and empirical observation, not preachers ranting about the “revelations” bespattering their “sacred” tome. Barber’s Creator God is nothing more than a shopworn deus ex machina, whose mysterious emergence poses its own obvious question: what created Him? And so on, ad infinitum.
Barber then cites my description of the “faith-deranged . . . unwashed crazies” in red-state primaries whose “religious beliefs would (or should) render them unfit for civilized company anywhere else.” This he terms “hubristic elitism” and “so 1939,” comparable to Jews being forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. “Shall we Christians,” asks Barber, “be fitted with yellow crosses, Herr Tayler?”
I chose the term “faith-deranged” with care. I meant it literally, lest there be any doubt that I intended to be merely incendiary. Derangement is clearly rampant across large swathes of America. Citizens of one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth who opt, of their own volition, to believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of bilious behests and misanthropic myths cannot be esteemed to be thinking sanely. Given the extreme nature of the delusions of these citizens and the resulting behavior – for example, petitions whispered to an invisible celestial tyrant with the goal of securing favorable outcomes, otherwise known as prayer, and hallucinated responses from said invisible tyrant – only one conclusion presents itself: faith has disrupted their mental faculties and is producing symptoms that, were they not sheltered under the adjective “religious,” would qualify as pathological.
I do consider Barber’s addressing me as “Herr” inapt, since it raises Hitler’s overworked ghost and implies that I think that I’m carrying out the Lord’s work. Those who would dispute me might wish to consult volume one of “Mein Kampf,” in which Hitler announced: “I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator,” and “I had so often sung ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and shouted ‘Heil’ at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.” They might also check the next chapter, in which Hitler predicted that “inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.” They surely would wish to know that Hitler’s Wehrmacht soldiers launched themselves into battle wearing belt buckles emblazoned with the motto “GOTT MIT UNS” – God is with us. This was all, really, par for the course. Throughout history, self-sainted barbarians have pressed their imaginary deity into service and used him to justify their lust for bloodshed.
Barber then accuses me of “knifing twixt the shoulder blades, the richly diverse, 100 thousand-plus student body at Liberty University” by calling their school a “bastion of darkness” that should be subject to “immediate quarantine until sanity breaks out.” This is the equivalent of, in his words, my “consigning all faithful Christians to a constructive encampment beyond the margins of functional society. That’s their end-game. That’s the way their boxcars roll.”
I actually like Barber’s use of “twixt” – the only instance of elegance in his otherwise pedestrian prose. But according to its own site, Liberty University has 13,800 students, not a “100 thousand-plus.” “Boxcars” — that’s Barber’s extrapolation. Atheism has no “holy book” of any sort that could serve as a manual for repression (as, say, the Bible did for the Inquisition). Furthermore, my suggestion of “quarantine” was, besides being obviously facetious, quite charitable and open-minded. After all, to earn their release into society at large, Liberty University students would be free to redeem themselves by renouncing fealty to their bogus deity and de-matriculating.
Barber says my phrase “fanatical homophobic cult” describes his “papist friends,” when I was, in fact, referring to Christ Fellowship (which Sen. Marco Rubio attends on Saturday nights). Christ Fellowship is indeed a “fanatical homophobic cult,” one so extreme it demands that employees certify their straightness. Presumably, Barber errs tendentiously, and hopes to spark the ire of the errant Catholic who might stumble upon his blog. In any case, he closes with a dull jab at President Obama: “Russia had its Stalin and China its Mao. Who needs an ‘invisible tyrant’ when we can elect one at the ballot box? Or didn’t we already do that.”
Such a statement only bolsters the point I made above, if in other words: faith deranges, and absolute faith deranges absolutely.
Barber’s blog is but a symptom of the seemingly incurable malady of faith. In fact there is a remedy — free speech, applied liberally to infected areas. Rationalists must resist all calls to show respect for religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other faith with universalist pretensions. Recall the damage these stultifying ideologies of control and repression have done the cause of progress throughout history. And remember the stakes now, with so many of our presidential candidates flaunting their belief, and seats on the Supreme Court likely to free up, especially post-2016. We either fight back by speaking out now, or we may end up living in a Christian-theme-park version of Iran, with Ted Cruz as our ayatollah.
Yet do not despair! In the United States the winds of reason are blowing more strongly than ever: since 2012 alone, 7.5 million have abandoned religion. We atheists have the momentum. Finally, finally, we can make out religion’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
Those sleeping the slumber of faith hang DO NOT DISTURB signs about their minds.
No rationalist should feel obliged to comply.
*****
Jeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. His seventh book, "Topless Jihadis -- Inside Femen, the World's Most Provocative Activist Group," is out now as an Atlantic e-book. Follow @JeffreyTayler1 on Twitter.
Salon: Helping the NY Times look conservative...and ‘Mad Magazine’ and ‘The Onion’ look like newsmagazines.
Thanks for the ping!
Ted Cruz is going to make this Dude Bake a Cake?
But this guy would vehemently defend the “right” of Muslims to implement Sharia courts.
if you want a greater chill, read (or re-read) Revelation in the Bible; it gets a whole lot worse! But it does have a happy ending though :-}
Jeffrey Tayler is dead.
Cruz and Rubio can speak Spanish directly to Hispanics and get around the main media spin...though I’m not sure about Univisions’ spin. That is what they are afraid of...They are telegenic and present a wholesome image to Hispanics. The Dem’s have nothing to counter them. You don’t think Hispanics won’t be sorely tempted to vote Cruz or Rubio the same way blacks did with Obama?
I've seen Sen. Cruz quoted as saying he can only speak what he describes as "Spanglish".
You can look around at the leftist news reports to see claims that he has refused to debate in Spanish "because he doesn't speak it at all".
Seems to me it could make a great difference and I keep hoping he would start immersion lessons right away.
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.’”
Well Shelley was not a scientist but a poet(unless we are speaking of Mary Shelley the writer of Frankenstein)....logic dictates that proof of existence may be required by the theist but proof of nonexistence is also required by the atheist. Hence the term Tautology. It can’t be proven or tested as false or true that God exists the same way one can test gravity and its properties. The mistake many atheists make with the logical or scientific method is to assume that a tautologous issue such as “God exists” must automatically be considered false. In reality, such an issue can neither be considered true or false lest one be accused of personal bias that may cloud one’s reasoning process. The question at best must be left open, in terms of applied method, reasoning, or analysis.
I thought Cruz could speak it fairly well,,,,Oh well we know Rubio can but so can Jeb Bush unfortunately!
I know.
No doubt they will try to embarrass him on the debate stage with it too.
Maybe he’ll surprise us and blaze away like Ricky Ricardo by next fall.
By a tragicomic process of inversion, thus, we have to take Barber seriously, precisely because we would be inclined to disregard him as deeply un-serious, and thereby fail to appreciate the increasing threat that Christianity poses to our Constitutionally godless Republic. The latest reification of this faith-based menace: the proliferating “religious freedom restoration acts.” Nor should we forget the already shockingly successful stealth campaign underway to circumvent Roe v. Wade and deprive women of rights over their own bodies….
Accusations of “bigotry,” trotted out with the intent to silence, should still the tongue of no outspoken atheist. We attack not religious folks as people, but the irrationality inherent in their religion, which is nothing more than hallowed ideology, and therefore is, or should be, as much fair game as, say, socialism….
Yes, we atheists freely admit that no one can epistemologically prove there is no God. But the strength of our convictions should match the validity of the evidence on which they are founded [Well that would be nice…. ]
Sounds good to me. But here’s the pièce de résistance:]
The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions. (And it’s still expanding.) Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection. This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.”[Boldface added in the above for emphasis.]
WOW. This guy is a freaking scientific genius!!!
[NOT!!! He seems entirely ignorant of developments in the physical/natural sciences over the past 25 years. He sounds like a “wind-up toy” sputtering out "memes" of what passes for pop-scientific orthodoxy nowadays.]
Plus his fallacies, which become his premises, are legion. Examples: (1) He reasons from physical cosmology to the imputation that biology arose owing to a “still unexplained” chemical event, probably around 4 billion years ago, of the total 13.7 billion years of cosmic existence. But there’s nothing in physical cosmology suggesting that chemical occurrences per se are the deepest or most fundamental processes in nature. He’s simply begging the question here, building an edifice on an undemonstrated presupposition.
(2) He stipulates, without reservation, the idea that religion itself is the source of disorder in society, on the grounds that it is fundamentally “irrational.” The implication being that, unless “religious ideology” is expunged from “society” — the society that he and his class will “perfect” for us, if we’d only give them the chance — “society” cannot “progress.” I see here only platitudes, not verified propositions. More than that, I see a self-interested person at work … a member of a self-appointed “vanguard” seeking a pay-off.
But he stands up for a woman’s “rights” over her “own body!” [What on earth, precisely, does that mean??? Is this a natural or a positive right? Does it have any limit at all? Note: Evidently, these are not scientific questions; they are political ones.]
And, by the way, what does ANY of this have to do with TED CRUZ???
(3) Adverting back to (1), to his insistence that life arose from an “unexplained chemical occurrence” roughly 4 billion years ago, and this by random evolutionary processes, in a (usually) eternal universe scenario. He is invoking scientific, physical cosmology here, but doesn’t seem to realize the implications. Moreover, he seems to be wildly out-of-whack with current state-of-the-art physics, which increasingly seems to be taking a dim view of an accidental, or randomly evolving universe.
Some cosmological considerations that have come to the fore in the era of Hubble and COBE, two experimental satellite probes of deep space:
(1) Increasingly, evidence accumulates that the universe had a beginning in time, in the Big Bang of a “singularity,” before which event nothing — not time, nor space, nor energy, nor fields, nor organizing principles — existed at all.
(2) Somehow, the initial conditions of standard big bang theory were astoundingly consequent to the emergence of a “low-entropy,” anthropically-friendly — meaning able to bear life — universe, a universe not “static,” but ever “growing,” inflating. The observed fact of cosmic inflation — which over recent eras has been observed to be accelerating (presumably owing to dark energy, which seems to move according to principles at variance to classical Newtonian gravity) — argues for a beginning of time. How can something be said to be accelerating if one does not have a reference time to measure the acceleration against? Such a reference time cannot be infinite (therefore, time is past-finite, it has a beginning): At the very least, no human “measurement” can be conducted in “infinite time.”
(3) When we speak of cosmic inflation, we need to need to recognize that what we humans are able to observe is restricted to the current Hubble expansion, or Hubble volume. That’s because the total universe is not reducible to the currently humanly-visible universe, notwithstanding our magnificent space probes. It takes time for human observation to catch-up with cosmic events already concluded in a deep past, events that can only be conveyed to us human observers at the rate of the speed of light. Thus in an inflationary universe, it seems we humans are put in the perennial position of always having to play “catch-up ball”….
(4) I mention the Hubble Volume because it is key to the assessment of the tremendous proliferation of “eternal universe” cosmological models, which are mainly attempted, it seems to me, for one or two reasons: Either to completely obviate the problem of a “beginning” to the universe (because such a possibility eerily suggests a creator or superintelligence acting in/on Nature, which “we” will not countenance); or simply to insist that all of nature evolves according to purely “natural” (as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical) cause — more or less because science itself can only address “natural” or “physical” cause. Thus such investigators want to reduce the cosmic problem to the capabilities of the “tool” — i.e., the scientific method — they want to use to investigate the problem…. It seems it’s the only tool they’ve got….
Thus the amazing proliferation of scientific cosmologies struggling to get around the idea of a cosmic beginning in space and time, by adverting to various “eternal universe” models — multi parallel universes, ekpyrotic, bouncing universes, eternal boom and bust universes, etc., etc.
All these models require time to be past infinite; i.e., no beginning applies. This is all very Newtonian: For he stipulated that the universe exists for an infinite amount of time with an infinite amount of space and an infinite amount of interacting content. Therefore, as Robert Spitzer notes, “there would have been an infinite number of ‘tries’ to bring about virtually any degree of complexity” [such as associated with living systems in Nature]. But as Spitzer also notes, “Once an infinite number of possibilities is inserted into the probability equations, improbability disappears — and literally anything becomes possible.”
But if everything is ultimately “possible,” given infinite time, and the human mind is finite, how do we get the two to “measure up?” Which begs the question: What is the point of science at all?
At which point, I’d like to cite Spitzer’s cogent observation:
There is much loose talk, even among physicists and philosophers, of “many universes.” In all the theories we have been talking about, there is really just one universe, if we mean by universe the entirety of physical reality that is in any way physically connected to the world we experience. In “multiverse” models, the universe has many “domains,” but they are all parts of the same structure that is governed, ultimately, by one set of fundamental laws. Those fundamental laws may be realized in different ways in different domains, but the fundamental laws are the same in every domain, and the domains physically interact with each other in ways governed by those laws. Similarly, in bouncing or cyclic universe scenarios, there may be different cycles, but all those cycles are all part of a single process governed by one set of fundamental laws. In scenarios with many “branes” in a higher-dimensional universe, those “branes” are not really other universes, by all parts of one physical reality. — Robert Spitzer, S.J., New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, 2010, p. 43.The Hubble Volume test comes in handy here. Most of these multiverse constructs that depend on infinite past time — on obviating a creator — are defeated by this “test.”
It appears that a whole lot depends on the “average” expansion of the Hubble Volume, or HAV. HAV > 1 seems to account quite admirably for the universe we actually live in (based on actual experimental evidence). HAV = 0 represents the case of the “asymptotically static” universe, which doesn’t do much at all. HAV < 0 seems to represent the case of universal chaos, in which not only does nothing get done, but in which nothing can get done.
The scientific case that has been building up over the past two or three decades increasingly is in retreat from presuppositions that chance is the mother of the natural world, of the universe itself.
Indeed, anyone who clings to a belief in a “chancy universe” nowadays needs to grapple with Roger Penrose’s number: 1010123. This is the probability he assigns to the astoundingly low entropy (and anthropically-friendly nature) of the universe, in its initial conditions, to have occurred by chance.
Just a few illuminating reflections in closing:
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbably accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.” — Arno PenziasMy takeaway: There is a “miracle” at the foundation of the world, at the Beginning. Call it superintellect, or cosmic designer; we Christians call it: God.…A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. — Fred Hoyle
You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world to the degree that we may speak of such comprehensibility as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be in any way grasped through thought…. The kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s theory of gravity is of quite a different kind. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by a human being, the success of such an enterprise presupposes an order in the objective world of a high degree which one has no a-priori right to expect. That is the “miracle” which grows increasingly persuasive with the increasing development of knowledge. — Albert Einstein
And in this belief, it seems that recent developments suggest that, if anything, science is “on our side!”
So dear fellow Christians, do not despair when you hear the rantings of ignoramuses like Jeffery Tayler. In the final analysis, he has no rational or logical ground to stand on.
BTW, yet again, what does any of this have anything of substance to do with Ted Cruz???
Thanks ever so much for the ping dear sister in Christ!
Interesting how some think they “know” what happened 4 billion years ago...
-OR-
What’s going on in GOD’s mind... people that can read God’s mind..
MAN...... I must be dumb... a victim of Hoseheimer’s..
Or exaggerating the big bad Cruz threat could just be great for their fundraising.
This guy has written dozens of articles attacking religion, so it's not likely he'd be convinced by that argument.
Nature selecting HETEROsexual procreation for humans is a self-evident fact - not an argument.
Thank you!
It’s impossible not to notice the marks of a religion in all that Taylor and Barber have written. They cite chapter and verse of their religion and expect everyone to bow down.
http://www.leagle.com/decision/20061438422FSupp2d1016_11349
The United States Supreme Court has never determined whether atheism qualifies as a religion. The Courts of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has answered the question in the affirmative, both in this case and in Reed v. Great Lakes Cos., 330 F.3d 931, 934 (7th Cir.2003), but it had not addressed the question in 2002, when defendants made their decision. Courts have defined religion to encompass both traditional theism and beliefs regarding matters of “ultimate concern” that “occupy a place parallel to that filled by God in traditionally religious persons.” Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333, 340, 90 S.Ct. 1792, 26 L.Ed.2d 308 (1970); Fleischfresser v. Directors of School Dist. 200, 15 F.3d 680, 688 (7th Cir.1994). Under these standards, courts have recognized that pacifism, secular humanism and other nontheistic belief systems are entitled to the protection of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. See, e.g., Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 495, 81 S.Ct. 1680, 6 L.Ed.2d 982 (1961) (Buddhism, Secular Humanism, Taoism, Ethical Culture and other nontheistic philosophical systems qualify as “religions” within meaning of the First Amendment); Welsh, 398 U.S. at 342-43, 90 S.Ct. 1792 (moral, ethical, or religious beliefs about what is right and wrong held with the strength of traditional religious convictions qualify as “religious” beliefs).
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