Fascinating. And it’s as I feared. They’re able to do this now, in closed systems such as prisons and the military. They’ll be attempting it in the public sector soon enough.

I love using the phrase “God only knows.” Put it together with my atheism and you get “nobody knows,” which is exactly what I intend to express.

I have an intuitive sense that Mickey Mouse is a nice guy, and Wall-E is a lonely little robot who just needs some love and companionship. Doesn’t mean that they exist.

Yea huh, if you believe they do. We need more belief-things. They make belief in a particular God just another one. Drives Christians mad (my secret plan). Rather than denying all gods, maybe we should believe all of them, and by so doing trivialize them all. You must admit, some of those gods and make-believe things are pretty cool. Since there’s just as much evidence for them as for any popular God, and some of them are way nicer, why not? Wonder what the neighbors would think if they saw you out back of your place building an alter to Dionysis or something?

Doesn’t mean that they exist.

After surviving a fatal (for others) bus wreck phrases like “ohgodohgodohgod” and “Eh Allah” have escaped my lips in other buses as seemed appropriate…. It’s not the god gene. It’s the back of my brain grasping at straws.

It’s not even that. “Oh my God” is an idiom used as an exclamation of distress. Saying that “Oh my God” is a prayer is like saying that “caught my eye” refers to ocular trauma.

Also, suppose we did have an intuitive sense that there is a God, as Colson asserts. Why should that feeling, in the absence of good evidence to support it, mean that there really is one?

I don’t know if that’s really Lesson Number One. It’s a distinction that is made when atheists are arguing on forums, but in practice, it is often treated as a distinction without a practical difference. (See Dan Barker saying outright that God does not exist.)

I don’t speak for Barker and he doesn’t speak for me. His remarks are eloquent and powerful but his initial statement is a tactical blunder by which he sets himself up for the burden of proof. Always make your opponent work harder than you. The rest of his talk would have been just as effective without asserting his belief in the non existence of God.

I am a skeptic first, and my atheism comes secondarily out of that. I abstain from belief without evidence. If I say “I believe there are no gods” then I am contradicting my skeptical principle by believing something without evidence.

I call the distinction I described “Lesson Number One” in atheism because in the many, many conversations I have had with theists, this is by far their most common, right up front misconception that blocks any further understanding between us. Whether it takes place in a formal debate or a chat on a park bench, every other detail of our discussion will be confused unless this important fundamental stance of skeptical abstention from belief without evidence is clearly grasped first.

To all theists who assert their belief in the existence of gods, I say “Please show me your evidence.” To all atheists who assert their belief in the nonexistence of gods, I also say “Please show me your evidence.”

Why are we giving the words of a convicted felon who used religion to regain power and influence any consideration?

Because he has that power and influence. When he turns his bilious hate mongering toward atheists, he’s no longer just a phony and a windbag who scams prison systems, he’s a menace to us.

Depends what you mean by serious talk. My guess is that when Colson tries the “prove there is no God” gambit, he gets a response that is either along the lines of pushing the burden of proof back onto him or making a probabilistic argument as to why it is unlikely that God exists, and then Colson treats such a response as an evasion.

But then, J.J. Ramsey, that’s just what was going through my head when I wrote what I did. I absolutely agree with your and Cafeeine’s comments.

And, if belief in God helps prisoners to be less violent and to deal with the horrendous conditions of their incarceration, who am I to demand that it be taken from them?

Specifically this organization was found to be unconstitutional. Here’s from Americans United, who won the case:

The lawsuits also note that inmates in the InnerChange program receive much better treatment than inmates in the general population. InnerChange participants, for example, have keys to their cells and have access to private bathrooms. They are allowed to make free telephone calls to family members and are given access to big-screen televisions, computers and art supplies. These benefits are not extended to general-population inmates.

Newton officials fund InnerChange in part by charging general-population inmates and their family members exorbitant rates for telephone calls. The profits are then used to pay for 40 to 50 percent of InnerChange’s costs. Housing for the program is also completely subsidized with public funds.

This unusual funding mechanism means that all inmates and their family members and friends who wish to communicate by telephone are forced to support InnerChange.

What he was basically doing was creating a country-club within the prisons, supported by the taxpayers, whose requirement for membership was to speak shibboleth.

Colson’s claims of efficacy have also been challenged.

But when you look carefully at the Penn study, it’s clear that the program didn’t work. The InnerChange participants did somewhat worse than the controls: They were slightly more likely to be rearrested and noticeably more likely (24 percent versus 20 percent) to be reimprisoned. If faith is, as Paul told the Hebrews, the evidence of things not seen, then InnerChange is an opportunity to cultivate faith; we certainly haven’t seen any results.

So, how did the Penn study get perverted into evidence that InnerChange worked? Through one of the oldest tricks in the book, one almost guaranteed to make a success of any program: counting the winners and ignoring the losers. The technical term for this in statistics is “selection bias”; program managers know it as “creaming.” Harvard public policy professor Anne Piehl, who reviewed the study before it was published, calls this instance of it “cooking the books.”

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086617/