Whew -- heavy stuff! Not that I mind <G>.

Okay, so avoiding the topic of whether there should be federal funding for any science at all (which is too far outside the scope of this site to get into), here's my take.

1. The concept of soul is, obviously, unimportant to me. However, I think that humans have certain rights regardless of whether or not they have a soul.
2. I think that any statement about when human life begins is going to be, to some extent, arbitrary and purely philosophical. For this reason, I have no problem with saying that life begins at conception, even if it's just for the sake of argument.
3. I don't have a problem in general with using human tissue for experimentation, particularly when the experiments could lead to significant benefits for humanity.
4. If I understand it correctly, the law under discussion involves using for experimentation embryos that are slated for disposal.
5. If I had a one-month-old baby and it died, I would feel that donating my baby's organs for transplant or donating some of my baby's cells for significant, respectful experimentation might bring some good out of a great tragedy.
6. Therefore, I think that it may actually be better to use tissues from these proto-babies for research than to just dispose of them as bio-waste.

I too am annoyed by some politicians who use the "life is sacred" argument in this particular discussion. If these people honestly consider the embryos to be fully human, then why aren't they pressing for funerals or decent burials for them? Why aren't they trying to at least have them cremated and returned to their parents in a little vase? I know I'm sounding sarcastic here, but I think this is a very important point.

As for Sam Brownback in particular, I do find his arguments annoying but at least he is pretty consistent in his beliefs. He is against embryonic stem cell research, but he's also against abortion, and he has two adopted children (I'm a great believer in encouraging anti-abortion advocates to adopt children and therefore possibly make abortion less necessary.) I'd never vote for the guy, but at least on this subject he's not the worst of the bunch. What Brownback needs to do is realize that his opinions on these subjects are based on religion and therefore have no place being put into law.

While we're on the subject, I'm generally against full-body human cloning and elective genetic engineering. I don't have any problem with cloning individual human organs for use as transplants or with eliminating disease genetically. And I'm against the recent anti-fetal farming bill, because it bans something that, to my knowledge, nobody is even proposing doing and it colors the debate on stem-cell research.

So that's where I stand. Thanks for asking!

Personally, I think that religious belief is almost 100% nurture, not nature. But just to confuse the issue, I think that the potential for religious belief -- and the propensity for it -- is nature.

Let's look at the nature part first. Humans are very good at recognizing patterns. We do this instinctively and automatically, and it is a facility that has many evolutionary advantages (by helping us identify hunting targets in complex environments, for example). The down side to this ability is that humans also tend to pick out perceived patterns in random data, and this cherry picking of data very often leads to beliefs that would not be supported by more rigorous evaluation.

For example, let's say that 80% of the land in a certain area is over an underground source of water. A dowser comes in and chooses ten places to dig. Eight turn up water and two do not. It would not be at all unusual for the dowser to find some pattern that justified the eight "hits" and made the two "misses" not count -- for example, perhaps the two misses were near natural sources of magnetism. So with 8 hits out of 8 tries that "counted," the dowser feels that he has a 100% success rate when he is not interfered with. And, of course, this completely ignores the fact that random chance would have given the same results.

The same kind of thinking can "prove" the efficacy of prayer. When prayers appear to have been answered, God is credited. When prayers are not answered, it is for a good reason known only to God. So no matter how things turn out, even an imagined deity couldn't help but win.

Now think about our ancestors, way back when religion was in its infancy. Og has an argument with Ur, runs out of the cave during a storm, and is hit by lightning. On another occasion, there is a lightning storm while the tribe is considering moving to a new hunting ground. Is there a pattern here? If you're still figuring out how the world works, you certainly might think so.

Another factor -- and I think this is a cultural one -- is that people have a big problem with saying that they don't know the answer to a question. We try very hard to find answers even when we have nothing even close to enough information, and when some of these answers become part of our culture, they are very difficult to revise. You can see this in some parts of current creation/evolution debates: because creationist explanations have become part of culture, a creationist might say that scientists are attacking religious beliefs instead of saying that scientists are trying to find out the truth.

So, summing up, humans have the propensity for religious belief based in part on pattern recognition and a need for answers. Even so, I say that religion is largely cultural because I am not convinced that anyone has an innate, genetic need or resistance to religious belief. A child may have a propensity for curiosity that will lead it to investigate its cultural beliefs, but such curiosity can generally be suppressed or limited by cultural factors (e.g., punishment of one sort or another for questioning authority).

I think that the relatively large numbers of people "losing their religion" today is not due to any genetic shift, but instead due to the availability of information and more acceptance of the fact that asking questions is not in and of itself evil. It might be interesting to informally survey your friends who have lost their religion and those who have stuck with it -- is one group more willing to investigate their beliefs than the other?

This is one of the main reasons why I spend so much time talking about examining beliefs, and pretty much no time talking about trying to get rid of religion. I think that asking questions is the path to atheism or, at the very least, fully informed religious belief, and both are an improvement over where much of the world seems to be today.

Thank you for the kind words about me and my site. I have read the work of a great many philosophers, but there is none whose school I would put myself in. I guess the person I most admire would be Robert Ingersoll, but he's not really a philosopher.

My knowledge of Buddhism is sorely lacking, so I can't really answer your questions on these topics. Can you describe the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and interdependence to me?

Thanks for your complements and further questions. I'm going to have to pass on discussion of my profession as I like to leave certain personal details out of bounds. (I also avoid references to my gender, even in pronouns.) I will say that I do not have a college degree and that Pants Aflame Productions is the Webmaster of this site.

You asked if I, "consider it a personal prerogative to 'cleanse' the world of religion". I assume that by "prerogative" you don't mean to ask if I think I'm the only person who can eliminate religion from the world. Rather, I think you're asking if the elimination of religion is one of my main goals. In either case, my answer is no. I do not seek to eliminate religion. I realize that religion is helpful to many people and I don't seek to deny them this comfort.

What I do want to do is help people examine their own beliefs and make sure that they conform to my two rules for acceptable philosophy (that is, an acceptable philosophy must at least be self consistent and not condemn those who think in the same way). I think that promoting rational thought and behavior will go a long way toward eliminating a great many social problems, including those caused by the blind following of certain religions.

Despite the situation in the Middle East, I do think that peace and religion are compatible. However, I also think that any kind of fanaticism -- be it religious, political, or what have you -- is dangerous in that it discourages free thought and can therefore lead people to take completely irrational actions.

Must people give up their beliefs in the name of serenity? No. Heck, you can even believe that members of other religions deserve to die and live in peace, just so long as you also believe that you aren't the one with the right to carry out the death sentence. (This is an extension of my second rule -- if I believe I have the right to kill unbelievers, then I must not condemn anyone who believes they also have the right to kill unbelievers, so if I don't want everyone killing everyone else the rational thing to do is leave the killing to God.)

From an atheist perspective, is it wrong to follow an organized religion? Well, it would be wrong for an atheist, obviously. For anyone else, it is, at most, incorrect. Individuals must decide for themselves whether giving a certain amount of their belief up to faith is worth the benefit they get from religion. For those who think that the universe makes more sense if religion is true, then following an organized religion may make sense. But for anyone, I'd say that giving up your thought processes to another is always bad -- even if that other is always correct. Fortunately, there are some religions that do not require mindless belief.

Your last question is a difficult one: "Even if none of it is true, is it wrong to follow an idea that makes people feel safe?" The reason it is difficult is that you are mixing the theist and atheist perspectives. Is it bad to devote ones self to an idea that one knows is untrue for the sake of comfort? Probably. But this isn't generally what religious people do since they don't consider the ideas they are devoted to are false. But what about the person who believes in an afterlife because life without such belief would be overwhelming and there's no proof one way or another? Although it's bad to have any belief for simply emotional reasons, since this belief in and of itself harms nobody and helps the one holding it I can't condemn it to strongly -- just so long as the person with the belief admits its origin and does not try to convince others that it is based on something objective.

You tell me not to take what you say too seriously and mention that you just graduated from high school. If these are your beliefs and your honest questions we're talking about, I'm going to take them seriously whether you're 18 or 80. Even if you are just having this discussion to entertain yourself, so long as you are doing so seriously and with an intention to learn even when you disagree, then I welcome your correspondence.

That's pretty funny (even if the conclusion is not logically sound).

I like the point about what it would mean to have negative deities. Perhaps -1 dieties might be a new type of agnosticism -- there are no deities but the universe owes us one?

I certainly welcome your correspondence. Just keep in mind that anything you write to me may be posted on my Web site.

I think our only real point of disagreement here is that, even if one can alter one's feelings, one must first make a decision to do so, and I have trouble seeing how a rational atheist could be convinced to change their own beliefs about religion in this way.

You are right that making yourself happy is a rational action. But is intentionally deluding yourself to make yourself happy a rational action? Even if you could argue that it was, I think that such self delusion could easily lead to an inability to trust your own thoughts, and in that there is a minefield of potential difficulties.