Macro trend: Violence is going down...and Atheist of the Day: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker writes an article (from which the above photo was taken) outling the broad decline in overall violence over the last millenia, centuries, and decades (HT: Sullivan). Let us hope the trend continues, and let us do our best to help it along.

And while were at it, why not make Steven Pinker our Atheist of the Day? It's not too surprising if you've read much of his work, but since our last one was a porn star, why not have a science author to balance things out? Here's his atheist quote, from his book How the Mind Works:

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.

Here's a more explicit statement of atheism (for those of you who need extra convincing):

I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.

I highly recommend his book The Blank Slate, which is actually an attack on the idea that the mind is "a blank slate" ready to be completely molded by experience. Pinker is one of my favorite authors.