Category Archives: Religion in America

Religion Doesn’t Need Miracles

I recently read an online discussion of the intersection of science and religion. The discussion very quickly turned to talk of miracles and proposed that religion and science would be reconciled when science either acknowledges miracles or somehow verifies the connection between miracles and some divine agent.

In which case, science and religion will never be reconciled. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the things that I’ve realized through Zen is that our conceptual division of “natural” and “supernatural” is based largely on a failure to appreciate the truth of the “natural.” We take the natural world for granted and call it mundane, and we look for shiny, sparkly whoo-dee-doo out-of-this-mundane-world stuff to confirm our hope that the ordinary, common world isn’t all there is.

But some parts of science are telling us the world we see around us isn’t all there is, and indeed, the world we see around us isn’t even around us. It’s a fabrication of our brains and nervous systems. What’s really “around us,” or the stuff from which this temporary confluence of mind-and-matter fabricates the world, is to us a mystery. And the temporary confluence of mind-and-matter we call “I” also is a mystery. We assume we know what it is, but we don’t.

Science, particularly in such areas as theoretical physics and neuroscience, is gradually putting together a picture of reality that tells us everything we think we know about it is wrong. The Buddha said the same thing.

Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth.” People interpret that to mean something like “don’t forget to stop and smell the roses,” but that’s not what I see. When you begin to appreciate the truth of reality and the truth of our existence, you see he means that literally.

This so-called “mundane” world is a bleeping five-alarm wonder. Looking for miracles “out there” is like sitting at a table at Maxim’s with a plate of gourmet food in front of us, wishing we had something to eat. And appreciating the wondrous nature of our existence does not require the mundane world to behave in ways that are scientifically inexplicable.

Soyen Shaku Roshi, who as far as I know what the first Zen teacher to set foot in North America, carried on a productive correspondence with some Christian critics of Buddhism. This is from a latter he wrote to Dr. John Barrows in 1896:

I have not as yet been able to see that mankind can be benefited by believing that Jesus Christ performed miracles. I do not deny the miracles nor do I believe them; I only claim that they are irrelevant. The beauty and the truth of many of Christ’s sayings fascinate me, but truth does not become clearer by being pronounced by a man who works miracles.

This is a very Zen perspective. As a Zen student I don’t interpret was the Roshi said to mean that what Jesus said was just philosophy, or just intellectual or conceptual. He’s saying that the truth of reality — the amazing, brain-bending truth — is not proved or disproved or otherwise revealed by what we call miracles. Miracles are, literally, irrelevant, whether they happen or not.

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It’s certainly true that early Buddhists enshrined the Buddha’s memory in stories of his supernatural exploits, but that was a common thing to do in the ancient world. No powerful person did anything important without tales of the event being embroidered with miraculous signs and wonders. As I wrote in Rethinking Religion, in ancient times “truth” was about meaning, not facts. Accounts of important people and events often were dressed up with fantastical details that expressed how people felt about, or understood the significance of, this important thing. Equating truth with what is factual is something that happened gradually, beginning about the 15th century or so in western culture.

And now much of religion is stuck in conceptual cul-de-sac that mixes up mythos and logos and demands literal signs and wonders that science can measure. This is ass-backward, people. I sincerely believe that even the monotheistic religions don’t need miracles to be valid.

This is not to say that Buddhism and science don’t butt heads over some things, especially in the area of materialism. But I don’t necessarily think science and religion have to see things the same way, especially since the two disciplines are operating within different parameters. There are places Buddhism goes that science does not, and vice versa. In all these years as a Zen student, however, I’ve never been asked to believe anything I knew contradicted science, and I honestly don’t see why that would ever happen. It just isn’t necessary.

Deluded About Enlightenment

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This is a follow up to the post before last, about the death of Joshu Sasaki. The New York Times published an article about it, and apparently not all of the Roshi’s former students acknowledge that what he did was wrong.

“The idea that he was a predator is mistaken,” said Harold D. Roth, a professor of religious studies at Brown University and a former student of Mr. Sasaki’s. “Everything he did was in the devoted service of awakening enlightenment in his students.”

Oh, please. He was hitting on women students in freakin’ sanzen.

They said he would tell them that sexual contact with a Zen master, or roshi, like him, would help them attain new levels of “non-attachment,” one of Zen’s central objectives. If they resisted, they said, he used intimidation and threats of expulsion.

The Roshi was particularly devoted to the service of enlightening women, apparently, since by all accounts male students didn’t get the same opportunity to attain new levels of non-attachment.

An independent panel of Buddhist leaders concluded in 2013 that the allegations were essentially indisputable. The panel report said that students had complained to Mr. Sasaki’s staff about his behavior since the early 1970s, and that those “who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed or otherwise punished.”

Some of the senior students who make excuses for the Roshi note that no rape charge was ever filed. That’s not unusual, however. Women probably figured it was futile to file charges, considering the Roshi’s seniors students obviously were going to shield him from accountability.

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I would say to Professor Roth that nobody is absolutely bad or absolutely good. Nobody is absolutely anything. I don’t doubt a lot of people who studied with the Roshi and learned Zen practice from him feel the experience was worthwhile. But just as it is delusion to assume a person who has done something wrong is evil, it’s also a delusion to assume a person whose life has otherwise been beneficial is good. This proposes a permanent essence of Sasaki Roshi upon which attributes may be hung — good, bad, enlightened, deluded.

That’s not how it works.

Zennies must affirm that there is no excuse for sexual predation, and that the Roshi’s acts were harmful and wrong. This is not about punishing him, but about giving affirmation to the women he abused while also saying loudly and clearly that this is not what Zen does.

Flaws and Zen Teachers

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The death of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at the age of 107 was noted in several major U.S. newspapers, but I haven’t heard much about it in the U.S. Zen community, possibly because many would like to forget him entirely.

James Ford, a Soto Zen lineage holder, did post on his blog Monkey Mind about the Roshi, and wrote,

By all accounts a great teacher.

By all accounts a sexual predator.

A great sadness for the Dharma come west.

There is no question flawed people can still be great teachers. Were it not so, there would be no great teachers. But there are flaws, and then there are other flaws. Christine Mai-Duc wrote in the Los Angeles Times,

Decades later, allegations from dozens of former students that he had sexually abused them surfaced. The allegations included molestation and rape, and some had been reported to the Rinzai-ji board, which never took effective action, according to an investigation by an independent council of Buddhist leaders.

The council’s report suggested he may have abused hundreds. “We see how, knowingly and unknowingly, the community was drawn into an open secret,” the council wrote. “We have reports that those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished.”

A council of senior Zen teachers ordained under Roshi later responded with an apology, acknowledging that it failed to address the teacher’s alleged sexual misconduct.

The community was drawn into an open secret … those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished. To me, this is the most critical issue. There is no group of people immune to herd mentality, including scientists, self-described skeptics — and Zen students. And I feel compelled to point out that “great teachers” don’t haul their students into co-dependency and complicity.

His senior students, quoted in the news stories, still speak of him with gushing reverence. Apparently he had great presence, even charisma. But in Zen, genuinely great teachers are praised for their ordinariness. Genuinely great teachers don’t encourage emotional dependency.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), who founded the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) in the late 1960s, once compared working with one’s own delusions to climbing a stepladder. Then he added,

Sometimes I may be a delusion. You may overestimate me: “He is a good teacher!” That is already a kind of delusion. I am your friend. I am just practicing with you as your friend who has many stepladders.”

Shunryu Suzuki was a great teacher. I’ve never heard even a hint of a scandalous thing about him. However, as he was dying he rushed transmission of his senior student Richard Baker, who apparently was not ready, and Baker became embroiled in scandals that nearly destroyed SFZC. But SFZC survived, partly through the guidance of Shunryu Suzuki’s son Hoitsu Suzuki. My second Zen teacher, Jion Susan Postal (1940-2014) received transmission from a teacher in Suzuki Roshi’s lineage through Hoitsu Suzuki. Susan was a great teacher.

(If you are unfamiliar with the Zen lineage tradition, see the explanation beneath the asterisks below.)

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American Zen has done a lot of soul-searching, so to speak, in recent years. A relative handful of Japanese and Korean teachers came to the U.S. in the 1950s through 1970s to teach Zen, and out of that small group several were accused of sexual impropriety eventually. The first generation of American-born teachers, almost all men, also included some teachers who arguably allowed their sexual choices to compromise their roles as teachers, which doesn’t mean they were all predators. Japanese Buddhism is not celibate, and I know of at least a couple of teachers who engaged in publicly acknowledged, serially monogamous relationships with students who were old enough to know what they were getting into. Whether this was detrimental to either the students or the community is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

However, I sense a consensus is growing that teachers shouldn’t be messing with their own students, period. Also, more and more American lineage holders are women, so western Zen is not nearly as much of a boy’s club as it was in the 1970s. More importantly, as western Zen matures students are less likely to think of Zen masters as people with magic powers. They provide essential guidance in the process that is Zen, but ultimately they are just people with flaws and stepladders.

* * *

Joshu Sasaki Roshi established a network of Zen centers called Rinzai-ji but left no dharma heirs, in spite of being a teacher for more than 60 years, which throws the future of those centers into doubt.

The news stories and articles about the Roshi persistently confuse terms like “priest” and “teacher,” so let me explain. Rinzai and Soto Zen (the two primary schools in Japan) operate a bit differently, but generally priest ordination roughly is equivalent to novice nun or monk ordination, and “dharma transmission” is equivalent to full ordination. Usually the term “Zen teacher” is limited to the transmitted and is not used to describe priests without transmission, even if the priest is filling the function of a teacher. However, I don’t know if that’s a hard-and-fast rule everywhere.

Someone who has received transmission is also called a “lineage holder,” “dharma heir” or even “Zen master,” although within American Zen it’s unusual to hear the title “Zen master.” The lineage tradition is the primary container that has maintained the integrity of Zen lo these 15 centuries, since Bodhidharma sat in the cave at Shaolin. Zen defines itself as the “face to face transmission of the dharma outside the sutras,” and “dharma” in this case is understood to be the Buddha’s own enlightenment, kept alive by students and teachers working together, person-to-person, mind-to-mind, through the generations. It’s not a matter of learning stuff from books, in other words. Obviously the system doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s the only system Zen has. Without it, no Zen.

There are many functions only a lineage holder is supposed to be able to do, such as give formal private spiritual interviews (called dokusan or sanzen) and confer ordinations at any level. Zen centers that have no affiliation with a transmitted teacher have limited functionality and, I would argue, are not really “Zen centers.” The Rinzai-ji centers will have to recruit teachers from outside Rinzai-ji to remain “Zen.” But if they can do that, they should be able to survive.

My Heresy on Spiritual but Not Religious

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“Spiritual but not religious” has become a new orthodoxy. In some circles one cannot say anything positive about “religion,” even in a generic way, without being informed one is behind the times. Religion = bad. Spiritual = good. Religion is divisive and dogmatic and corrupt. It is riddled with sexual predators and scam artists. It is interested only in its own power. Spirituality, on the other hand, is all about free thinking, self-affirmation and happy folks tripping down the path of love and light.

Yeah, whatever. I’m spiritual and religious. Sue me.

I’m also an old lady who has been around the block a few times. And I have seen many things. I agree that affiliation with an established “church” is no guarantee of quality or even decency. But neither is non affiliation. Religious history is full of charismatic freelance “gurus” who turned out to be sexual predators and scam artists.

I’m thinking of people like James Arthur Ray, who charged up to $10,000 to attend his “spiritual warrior” retreats, and who was convicted of negligent homicide after three attendees died in one of his sweat lodges. Native Americans criticized Ray because he’d had no training or experience whatsoever in sweat lodge traditions and didn’t know what he was doing. Did I mention he charged up to $10,000 per person?

So there are no guarantees. Religion, organized or not, is a wide-open field for many kinds of predators and scam artists, because unlike with other kinds of scams there is rarely objective proof that the product doesn’t work; that the medicine in the bottle is snake oil. With charm and the right sales pitch you can string your marks along indefinitely, assuming you don’t get them killed.

That said, I partly agree with “retreat leader” Bruce Davis, who says,

It is the human need for meaning, intimacy, joy that is driving many to leave institutions with too much theology and too little care and devotion. When religion is more about correct thinking and less about love and understanding, people feel something missing. When religion is more about judging others and less about humility and the path of looking inward, it loses the spirit of what church is suppose to be about.

Yes. However, then Davis gushes on about the bliss of “spirituality,” and please forgive me if I’m not sold on that, either. I’ve been closely observing unaffiliated countercultural “spirituality” since the 1960s. Whether you call it New Age or Body-Mind-Spirit or something else, it seems to always devolve into one of three things.

One, what I call “spiritual tourism,” or the practice of treating religion as a tasting bar. Spiritual tourists dabble in many traditions and enjoy a variety of spiritual adventures, but they never stick to one tradition long enough to get more than a superficial impression or experience anything genuinely transformative. But at least spiritual tourism usually is harmless, if you can afford it.

Second is the DIY Mystic, who doesn’t need a teacher and doesn’t need a congregation; he can find the Great Ineffable Whatever all by himself, thank you. “Enlightenment” then becomes just a projection of his own ego, or his own craziness, or probably both.

And finally you’ve got the sort of person who would actually spend as much as $10,000 to spend time with a freelance guru whose only discernible talent is self-promotion. The delusion that there must be someone out there who could sell you the magic bean that will give you whatever you imagine you are missing is very common, and it’s also the reason why “religion” and “scam” so often travel in the same circles. But in that regard “spirituality” really isn’t any better.

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I argue in Rethinking Religion that religion and spirituality need each other. Religion stripped of all mysticism and spiritus is empty. It becomes a stupid, supernatural ideology perpetuated more out of tribal loyalty than devotion, and religious institution become exercises in maintaining authority for authority’s sake. But DIY spirituality/mysticism seems to nearly always devolve, at best, into an ego-driven but directionless quest to feel better about oneself. Too often it’s more palliative than curative.

Spirituality and religion need each other. It’s the spiritual element that liberates us from the conventional and makes possible some sense of union with the Great Ineffable Whatever. Religious tradition challenges the supremacy of the ego, gives the quest some direction and puts traffic cones around the potholes.

However, I do think it’s mostly up to religious institutions to make themselves alive and relevant and return to their mystical roots. Otherwise people will continue to float away in pursuit of something else.

Why the U.S. Christian Right Is Dangerous

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Amanda Marcotte writes about The Christian right’s obscene, defining hypocrisy.

Whether it’s liberal college professors supposedly turning kids to Marxism or gay people who are accused of recruiting, over and over you hear the claim that the children of conservatives are in serious danger of being talked into everything from voting for Democrats to getting gay-married. …

… I think I know where conservatives get the idea that other people are sneaking around trying to indoctrinate children into unthinking ideologies. It’s because they themselves are totally guilty of it, both in terms of trying to recruit other people’s children and trying to frighten their own children about the dangers of exploring thoughts outside of the ones approved by their own rigid ideologies.

Marcotte provides several examples, from a group operating in Portland pubic parks that entices children with games and then teaches them about Hell, to the growing “home schooling” movement that encourages parents to keep their kids out of public school so they won’t be exposed to any but an extremist, right-wing religious ideology.

You can trace the anti-public school hysteria back to Brown v. Board of Ed. (1954). Before court-ordered school desegregation, even (white) conservative Bible Belt parents thought public school was one of the great things about America, and only those idol-worshiping Papists sent kids to parochial schools. After Brown, however, suddenly public school education was no good.

Parents yanked their kids out of public school and sent them to all-white “Christian academies,” which sprang up suddenly like mushrooms after the rain. The first voucher programs began then, so that tax dollars could follow the white children into their new white schools. But when the private schools also had to desegregate to survive, the home schooling movement was born.

By now, the home schoolers probably don’t consciously associate home schooling with racial segregation. Their “cause” has morphed into a general mistrust of mainstream America.

Karen Armstrong, who writes about religious history and fundamentalist movements around the world, defines fundamentalism in a broad sense as a reaction against and rejection of modern Western society. Fundamentalists, in different ways, all attempt to establish enclaves of pure faith that shut out any other views. Those they come in contact with who aren’t “them” must be assimilated. And in time, if that doesn’t work, they must be eliminated.

There are two chapters in Rethinking Religion dedicated to religious mass movements and religious violence. These chapter propose that the two factors always present in violent mass movements are a holy cause — defending the faith against those they think are its enemies, in this case — combined with a fanatical grievance, or the belief they’re the ones who are the victims. You see this in violent Islam, in the violent Buddhists in Myanmar, and also in mass movements that are not expressly religious. If religion isn’t the “holy cause,” sometimes belief in a glorious national or racial destiny will do nicely as well.

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The “Christian Right” in America definitely shows all the symptoms that lead to violence. They are obsessed with the belief they are being persecuted and are surrounded by enemies. A growing subculture of ignorant religious fanatics could prove to be a huge and violent threat eventually. I’m not sure what to do about it, but it’s not healthy.

The Basis of Morality

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One chapter in Rethinking Religion is devoted to rethinking morality. Many religious people insist — absurdly, to my mind — that there can be no morality without religion. Secularists have taken up this challenge and have devised various non-religious moral theories. Prominent atheist Sam Harris, for example, has written a number of articles and books with his own proposals for how we might live by a moral code without having to believe in a judgmental God.

Religious and secularist moralists tend to make the same basic mistake, however, which is to assume that “morality” mostly involves living according to some kind of universally accepted code. It doesn’t. It never did.

Much current research in psychology and sociology points to another source entirely for where our moral notions come from. And that would be our biases and emotions. Our orientation toward all moral issues depends on how we feel about those issues, and then we use our “rational” minds to craft a narrative to explain why our views are “good.” We all do this, whether we admit it or not.

This is why many of our public fights over “moral” issues remain at impasse. People who are disgusted by homosexuality, for example, will find no end of reasons why suppressing it isn’t some kind of moral “good,” while people who accept homosexuality think it’s the suppression that’s immoral.

Notice that most of our hot-button and never-ending public squabbles about what’s moral and what isn’t touches on the same two issues — sex and death. That’s because these are two issues most of us are really emotional — and often conflicted — about. Lying, stealing and cheating, by contrast, are not nearly so controversial.

Although Christians opposed to abortion and birth control insist their perspective is religious, the truth is that Bible-based arguments against abortion and birth control are laughably flimsy, and the pertinent scriptures could be interpreted many ways. Yet to go by the energy the Christian Right puts into fighting these things, you’d think Jesus never talked about anything else. In fact, he never addressed abortion or birth control at all, nor did the Apostles, even though abortions and haphazard attempts at birth control were going on at the time, and they must have known about this.

In truth, our opinions about these issues actually are coming from a murky place in our ids where our feelings about sex, sexual purity, women, motherhood etc., are perpetually stewing and jerking us about. We choose sides depending on what those feelings are, and then we grab the first available ideology that harmonizes with our opinions, whether “religion” or liberalism or whatever.

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And if the facts of a situation don’t fit our narratives, we change the facts. The pro-life zealots who camped around Terry Schiavo’s hospital a few years ago convinced themselves that Ms. Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state at all, but was awake and communicating, for example. The truth is, “moral clarity” nearly always depends on ignoring the messy, and often painful, details of human life that obstruct the view.

But those irrelevant details are what our lives actually are. To ignore them is to ignore humanity. That’s why moral absolutism, taken to logical extremes, becomes inhumane. To deny our subjectivity is to deny us.

I’m not arguing against all codes of morals, mind you. Humans need agreed-upon codes of behavior in order to live in communities together. But those are not the basis of morality.

The basis, like it or not, is just us. The basis is our ability to be compassionate; to be empathetic; to value others as much as we value ourselves. Often morality depends on our ability to put aside our own desires and defer to the needs of others. If we can do that, we will be moral people, and if we can’t we won’t. And if we can’t, all the rules in the world won’t matter.

You Can’t Kill Intolerance With More Intolerance

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If you’ve read my book Rethinking Religion, you know how much I want reactionary Christians to stop trying to force the rest of us to bow to their tribal totems. If it were up to me, there’d be no Ten Commandments monuments or Nativity scenes on pubic property. No store clerk would ever be harassed for saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” There’s be no special legal favors for “Christian” corporations, no proselytizing anywhere, and separation of church and state would be global policy.

Although achieving this happily tolerant state won’t be easy and won’t happen in my lifetime, I think it could happen some day. But there’s a smart way to work toward a religiously tolerant world, and there’s the stupid way.

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For examples of stupid, see 5 atheist and Muslim billboards that drove the Christian right nuts at Salon. One is a large billboard with a picture of Santa Claus, captioned “Keep the MERRY.” Under that is Christ on the Cross, captioned “Dump the MYTH.” Another billboard reads “Who Needs Christ During Christmas? Nobody!” The name “Christ” is crossed out. These billboards were both sponsored by the group American Atheists.

The Salon article quotes American Atheist president David Silverman: ““We all love this time of year…Christianity has been trying to claim ownership of the season for hundreds of years. But the winter solstice came first and so did its traditions. The season belongs to everybody.” I agree. I also think that’s what they should have said on their billboards — The season belongs to everybody. Ridiculing Jesus was unnecessary.

Seriously, atheist dudes, the Christian Right is not Jesus’ fault. The CR may have adopted Jesus as its team mascot, but it’s ignored his teachings for years. And seeing Jesus ridiculed is as jarring to Christians — including the tolerant, progressive ones — as watching their mothers being publicly humiliated.

This is not a way to win hearts and minds; it’s just a cheap self-indulgence.

Before buying any more billboard space, I suggest that American Atheists sit down and have a good, long think about what they are trying to accomplish. And then they should take a look at current research in cognitive science and social psychology to craft a smarter way to achieve their goals.

For example, is the goal (a) to wean humankind from religion completely? Or is it (b) to foster a society in which religion is respected as a private matter and not something we’re perpetually hassling each other about?

I can tell you right now (a) is not going to happen in your lifetimes. Or this century. Likely not in this millennium. Something that has been part of civilization since there has been civilization doesn’t disappear that easily. I’m not even going to try to persuade you that (a) wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing, although I don’t think it would be. I’m saying it’s a fool’s errand to even try.

If (b), now we’re talking. That is more do-able. And a lot of religious people, like me, would happily join you in the effort. Even then it won’t be easy, but I think enough people are getting fed up with the antics of religious extremists that a smartly run campaign might actually work.

“Smartly run” brings us to the cognitive science and social psychology. Google “motivated reasoning” and read up on it. Rmuse at Politics USA explains,

What results of the several studies demonstrate is that once a partisan is confronted with unwelcome facts about their beliefs, the centers of their brain associated with emotional distress light up and remain active until their defective brains “rationalize away the unwanted information.” According to one of the scientists conducting the studies, when conservatives and Christian zealots rationalize away unwanted information, the centers of their brains associated with positive feelings turn on and “overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their ‘fix.’”

The studies also prove that despite showing conservatives, Republicans, gun fanatics, and evangelical special interests facts, scriptures, and even video evidence that their strongly held beliefs are pure fantasy or absolutely wrong, conservative (and some liberal) brains automatically reject facts because they refute their personal beliefs. Research teams at Yale and Dartmouth discovered, for example, that highly skilled mathematicians will, more often than not, deliberately reach an incorrect answer if data leads to a conclusion that is contrary to their political worldview. There are myriad examples of conservatives and evangelical fanatics disputing hard data, the Constitution, and the Christian bible because they are programmed by conservatives’ buzzwords, memes, and outright lies into believing their errant conclusions and faith are fact.

I doubt that surprises anyone, but do re-read the first paragraph of the excerpt. If your message is one that triggers a negative emotional reaction in most folks, including those who might be persuadable, you are hurting your cause more than helping it.

Negative attack ads work in elections — usually, anyway — because they can whip up enough low-information voters to vote against the guy the ads are attacking. Especially in a close election, just a few hundred voters can change the outcome.

But, dear atheists, you aren’t trying to be elected to a county commission. You’re trying to change society itself. That’s a whole ‘nother thing. And your “target audience,” the people whose minds you are trying to change, are not the hard-right religious extremists, because their minds will not change.

Your audience is everybody else, religious and not-religious.

Take a cue from same-sex marriage advocates. They are winning public opinion by engendering public sympathy. They are changing minds by presenting a positive image of themselves as loving, responsible and family oriented, not by bashing their opposition.

Years ago I formulated a basic rule for successful demonstrating that I call the “Bigger Asshole” rule. The job of public protesters is not to change the minds of the powerful people they are opposing, but to gain public sympathy for their cause. Especially in politics, the powerful won’t change until they are compelled to do so by a sufficient critical mass of public opinion saying they must.

So the job of protesters and demonstrators is to make the people they are protesting look like bigger assholes than they are. But if the protesters come across as bigger assholes than the protestees, the public will side with the establishment. And I assure you that, in terms of the Bigger Asshole rule, ridiculing Jesus is a losing strategy.

LGBT activists are winning public opinion by making gay-bashers look like the bigger assholes. And considering there’s a lot of overlap between homophobes and religious extremists, atheists ought to be able to do the same thing.

America on Buddhism — More Popular Than Evangelicals