CNN has very little credibility to begin with. If they are not busy spending 24 hours a day speculating about the location of a missing airplane or describing the screams of passengers on a crashing airplane, they are usually running low rate documentaries about Finding Jesus or offering TV shows to faux-intellectuals like Reza Aslan.

They did run an okay half-rate special on Atheists in America, and though they got a lot wrong, it certainly could have been worse.

But now, in an effort to appear fair and balanced they have allowed con-artist extraordinaire Deepak Chopra to pen a piece titled, Deepak Chopra: The problem with atheism.

The article is your usual Chopra nonsense but he makes some rather bold claims worth addressing.

Standing back a bit, faith is on a rheostat, not an on-off switch. Putting God into the position of yes/no, belief/unbelief doesn’t really reflect the modern state of faith. There are gradations of belief. In fact, 17% of people who identify as atheists still go to church — they have social and family reasons for their choice rather than religious ones.

Yes, you can put God and belief/unbelief (what the hell is unbelief?) in an on/off position. I do not believe there is a God, I reject the claims of the religious that some supernatural being exists. God is “off” for me, because I find the concept useless.

17% of atheists may very well go to church, and to think that is made up of social or family reasons alone is just ignorant. How about fear? How many people do you know who are afraid to be “out” as an atheist. I know many, and I know many that still go to church to keep up appearances. This may sound like a social reason, but it is so much deeper than that.

Unfortunately, the goal of many faiths is to obey dogma and accept a cultural mythology. Atheism can do good by casting a skeptical light on cultural mythologies, but believing in nothing but the material world is cold comfort.

He starts off here almost correct, yes atheism “can do good by casting a skeptical light on cultural mythologies,” but he drops the ball completely when he states that “believing in nothing but the material world is cold comfort.”

Seeing the natural world as it is as “cold comfort” would be rather subjective. I know many others and myself who see the natural world as all the comfort one needs. We are in awe that we as a species are even here and able to comprehend the amazing universe we briefly get to be a part of. We do not need to rely on superstition and stories about a world after this one of some grand plan to find happiness and comfort in the world we live in.

Strong-minded, vocal atheists claim that God isn’t science and science isn’t God. But the implication that faith is irrational and only science knows the truth has no basis in fact.

How is there no basis in fact here? Faith cannot reveal the truth, faith is believing in something you do not know is true, and often something that has been proven to not be true.

Creationists have faith in creationism while scientific evidence shows us clearly that creationism is not only false, but it cannot be true. It has zero basis in fact and does not align with a single piece of evidence we know about the world.

Often faith is irrational and by often, I guess you could say always. This is why you have faith. As Peter Boghossian defines faith it is believing in something you do not know. That is no way to make a statement about the truth of something. The truth comes about via evidence and the scientific method has proven to be the best way to test and scrutinize evidence in search of the “truth.”

Some studies indicate that scientists actually go to church more than the general population. They have found a way to be scientific in their work without turning it into a moral dogma.

“Some studies”? What studies? The piece on CNN lacks a single citation for any claim Chopra makes and I am supposed to take him at his word.

A simple Google search turned up zero studies that support this claim; zero.

I feel for people who get stuck in any belief system, including rigid skepticism. They are signing up for the suppression of curiosity.

Rigid skepticism is the suppression of curiosity? Skepticism by definition is all about curiosity.

Chopra wants the world to believe he is a skeptic who questions his own faith, but as he has shown time and time again, he isn’t skeptical about a single claim he makes, unless of course that claim isn’t turning him a profit, then he may be skeptical on how much that claim is worth making…