Almost forgot, the latest Carnival Of The Godless is up at The Jesus Myth, where faith and logic collide!
One day soon I'm going to write something worthwhile and submit to COTG again! I Swear!
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Monday, December 10, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Astonishing Lack of Comprehension
A theist named Scott Caan opened a ridiculous strawman argument on the Atheism, Logic and Truth forum on Facebook:
Amazing, isn't it? As I said in my reply,
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth” -- Genesis
1:1.
“The cosmos is that that is, or ever was, or ever will be. ” – Carl Sagan.
The two statements above are both statements of faith. Neither can be experimentally verified and both make assumptions. The two statements also offer a remarkable contrast. The first statement indicates:
1. There was a beginning.
2. The beginning was caused.
3. The cause was God.
The second statement indicates:
1. There was no beginning.
2. The cosmos is self-existing and thus uncaused.
3. The universe was not created and thus is the product of non-intelligence.
Amazing, isn't it? As I said in my reply,
The Sagan quote does not support any one of the three things you claim it does. It is simply a definition (not a "statement of faith") of the word 'cosmos' as being inclusive of all phenomena throughout all time; it does not even address the existence or not of an origin point, nor does it address causation or processes of the cosmos.
It's a pretty astonishing feat of reading incomprehension to so totally misread so short a quote you selected yourself, or indeed even to select a quote from someone whose body of work so totally fails to match the position you want set up in opposition to your preferred conclusion.
To give you the citation, the Sagan quote you used is from the first textual page of the first chapter of 'Cosmos' - page 4 of the book. Had you made the scholarly effort to read the remainder of that chapter - all the way to page 21 - you would have found this:
"We now know that our universe - or at least its most recent incarnation - is some fifteen to twenty billion years old. This is the time since a remarkable explosive event called the Big Bang. At the beginning of this universe, there were no galaxies, stars or planets, no life or civilizations, merely a uniform, radiant fireball filling all of space."
Needless to say, this is in total opposition to the viewpoint you chose to attack, that the universe has always existed in its present state - a viewpoint Sagan never held, and which no astrophysicist of any stature has supported since the COBE cosmic background measurements in 1964 at the very latest.
You make really shoddy strawmen, my friend, and you should work on your quote mining too. Granted that you don't really understand basic physics (Hint: the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a *statistical* observation), it still behooves anyone with pretensions to intellectual honesty not to totally misrepresent another person's stated positions.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Jesus's Poor Communication Skills
Jim Benton, guest-blogging over at Aardvarchaeology (winner of the coveted "Most Difficult To Spell Scienceblog" award), has put together an absolute barn-burner of an article on the above subject, expanding on an earlier piece by an ex-minister named Joseph writing at Debunking Christianity.
As Jim says in the comments of the latter,
Nothing I haven't thought and written about before, but I'm in awe of the clarity brought to bear on the issue, and don't really have anything to add at the moment beyond saying that both articles are well worth the read. Go enjoy!
As Jim says in the comments of the latter,
If Jesus was who Christians say he was, he must have been boneheadedly dumb, totally without foresight, and addicted to doing things the most inefficient and least sensible way possible, someone totally incapable of getting his ideas across, and delighting in contradicting himself right and left. Some God!
The real Jesus, as far as we can tell, would have thrown a table at these idiots, not just for calling him divine, but for so insulting the God he believed in.
Nothing I haven't thought and written about before, but I'm in awe of the clarity brought to bear on the issue, and don't really have anything to add at the moment beyond saying that both articles are well worth the read. Go enjoy!
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Truth in Fiction
The Catholic League has started an email campaign to promote boycotting the film version of Philip Pullman's book The Golden Compass - yeah, I know, Catholic censorship, contain your shock. The reasoning is as predictable as it is revealing:
Farfetched? Well, probably not; that's actually the central theme of the book. The Catholic League is quite correct in discerning that that message is implied in Pullman's dark little fairy tale. What's amusing, in a sad and bitter kind of way, is that by reacting this way they are actively demonstrating the truth of the accusations implied in the fiction.
They're probably correct, too, that exposure to these books is dangerous to a child's faith in the Church. What are the parents going to do, explain that in Lyrah's make-believe world of talking bears and daemons the priests are mostly domineering control freaks who think nothing of abusing children, while in the real world of pregnant virgins and resurrected corpses the priests are, uh, isn't it your bedtime sweetie?
Truth be told, the fundies who insist that their children read only Bible stories (and never, ever indulge in critical thinking about them, needless to say) have the right idea if the object to prevent their progeny from straying into the real world. All the other stuff is dangerous: The Golden Compass, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Once and Future King, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, The Wind In The Willows, even that Christian parent's favorite The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
That's right, even Narnia is a threat, however closely Aslan's character might be plagiarizing Christianity's plagiarism of Mithraism; after all, you can't seriously maintain that the Narnia books are nonfiction, so a bright child is liable to start wondering if the Noah's Ark story is. Even worse, such a child is then not only likely to conclude that the Bible is also fiction, but that it compares pretty badly to the others in plausibility and entertainment value.
So yes, the Catholic League really is correct in opposing the film, given their axiom that having children think critically about the Church is a bad thing. What's more I applaud the fact that they are boycotting the film; I hope they go further and picket the theaters as well.
You see, I loved the book, and even though it's reportedly been watered down a bit, I want the film to be a roaring success, in the hope that kids will indeed go on to read the series. If my own childhood experience with Monty Python's Life Of Brian is anything to go by, nothing could help that cause better than an attempt to censor the movie! :)
The Catholic League wants Christians to boycott this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books: unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books.Yes, Heaven Forbid a child should watch any films or read any books which aren't perfectly respectful toward the Church. Introducing any alternate point of view during the critical years of childhood could result in independent thought, which would inevitably lead to questioning of the basis for the clergy's spiritual authority, and a perspicacious child might even come to rebel against a corrupt and tyrannical system.
Farfetched? Well, probably not; that's actually the central theme of the book. The Catholic League is quite correct in discerning that that message is implied in Pullman's dark little fairy tale. What's amusing, in a sad and bitter kind of way, is that by reacting this way they are actively demonstrating the truth of the accusations implied in the fiction.
They're probably correct, too, that exposure to these books is dangerous to a child's faith in the Church. What are the parents going to do, explain that in Lyrah's make-believe world of talking bears and daemons the priests are mostly domineering control freaks who think nothing of abusing children, while in the real world of pregnant virgins and resurrected corpses the priests are, uh, isn't it your bedtime sweetie?
Truth be told, the fundies who insist that their children read only Bible stories (and never, ever indulge in critical thinking about them, needless to say) have the right idea if the object to prevent their progeny from straying into the real world. All the other stuff is dangerous: The Golden Compass, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Once and Future King, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, The Wind In The Willows, even that Christian parent's favorite The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
That's right, even Narnia is a threat, however closely Aslan's character might be plagiarizing Christianity's plagiarism of Mithraism; after all, you can't seriously maintain that the Narnia books are nonfiction, so a bright child is liable to start wondering if the Noah's Ark story is. Even worse, such a child is then not only likely to conclude that the Bible is also fiction, but that it compares pretty badly to the others in plausibility and entertainment value.
So yes, the Catholic League really is correct in opposing the film, given their axiom that having children think critically about the Church is a bad thing. What's more I applaud the fact that they are boycotting the film; I hope they go further and picket the theaters as well.
You see, I loved the book, and even though it's reportedly been watered down a bit, I want the film to be a roaring success, in the hope that kids will indeed go on to read the series. If my own childhood experience with Monty Python's Life Of Brian is anything to go by, nothing could help that cause better than an attempt to censor the movie! :)
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Richard Dawkins at AAI
Richard Dawkins gave a rather compelling presentation at Atheist Alliance International:
As is customary, a Q&A followed:
The videos are discussed at Richard's site. I may comment on this later, but I'm a bit short on time right now.
As is customary, a Q&A followed:
The videos are discussed at Richard's site. I may comment on this later, but I'm a bit short on time right now.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Help Thou Mine Unbelief?
One of the things that often puzzles me in conversations with theists (which, given my location, mostly means Christians) is their insistence that they can choose to believe in the face of all logic and evidence. Is that really possible?
A person can choose to profess a belief, and act on a presumption that something is true, and even predicate upon such an assumption a line of thought or an entire philosophy. Is that really belief, though, or only the trappings of it?
I thought at first that the answer was obviously the latter, but I'm no longer so sure. I think I have been misled by a quirk of my own personality, one which I seem to share with an inordinate percentage of my fellow nonbelievers; I place an immensely high relative value on factual truth and on the mental processes which reveal it. Applying logical analysis to statements, parsing out chains of inference, meting out and continually revising estimates of reliability to putative facts - these habits of mind are so deeply ingrained and of such long standing that I'm scarcely aware of using them anymore, unless I make a special effort.
Most people simply don't have those priorities built into the way they look at the world. If an idea is rewarding emotionally, that is more important than its truth value. Even people who are well trained in the threshing out of data from anecdota and sound argument from sophistry will simply refuse to apply such methods to the claims they are determined to believe. Such fundamental dishonesty toward one's own self seems to me to be nothing short of a mental illness. Fellow proponents of irrational beliefs will often try to use the legitimate authority which such split minds have earned in one field (by applying sound methods of thinking) to lend a spurious legitimacy to another field (to which they have not applied those methods). It is a signature thinking flaw of irrationality, of course, to think that the legitimacy derives from the person rather than the methodology.
That isn't to say that truth has no value to them, but that value seems to lie more in the perception than in the reality - naming it truth rather than proving it true. I often pass a church sign that says "Avoid Truth Decay - Read your Bible" and have to add mentally "But for God's Sake Don't Think About It." The Christian bible does in fact have a story which is directly on point, a quote from which forms the title of this essay.
The story in Mark 9:14-30 tells of a man who is filled with desperation over his son, a boy subject to seizures, and begs Jesus to heal the boy with his magic powers. Jesus responds with the standard faith healer's escape clause, "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." (To those of us with a skeptical cast of mind it's a very neat way to make sure it's the victim's fault if the healing doesn't take.) The desperate parent cries through his tears "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"
Jesus does see the boy through a seizure, of course, and some Christians are wont to take this and only this as the point of the story. More sophisticated Christian readers generally focus more on the same factor that commends the story to my attention; the fact that the father despite his declaration quite obviously wasn't really able to believe, but in his desperation was willing to try to believe, and asked Jesus to help him do so. He was basically begging Jesus, if belief was necessary to save his son, to help him believe.
Most Christians I've discussed this story with tend to take this in some mystical fashion, as asking for Jesus to use his Godly power to infuse the man with faith - a mystical brainwashing,if you will. I'm reminded of Winston Smith's exchange with his torturer in the novel 1984, when told that he must see that 2+2=5:
"Do you want to convince me that you see five fingers, or to see them?"
"To see them! Really to see them!"
One can certainly empathize with a parent willing to compromise the integrity of his thought, if the alternative is the continued torment of his child. It seems to me at least an equally compelling interpretation, though, that the man was expressing more a willingness to accept a hypothesis (that Jesus could help him) provided that a cure was actually forthcoming, in order to help his unbelief. It's notable, though, that like many a modern-day faith healer Jesus and his crew quickly and quietly departed the area. There is absolutely no indication that the boy was actually permanently healed, and one may certainly doubt that the father's 'belief' long survived the departure of Jesus if the boy subsequently continued to have seizures!
Given how many and deep are the contradictions between the claims of the bible and the observable evidentiary facts of the universe around us, not to mention the internal inconsistencies in the collection itself, I most certainly am not willing to accept the claims of Christianity at face value and without evidence. (Just to pre-empt, yes, Zombie Jesus supposedly said to Doubting Thomas Didymus, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Well, that doesn't say that Thomas wasn't blessed as well, now does it?) If my belief that God is other than imaginary is important, I'm going to need some serious help for my unbelief; given my firmly entrenched habits of thought, I'd humbly suggest that providing some evidence would be a simpler route than a mystical brainwashing. I'm unlikely to ask for the latter out of my free will.
I value my mind too much to willingly maim it by holding beliefs I can't honestly examine.
A person can choose to profess a belief, and act on a presumption that something is true, and even predicate upon such an assumption a line of thought or an entire philosophy. Is that really belief, though, or only the trappings of it?
I thought at first that the answer was obviously the latter, but I'm no longer so sure. I think I have been misled by a quirk of my own personality, one which I seem to share with an inordinate percentage of my fellow nonbelievers; I place an immensely high relative value on factual truth and on the mental processes which reveal it. Applying logical analysis to statements, parsing out chains of inference, meting out and continually revising estimates of reliability to putative facts - these habits of mind are so deeply ingrained and of such long standing that I'm scarcely aware of using them anymore, unless I make a special effort.
Most people simply don't have those priorities built into the way they look at the world. If an idea is rewarding emotionally, that is more important than its truth value. Even people who are well trained in the threshing out of data from anecdota and sound argument from sophistry will simply refuse to apply such methods to the claims they are determined to believe. Such fundamental dishonesty toward one's own self seems to me to be nothing short of a mental illness. Fellow proponents of irrational beliefs will often try to use the legitimate authority which such split minds have earned in one field (by applying sound methods of thinking) to lend a spurious legitimacy to another field (to which they have not applied those methods). It is a signature thinking flaw of irrationality, of course, to think that the legitimacy derives from the person rather than the methodology.
That isn't to say that truth has no value to them, but that value seems to lie more in the perception than in the reality - naming it truth rather than proving it true. I often pass a church sign that says "Avoid Truth Decay - Read your Bible" and have to add mentally "But for God's Sake Don't Think About It." The Christian bible does in fact have a story which is directly on point, a quote from which forms the title of this essay.
The story in Mark 9:14-30 tells of a man who is filled with desperation over his son, a boy subject to seizures, and begs Jesus to heal the boy with his magic powers. Jesus responds with the standard faith healer's escape clause, "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." (To those of us with a skeptical cast of mind it's a very neat way to make sure it's the victim's fault if the healing doesn't take.) The desperate parent cries through his tears "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"
Jesus does see the boy through a seizure, of course, and some Christians are wont to take this and only this as the point of the story. More sophisticated Christian readers generally focus more on the same factor that commends the story to my attention; the fact that the father despite his declaration quite obviously wasn't really able to believe, but in his desperation was willing to try to believe, and asked Jesus to help him do so. He was basically begging Jesus, if belief was necessary to save his son, to help him believe.
Most Christians I've discussed this story with tend to take this in some mystical fashion, as asking for Jesus to use his Godly power to infuse the man with faith - a mystical brainwashing,if you will. I'm reminded of Winston Smith's exchange with his torturer in the novel 1984, when told that he must see that 2+2=5:
"Do you want to convince me that you see five fingers, or to see them?"
"To see them! Really to see them!"
One can certainly empathize with a parent willing to compromise the integrity of his thought, if the alternative is the continued torment of his child. It seems to me at least an equally compelling interpretation, though, that the man was expressing more a willingness to accept a hypothesis (that Jesus could help him) provided that a cure was actually forthcoming, in order to help his unbelief. It's notable, though, that like many a modern-day faith healer Jesus and his crew quickly and quietly departed the area. There is absolutely no indication that the boy was actually permanently healed, and one may certainly doubt that the father's 'belief' long survived the departure of Jesus if the boy subsequently continued to have seizures!
Given how many and deep are the contradictions between the claims of the bible and the observable evidentiary facts of the universe around us, not to mention the internal inconsistencies in the collection itself, I most certainly am not willing to accept the claims of Christianity at face value and without evidence. (Just to pre-empt, yes, Zombie Jesus supposedly said to Doubting Thomas Didymus, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Well, that doesn't say that Thomas wasn't blessed as well, now does it?) If my belief that God is other than imaginary is important, I'm going to need some serious help for my unbelief; given my firmly entrenched habits of thought, I'd humbly suggest that providing some evidence would be a simpler route than a mystical brainwashing. I'm unlikely to ask for the latter out of my free will.
I value my mind too much to willingly maim it by holding beliefs I can't honestly examine.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Carnival of the Godless #78
Don't forget to check out Greta Christina's Halloween-themed Carnival of the Godless. Oooh! Scary!
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Conversation With A Theist
You detail some aspects of your philosophy, which seem to me to boil down to that your god made everything, including you, to the purpose of glorifying him, including giving you the power of rational thought for the limited purpose of enabling you to dominate and subdue the world in order to glorify him even more (presumably because, short of granting you rationality, he would be left unsatisfied by the amount of glorification the world he created could provide). In amongst all that you note that you believe he gave you moral standards to live by, and I think it reasonable to presume that if you live by them you will further glorify him, and that is a sufficient reason to do so.
You then go on to tell me and every other atheisr what our philosophy is, viz. “According to you, there is no God.” The first sentence is accurate; you could address it to any atheist without argument, since by definition an atheist is one who believes there is no god. Well done.
“According to you, all there is, is matter and motion.” The second is not so accurate; there may be atheists who would agree with the premise, once it was made intelligible by explication, but it doesn't form a part of the definition of atheism and needn't apply to all atheists. Any argument you follow with which presupposes that all atheists believe only in “matter and motion” fall into the straw-man fallacy; you are not arguing against atheism, you are arguing against a cartoon version of atheism of your own devising, one specifically designed for the purpose of being easy to refute. If there are some atheists who believe only in “matter and motion” then your arguments may well apply to their philosophy, but it no more applies to atheism in general than arguments against my local Christian snake-handlers, based on their beliefs about handling serpents, apply to Christianity in general.
“I realize that when I give you evidence of God’s existence, and the truth of Christianity, for instance; that a man named Jesus rose from the dead, his opponents couldn’t disprove it, those who believed it were willing to die for it, I give you evidence of those things, and I draw the conclusion given my philosophy of life, He has given historical evidence of who He is and that we should follow Him.” Give me some evidence and we can talk about that. There is no contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Jesus outside the Gospels; that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't exist, but it argues against it. The contemporaneous Romans kept pretty good records, as did the contemporaneous Jews, and a fair proportion of those records survived to this day; not only do they not note the death and resurrection of Jesus, they fail to note the earthquake, the curtain rending, and the opening of graves and subsequent perambulations of the dead. It seems terribly unlikely that only the followers of Jesus were astute enough to notice such things, or sufficiently struck by them as to make a note. That they alone were willing to die for it seems more likely, I'll grant you; it's not a normal reaction of rational beings to be willing to die for unsubstantiated rumors. I would note that the lunatic asylums are full of people willing to die for strange beliefs, though.
“I am going to argue now from the impossibility of the contrary. That is, within my worldview I can explain to you why there is logic... causality... moral absolutes, why I believe that human beings are free and have dignity. But in your worldview, there couldn’t be any logic.” Only the latter constitutes arguing from the impossibility of the contrary, actually. The attributes you assign your worldview, viz. logic, causality, moral absolutes, and human freedom and dignity, may be equally well attributed to an atheistic worldview or may be unnecessary to it. Still, let's see how you do with logic.
“Why not? Well, matter in motion, that’s your worldview, the logic isn’t material and its not in motion.“ You're arguing against your straw man, not against atheism. An atheistic viewpoint does not require that abstract entities don't exist, it doesn't even require that the abstract notion of gods should not exist; an atheistic worldview requires only the understanding that gods don't exist as genuine independent entities outside the imaginations of human beings. An atheistic viewpoint is entirely compatible with logic and other abstractions lacking materiality.
“On what rational basis, as an atheist, do you justify belief in the inductive principle?“ I don't need to justify it in order to be an atheist, any more than a theist needs to justify it in order to believe in a god. The inductive principle is a tool for thinking, not a god, and belief in it is entirely orthogonal to a belief in gods. As a tool the inductive principle is either useful or not, and whether it proves useful is determined by experience after the fact of its use, by comparison of the predictions produced by its use against the reality which exists independent of whether you use it or not.
“As you observe the life of a the atheist I want you to observe that the life of an atheist is riddled with inconsistency and thus has exposed it as being utterly irrational.” Well, again, I have no reason for doubting your assertion that you want me observe these things, but that really has no bearing on whether I actually observe them or not. I don't.
“Atheists will presuppose human dignity and attend the funeral of a friend or to honour a relative, but then they will turn around and argue that man has no dignity and he’s no different than any other product of evolution like a snail or a dog or a horse.“ Will they, indeed? Here we have another straw man for you to demolish, and a mistaken conflation to boot. Some atheists presuppose human dignity, others do not, but in neither case does this bear on the question of whether a god exists. While I have no doubt that somewhere out there there exist atheists who will argue that man has no dignity, just as there are theists who so argue (there being ample scriptural support for such views), that also bears not at all on atheism per se. Beliefs about the relative dignity of dogs and horses is likewise well distributed among both theists and atheists, as is attested to by the number of pet cemeteries out there.
“The atheist will insist that people are nothing more than complex biochemical factors that are subject to the laws of physics and yet he kisses his wife and his children as though there is something called love.“ Quite apart from the fact that not all atheists insist that people are nothing more than complex biochemical factors (more straw man arguing), there isn't even a contradiction for those who do. I observe a thing (or a disposition, rather) called love every day, both in myself and, by inference from their actions, in others; what explanation I give myself for it bears not at all on its existence.
“The atheist will argue that in sexual relations, anything goes there are no moral absolutes, don’t impose your views on others. They will even defend prostitution but then indignantly condemn child molesters or morally repudiate necrophilia.” Will you never run out of straw and cloth? Atheism is the lack of belief in gods; that does not necessarily entail a disbelief in moral absolutes, only a disbelief that gods are the source of them and/or the enforcers of them. Most (not all) atheists believe that mutual consent is the sine qua non of ethical sexual behavior, which is entirely consistent with not condemning prostitution but disallowing sexual congress with those too young to give informed consent; necrophilia would be condemned by most (not all) atheists because of the disrespect it shows harms the surviving family. In any case it really doesn't matter whether or why atheists or theists consider any behavior acceptable, sexual or otherwise; it's completely orthogonal to the question of whether gos exist.
“The atheist is just a bundle of contradictions. He can’t bring his worldview into harmony with itself.” Sorry, but this is simply laughable coming from a Christian. Your god issued a blanket prohibition against killing and in the same book both committed and ordered genocides, and that's one amongst a plethora of contradictions within your holy scripture..
“He’ll suggest that things that happen in the universe, happen randomly; that it just is that way arbitrarily. He’ll say it just happens but then he’ll turn around and he’ll look for regularities and law like explanations for events, he looks for uniformity and predictability in things that he studies in natural science. ” I'm developing a straw allergy here. An arbitrary universal genesis (which would cover even one initiated by a god), or even a random one, does not imply that all subsequent events are either random or arbitrary. It is equally justifiable to assume that all events from that point of genesis onward follow discoverable patterns, and it is reasonable to assume that those patterns ('laws') are universal and invariant. Theists normally assume that events can occur which are contrary to the patterns set down at the genesis (whenever their god sees fit), while atheists generally do not, but thus far no event has indisputably proven miraculous. The laws of physics seem to work indiscriminately for all, regardless of their personal belief structure and whether it agrees with said laws.
“The atheist doesn’t have a workable worldview.” See two paragraphs above.
“The atheist will simply say, ‘everyone knows there’s uniformity in nature, everyone knows there are moral absolutes. Everybody knows these things.’ And on that I agree with the atheist, everyone does know these things, but the problem is they don’t comport with atheism.” They do, at least as far as uniformity in nature is concerned, at least as a practical matter (when your iPod stops working, you assume it to be a due to a defect of some kind, not due to a change in the laws of physics pertaining to your particular iPod). Moral absolutes are another matter; there are some few (such as I) who deny that moral absolutes exist or are necessary for the continued existence of the universe. Certainly it's difficult to argue that the Moon could not exist if homosexuality were considered a harmless eccentricity.
“You can claim that events are just random, that there’s no personal plan or control or purpose in the universe. You can claim that reality amounts to nothing more but matter in motion but you can’t act, live or reason in that way.” Well, yes I can. Not that I do, mind, because I'm not made of straw, but I could. Whether I did or not would have no bearing on how the universe actually behaves, of course.
“Consider this parallel. Its like someone arguing against the existence of air yet he continues to breathe air all while he is arguing against it.” Okay, I've considered it, and concluded that it is a stupid analogy which has nothing to do with the question at hand. Let's move on.
“Atheists work hard to hide this intellectual poverty from themselves, that’s why they try to look up verses in the Bible and try to ridicule things rather than getting down to the basic issue of do you have a philosophy of life in terms of which you can reason about anything at all?“ Some atheists... (yawn). Sorry, straw allergy.... Some atheists, when arguing with Christians, will try and succeed in looking up verses in the Christian Bible which either contradict observable conditions in the world at large, or other parts of the Christian Bible, or both. It's an easy book to ridicule, because it is a compilation of stories sourced from ignorant agrarian peoples and insufficiently edited to weed out inconsistencies.
As for whether atheists have a philosophy of life which allows reasoning, I would say we do. All that is necessary to pass that small hurdle is to ask, “Can a person reason without believing in gods?” A single example will suffice: I do not believe in any gods, yet I am able to reason. I would add that it is also possible for one who believes in a god to reason; it may not be possible for such a person to closely reason about their particular god-related beliefs and retain them, but theism does not in and of itself preclude reasoning, It often does limit the range and effectiveness of the theist's reasoning, though.
“The response about the claims in the Bible is always that its just implausible. But remember that what you think is plausible is a reflection and a function of your basic conception of reality, your underlying worldview and how you know what you know and how you should live your life. Plausibility is rated by your worldview.” Well, yes, and whether it meets the test of agreeing with real-life experiment. It's a common idea amongst poker players that their luck will turn around if they turn around their hats; I've actually taken the trouble of writing down the results, and I can tell you that it did not work in the case of three poker players I looked at. Virgin births and dead people walking about haven't been claimed recently by Christians (not mainstream ones anyway) but given the dearth of evidence why should I believe they ever did? Why should I believe either ancient or contemporary claims of miraculous healing, given the lack of evidence?
It isn't simply a difference in underlying worldview, it's a difference in underlying evidence. I didn't believe in quantum physics, either; the idea that a single particle's path could be determined by whether there were multiple paths it could have taken is to say the least counterintuitive, but I came to believe it because the experimental results worked for me just as well as anyone else. I can do them again, with a doubter present, and they will work the same way, Plausibility is is rated by experiment.
“Atheists say ‘we can’t understand and explain every natural phenomenon’ Well you’ve missed my point. I’m arguing that you can't explain ANY natural phenomenon, and so every time you say I want natural proof, I want empirical verification, my point is your worldview can’t account for anything in the world; miraculous or not miraculous. My whole point is that all of our normal analytical procedures presuppose God in order to make sense of the inductive principle, moral absolutes, human dignity and all the rest.” Quite honestly, we've missed your point because you don't have one. Your analytical procedures may presuppose the existence of a god, but that doesn't mean that presupposing a god is necessary in order to effect an analysis. I might add that analyzing the implications of, say, a theory that the Sun's light results from the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements does not depend upon moral absolutes or human dignity.
“I have shown that the atheistic presuppositions violate the conditions of rationality and that the Christian view does not.” No, you haven't, in either case.
“Atheists can’t show why they’re not being arbitrary when they condemn one thing and condone another.” What you mean is that when we condemn one thing or condone another, we cannot say “because God told me so.” Can you tell me why you are not being arbitrary in your belief that God told you so, or why God is not being arbitrary in his decision that it should be so?
I (an atheist) condemn theft, and believe that stealing should be punished by the community (rather than await divine justice) because it disrupts the orderly flow of commerce which benefits everyone; I will be upset if the system of justice lets too many thieves get away with their crimes, though I may allow for a few getting away with it in order to protect the innocent from railroading. I will also allow for exigent circumstance; if a poor woman steals to feed her children, reduce the sentence.
Contrast me with my neighbor, who believes that theft is wrong because her god says it is, and believes that no matter what happens here on Earth, the thief will be punished in an afterlife. Unlike me, my neighbor will under no circumstance elide the 'majesty of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike from stealing bread or sleeping under railway culverts' – my neighbor has her law directly from her god, and her god has set out moral absolutes which forbid stealing under any circumstances.
Oddly enough, even though my neighbor is assured that the thief cannot escape punishment in the afterlife, she is still determined that punishment is needed in this life – not restitution, mind, which anyone could see the justice of, but vengeance. Even though the thief is automatically going to be burned in sulfurous flames and poked with pitchforks for all eternity, it is morally necessary to throw her into a dank, rat-infested hole for years – or exile her for life from her family by sending her to Australia – or cut off her hand - or simply hang her from the neck until dead, prior to the aforementioned automatic punishment. Such is the power of moral absolutism.
“You can't coherently make moral judgments if people are nothing more than bags of biochemical stuff.” (Spelling and punctuation corrected.) Prove it. I just made a moral judgment. Can you prove (not simply assert) that I am not just a bag of biochemical stuff? Of course you can't, any more than I can prove that there isn't a god. Neither assertion is proved, nor is either likely to be any time soon. I'd have to say, though, that the evidence I can point toward the theory that we're all just bags of biochemical stuff is a lot deeper than the evidence that points toward a god – any god.
“Atheists spotlessly profess and they are emotionally committed to an underlying worldview that happens to render the reasoning science of ethics they want to do, unintelligible.“ That sentence, and the following paragraph, are what is unintelligible.
“The atheist is satisfied to ignore the need for intellectual justification and explanation, the need to gain consistency within his total beliefs and the need to demonstrate systematic cogency in his overall perspective on the world, man and values.” Actually, most atheist I know have come to that position because their religions failed spectacularly to justify assertions those religions were making – from cosmological assertions about the nature of the universe (such as that the Sun circles the Earth, or that the Earth is flat) to ethical assertion which were untenable (such as that it is desirable to stone to death upon her father's doorstep a bride who turns out not to be virgin). It is the theist who is typically disinclined to examine closely arguments and evidence which contradict the theist's viewpoint.
“'It’s the fool that says in his heart, ‘”there is no God.”’ Paul says, 'Professing themselves to be wise, those who are unbelievers, they became fools.' That is not name calling, it is description of what happens to reasoning when you will not admit the obvious.” By obvious do you mean things like “Not all animals lived within walking distance of Noah's house” or things like “It isn't reasonable to apply the death sentence to people who choose to work on Sunday”?
“You as an atheist are in a lot of company. But the fact that there are a lot of people who believe that sort of thing does not make your thinking any less superstitious or arbitrary. The atheist is simply taking his intellectual autonomy for granted.” I invite you to substitute the word Christian for the word atheist, and see how well it fits.
You then go on to tell me and every other atheisr what our philosophy is, viz. “According to you, there is no God.” The first sentence is accurate; you could address it to any atheist without argument, since by definition an atheist is one who believes there is no god. Well done.
“According to you, all there is, is matter and motion.” The second is not so accurate; there may be atheists who would agree with the premise, once it was made intelligible by explication, but it doesn't form a part of the definition of atheism and needn't apply to all atheists. Any argument you follow with which presupposes that all atheists believe only in “matter and motion” fall into the straw-man fallacy; you are not arguing against atheism, you are arguing against a cartoon version of atheism of your own devising, one specifically designed for the purpose of being easy to refute. If there are some atheists who believe only in “matter and motion” then your arguments may well apply to their philosophy, but it no more applies to atheism in general than arguments against my local Christian snake-handlers, based on their beliefs about handling serpents, apply to Christianity in general.
“I realize that when I give you evidence of God’s existence, and the truth of Christianity, for instance; that a man named Jesus rose from the dead, his opponents couldn’t disprove it, those who believed it were willing to die for it, I give you evidence of those things, and I draw the conclusion given my philosophy of life, He has given historical evidence of who He is and that we should follow Him.” Give me some evidence and we can talk about that. There is no contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Jesus outside the Gospels; that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't exist, but it argues against it. The contemporaneous Romans kept pretty good records, as did the contemporaneous Jews, and a fair proportion of those records survived to this day; not only do they not note the death and resurrection of Jesus, they fail to note the earthquake, the curtain rending, and the opening of graves and subsequent perambulations of the dead. It seems terribly unlikely that only the followers of Jesus were astute enough to notice such things, or sufficiently struck by them as to make a note. That they alone were willing to die for it seems more likely, I'll grant you; it's not a normal reaction of rational beings to be willing to die for unsubstantiated rumors. I would note that the lunatic asylums are full of people willing to die for strange beliefs, though.
“I am going to argue now from the impossibility of the contrary. That is, within my worldview I can explain to you why there is logic... causality... moral absolutes, why I believe that human beings are free and have dignity. But in your worldview, there couldn’t be any logic.” Only the latter constitutes arguing from the impossibility of the contrary, actually. The attributes you assign your worldview, viz. logic, causality, moral absolutes, and human freedom and dignity, may be equally well attributed to an atheistic worldview or may be unnecessary to it. Still, let's see how you do with logic.
“Why not? Well, matter in motion, that’s your worldview, the logic isn’t material and its not in motion.“ You're arguing against your straw man, not against atheism. An atheistic viewpoint does not require that abstract entities don't exist, it doesn't even require that the abstract notion of gods should not exist; an atheistic worldview requires only the understanding that gods don't exist as genuine independent entities outside the imaginations of human beings. An atheistic viewpoint is entirely compatible with logic and other abstractions lacking materiality.
“On what rational basis, as an atheist, do you justify belief in the inductive principle?“ I don't need to justify it in order to be an atheist, any more than a theist needs to justify it in order to believe in a god. The inductive principle is a tool for thinking, not a god, and belief in it is entirely orthogonal to a belief in gods. As a tool the inductive principle is either useful or not, and whether it proves useful is determined by experience after the fact of its use, by comparison of the predictions produced by its use against the reality which exists independent of whether you use it or not.
“As you observe the life of a the atheist I want you to observe that the life of an atheist is riddled with inconsistency and thus has exposed it as being utterly irrational.” Well, again, I have no reason for doubting your assertion that you want me observe these things, but that really has no bearing on whether I actually observe them or not. I don't.
“Atheists will presuppose human dignity and attend the funeral of a friend or to honour a relative, but then they will turn around and argue that man has no dignity and he’s no different than any other product of evolution like a snail or a dog or a horse.“ Will they, indeed? Here we have another straw man for you to demolish, and a mistaken conflation to boot. Some atheists presuppose human dignity, others do not, but in neither case does this bear on the question of whether a god exists. While I have no doubt that somewhere out there there exist atheists who will argue that man has no dignity, just as there are theists who so argue (there being ample scriptural support for such views), that also bears not at all on atheism per se. Beliefs about the relative dignity of dogs and horses is likewise well distributed among both theists and atheists, as is attested to by the number of pet cemeteries out there.
“The atheist will insist that people are nothing more than complex biochemical factors that are subject to the laws of physics and yet he kisses his wife and his children as though there is something called love.“ Quite apart from the fact that not all atheists insist that people are nothing more than complex biochemical factors (more straw man arguing), there isn't even a contradiction for those who do. I observe a thing (or a disposition, rather) called love every day, both in myself and, by inference from their actions, in others; what explanation I give myself for it bears not at all on its existence.
“The atheist will argue that in sexual relations, anything goes there are no moral absolutes, don’t impose your views on others. They will even defend prostitution but then indignantly condemn child molesters or morally repudiate necrophilia.” Will you never run out of straw and cloth? Atheism is the lack of belief in gods; that does not necessarily entail a disbelief in moral absolutes, only a disbelief that gods are the source of them and/or the enforcers of them. Most (not all) atheists believe that mutual consent is the sine qua non of ethical sexual behavior, which is entirely consistent with not condemning prostitution but disallowing sexual congress with those too young to give informed consent; necrophilia would be condemned by most (not all) atheists because of the disrespect it shows harms the surviving family. In any case it really doesn't matter whether or why atheists or theists consider any behavior acceptable, sexual or otherwise; it's completely orthogonal to the question of whether gos exist.
“The atheist is just a bundle of contradictions. He can’t bring his worldview into harmony with itself.” Sorry, but this is simply laughable coming from a Christian. Your god issued a blanket prohibition against killing and in the same book both committed and ordered genocides, and that's one amongst a plethora of contradictions within your holy scripture..
“He’ll suggest that things that happen in the universe, happen randomly; that it just is that way arbitrarily. He’ll say it just happens but then he’ll turn around and he’ll look for regularities and law like explanations for events, he looks for uniformity and predictability in things that he studies in natural science. ” I'm developing a straw allergy here. An arbitrary universal genesis (which would cover even one initiated by a god), or even a random one, does not imply that all subsequent events are either random or arbitrary. It is equally justifiable to assume that all events from that point of genesis onward follow discoverable patterns, and it is reasonable to assume that those patterns ('laws') are universal and invariant. Theists normally assume that events can occur which are contrary to the patterns set down at the genesis (whenever their god sees fit), while atheists generally do not, but thus far no event has indisputably proven miraculous. The laws of physics seem to work indiscriminately for all, regardless of their personal belief structure and whether it agrees with said laws.
“The atheist doesn’t have a workable worldview.” See two paragraphs above.
“The atheist will simply say, ‘everyone knows there’s uniformity in nature, everyone knows there are moral absolutes. Everybody knows these things.’ And on that I agree with the atheist, everyone does know these things, but the problem is they don’t comport with atheism.” They do, at least as far as uniformity in nature is concerned, at least as a practical matter (when your iPod stops working, you assume it to be a due to a defect of some kind, not due to a change in the laws of physics pertaining to your particular iPod). Moral absolutes are another matter; there are some few (such as I) who deny that moral absolutes exist or are necessary for the continued existence of the universe. Certainly it's difficult to argue that the Moon could not exist if homosexuality were considered a harmless eccentricity.
“You can claim that events are just random, that there’s no personal plan or control or purpose in the universe. You can claim that reality amounts to nothing more but matter in motion but you can’t act, live or reason in that way.” Well, yes I can. Not that I do, mind, because I'm not made of straw, but I could. Whether I did or not would have no bearing on how the universe actually behaves, of course.
“Consider this parallel. Its like someone arguing against the existence of air yet he continues to breathe air all while he is arguing against it.” Okay, I've considered it, and concluded that it is a stupid analogy which has nothing to do with the question at hand. Let's move on.
“Atheists work hard to hide this intellectual poverty from themselves, that’s why they try to look up verses in the Bible and try to ridicule things rather than getting down to the basic issue of do you have a philosophy of life in terms of which you can reason about anything at all?“ Some atheists... (yawn). Sorry, straw allergy.... Some atheists, when arguing with Christians, will try and succeed in looking up verses in the Christian Bible which either contradict observable conditions in the world at large, or other parts of the Christian Bible, or both. It's an easy book to ridicule, because it is a compilation of stories sourced from ignorant agrarian peoples and insufficiently edited to weed out inconsistencies.
As for whether atheists have a philosophy of life which allows reasoning, I would say we do. All that is necessary to pass that small hurdle is to ask, “Can a person reason without believing in gods?” A single example will suffice: I do not believe in any gods, yet I am able to reason. I would add that it is also possible for one who believes in a god to reason; it may not be possible for such a person to closely reason about their particular god-related beliefs and retain them, but theism does not in and of itself preclude reasoning, It often does limit the range and effectiveness of the theist's reasoning, though.
“The response about the claims in the Bible is always that its just implausible. But remember that what you think is plausible is a reflection and a function of your basic conception of reality, your underlying worldview and how you know what you know and how you should live your life. Plausibility is rated by your worldview.” Well, yes, and whether it meets the test of agreeing with real-life experiment. It's a common idea amongst poker players that their luck will turn around if they turn around their hats; I've actually taken the trouble of writing down the results, and I can tell you that it did not work in the case of three poker players I looked at. Virgin births and dead people walking about haven't been claimed recently by Christians (not mainstream ones anyway) but given the dearth of evidence why should I believe they ever did? Why should I believe either ancient or contemporary claims of miraculous healing, given the lack of evidence?
It isn't simply a difference in underlying worldview, it's a difference in underlying evidence. I didn't believe in quantum physics, either; the idea that a single particle's path could be determined by whether there were multiple paths it could have taken is to say the least counterintuitive, but I came to believe it because the experimental results worked for me just as well as anyone else. I can do them again, with a doubter present, and they will work the same way, Plausibility is is rated by experiment.
“Atheists say ‘we can’t understand and explain every natural phenomenon’ Well you’ve missed my point. I’m arguing that you can't explain ANY natural phenomenon, and so every time you say I want natural proof, I want empirical verification, my point is your worldview can’t account for anything in the world; miraculous or not miraculous. My whole point is that all of our normal analytical procedures presuppose God in order to make sense of the inductive principle, moral absolutes, human dignity and all the rest.” Quite honestly, we've missed your point because you don't have one. Your analytical procedures may presuppose the existence of a god, but that doesn't mean that presupposing a god is necessary in order to effect an analysis. I might add that analyzing the implications of, say, a theory that the Sun's light results from the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements does not depend upon moral absolutes or human dignity.
“I have shown that the atheistic presuppositions violate the conditions of rationality and that the Christian view does not.” No, you haven't, in either case.
“Atheists can’t show why they’re not being arbitrary when they condemn one thing and condone another.” What you mean is that when we condemn one thing or condone another, we cannot say “because God told me so.” Can you tell me why you are not being arbitrary in your belief that God told you so, or why God is not being arbitrary in his decision that it should be so?
I (an atheist) condemn theft, and believe that stealing should be punished by the community (rather than await divine justice) because it disrupts the orderly flow of commerce which benefits everyone; I will be upset if the system of justice lets too many thieves get away with their crimes, though I may allow for a few getting away with it in order to protect the innocent from railroading. I will also allow for exigent circumstance; if a poor woman steals to feed her children, reduce the sentence.
Contrast me with my neighbor, who believes that theft is wrong because her god says it is, and believes that no matter what happens here on Earth, the thief will be punished in an afterlife. Unlike me, my neighbor will under no circumstance elide the 'majesty of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike from stealing bread or sleeping under railway culverts' – my neighbor has her law directly from her god, and her god has set out moral absolutes which forbid stealing under any circumstances.
Oddly enough, even though my neighbor is assured that the thief cannot escape punishment in the afterlife, she is still determined that punishment is needed in this life – not restitution, mind, which anyone could see the justice of, but vengeance. Even though the thief is automatically going to be burned in sulfurous flames and poked with pitchforks for all eternity, it is morally necessary to throw her into a dank, rat-infested hole for years – or exile her for life from her family by sending her to Australia – or cut off her hand - or simply hang her from the neck until dead, prior to the aforementioned automatic punishment. Such is the power of moral absolutism.
“You can't coherently make moral judgments if people are nothing more than bags of biochemical stuff.” (Spelling and punctuation corrected.) Prove it. I just made a moral judgment. Can you prove (not simply assert) that I am not just a bag of biochemical stuff? Of course you can't, any more than I can prove that there isn't a god. Neither assertion is proved, nor is either likely to be any time soon. I'd have to say, though, that the evidence I can point toward the theory that we're all just bags of biochemical stuff is a lot deeper than the evidence that points toward a god – any god.
“Atheists spotlessly profess and they are emotionally committed to an underlying worldview that happens to render the reasoning science of ethics they want to do, unintelligible.“ That sentence, and the following paragraph, are what is unintelligible.
“The atheist is satisfied to ignore the need for intellectual justification and explanation, the need to gain consistency within his total beliefs and the need to demonstrate systematic cogency in his overall perspective on the world, man and values.” Actually, most atheist I know have come to that position because their religions failed spectacularly to justify assertions those religions were making – from cosmological assertions about the nature of the universe (such as that the Sun circles the Earth, or that the Earth is flat) to ethical assertion which were untenable (such as that it is desirable to stone to death upon her father's doorstep a bride who turns out not to be virgin). It is the theist who is typically disinclined to examine closely arguments and evidence which contradict the theist's viewpoint.
“'It’s the fool that says in his heart, ‘”there is no God.”’ Paul says, 'Professing themselves to be wise, those who are unbelievers, they became fools.' That is not name calling, it is description of what happens to reasoning when you will not admit the obvious.” By obvious do you mean things like “Not all animals lived within walking distance of Noah's house” or things like “It isn't reasonable to apply the death sentence to people who choose to work on Sunday”?
“You as an atheist are in a lot of company. But the fact that there are a lot of people who believe that sort of thing does not make your thinking any less superstitious or arbitrary. The atheist is simply taking his intellectual autonomy for granted.” I invite you to substitute the word Christian for the word atheist, and see how well it fits.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Capitulating to crying is not proper parenting
(The following is a copy of a letter sent to Cary Tennis at Salon.com)
Cary Tennis' advice to one of his correspondents in his Salon column today ('Unholy Father', Oct. 4 2007) seemed to me to show up an enormous hole in his objectivity. In a parental disagreement between an evangelical Christian mother and an atheist father (the correspondent), he simply assumes that it is preferable to allow the daughter to accept the religious viewpoint without question, and he even advises the father that his own beliefs should be subordinated.
The letter writer explained that his child is being raised mostly by her mother, who is deeply Christian, and that lately the child has become fearful that her father, who is an atheist, is heading for the fires of Hell. When he attempts to explain to her why he thinks this isn't going to happen (viz., there's no such place) she cries. Naturally, he finds this distressing and wanted some advice from Cary on how he can communicate with his daughter about such issues without the tears.
Cary's advice? He should just start going to church, so that his daughter won't worry so and to show his 'open mind' on such matters. I find this wildly inappropriate, and wonder how Cary would have approached the same problem if the letter writer had been a member of another religion rather than an atheist. Would he have advised him to skip the synagogue or mosque and go to church instead, because it would make the daughter more comfortable?
Mind you, this is not a 'default atheist' who simply doesn't believe but otherwise has no opinion on the matter. He states in his letter that he believes organized religion is actively harmful to her development into a rational adult. Despite this, he is certainly not trying to deny her mother the right to take her to church. He is, in fact, just trying to help her see that other people believe other things and that having an open mind is a good thing.
So the father's position is that he's willing to let her mother raise her in her beliefs (which also include such positions as denial of evolution and intolerance of homosexuality, naturally) but he wants to provide the rationalist viewpoint also, which seems pretty open-minded to me already, and he's writing to ask for advice on how best to communicate his views without upsetting his daughter.
Cary Tennis thinks the girl's father should start paying lip service to those beliefs, even though the man considers them wrong-headed and harmful. He thinks that caving to the child's tears, which were induced by those same irrational beliefs, and going to church for a few years will somehow give the father additional parental influence in these matters. When the man's daughter is grown and no longer so impressionable, why then her father can reveal that he was only humoring her and shamming his way through those masses, and she'll then be in a position to discuss these ideas reasonably.
What utter tosh. Being a hypocrite and denying his own beliefs is not going to gain this man his daughter's respect, and it is during childhood that it is most important for a parent to encourage open-minded thinking. As the Jesuits well knew, if you want to ensure that a fixed set of ideas are unshakably embedded in a person's mind for their entire life then you have to embed them, without competition, while the person is a child. In their hearts all religionists know this, which is why they so strongly discourage questioning of their dogmas - especially by the children.
Why not suggest that the mother should give up on church for a while? Obviously, because the child's already been taught to fear that idea, fear it beyond the point where it's even a viable consideration. It's the irrational fears which brought the tears! Humoring them is not going to help in the long run.
Note that the atheist isn't afraid of a fair competition of ideas - it's the theist who needs to frighten children out of even considering an alternate viewpoint. Truly, the father has it exactly right; subjecting a child to organized religion without a countering dose of skepticism is harmful to their development. It is child abuse, in fact, though the father stops well short of saying so. No doubt religionists will say that they are only trying to keep children out of their mythical hell and get them into their mythical heaven, but the only reason they hold such absurd beliefs is because they have been subjected to the same abuse themselves as children, without the moderating influence of a rational authority figure like this father presenting a better role model.
End the cycle of abuse. Teach your children critical thinking, and encourage them to apply it to everything. That will make them independent and strong, rather than hagridden by baseless fear of imaginary horrors.
Respectfully,
A Rational Father
Cary Tennis' advice to one of his correspondents in his Salon column today ('Unholy Father', Oct. 4 2007) seemed to me to show up an enormous hole in his objectivity. In a parental disagreement between an evangelical Christian mother and an atheist father (the correspondent), he simply assumes that it is preferable to allow the daughter to accept the religious viewpoint without question, and he even advises the father that his own beliefs should be subordinated.
The letter writer explained that his child is being raised mostly by her mother, who is deeply Christian, and that lately the child has become fearful that her father, who is an atheist, is heading for the fires of Hell. When he attempts to explain to her why he thinks this isn't going to happen (viz., there's no such place) she cries. Naturally, he finds this distressing and wanted some advice from Cary on how he can communicate with his daughter about such issues without the tears.
Cary's advice? He should just start going to church, so that his daughter won't worry so and to show his 'open mind' on such matters. I find this wildly inappropriate, and wonder how Cary would have approached the same problem if the letter writer had been a member of another religion rather than an atheist. Would he have advised him to skip the synagogue or mosque and go to church instead, because it would make the daughter more comfortable?
Mind you, this is not a 'default atheist' who simply doesn't believe but otherwise has no opinion on the matter. He states in his letter that he believes organized religion is actively harmful to her development into a rational adult. Despite this, he is certainly not trying to deny her mother the right to take her to church. He is, in fact, just trying to help her see that other people believe other things and that having an open mind is a good thing.
So the father's position is that he's willing to let her mother raise her in her beliefs (which also include such positions as denial of evolution and intolerance of homosexuality, naturally) but he wants to provide the rationalist viewpoint also, which seems pretty open-minded to me already, and he's writing to ask for advice on how best to communicate his views without upsetting his daughter.
Cary Tennis thinks the girl's father should start paying lip service to those beliefs, even though the man considers them wrong-headed and harmful. He thinks that caving to the child's tears, which were induced by those same irrational beliefs, and going to church for a few years will somehow give the father additional parental influence in these matters. When the man's daughter is grown and no longer so impressionable, why then her father can reveal that he was only humoring her and shamming his way through those masses, and she'll then be in a position to discuss these ideas reasonably.
What utter tosh. Being a hypocrite and denying his own beliefs is not going to gain this man his daughter's respect, and it is during childhood that it is most important for a parent to encourage open-minded thinking. As the Jesuits well knew, if you want to ensure that a fixed set of ideas are unshakably embedded in a person's mind for their entire life then you have to embed them, without competition, while the person is a child. In their hearts all religionists know this, which is why they so strongly discourage questioning of their dogmas - especially by the children.
Why not suggest that the mother should give up on church for a while? Obviously, because the child's already been taught to fear that idea, fear it beyond the point where it's even a viable consideration. It's the irrational fears which brought the tears! Humoring them is not going to help in the long run.
Note that the atheist isn't afraid of a fair competition of ideas - it's the theist who needs to frighten children out of even considering an alternate viewpoint. Truly, the father has it exactly right; subjecting a child to organized religion without a countering dose of skepticism is harmful to their development. It is child abuse, in fact, though the father stops well short of saying so. No doubt religionists will say that they are only trying to keep children out of their mythical hell and get them into their mythical heaven, but the only reason they hold such absurd beliefs is because they have been subjected to the same abuse themselves as children, without the moderating influence of a rational authority figure like this father presenting a better role model.
End the cycle of abuse. Teach your children critical thinking, and encourage them to apply it to everything. That will make them independent and strong, rather than hagridden by baseless fear of imaginary horrors.
Respectfully,
A Rational Father
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Persecuting Christians
It never ceases to amaze me that Christians can maintain a sense of persecution in modern-day America, but many of them do.Not in some faraway republic in the Middle East or Africa, mind you, where actual persecution of their faith might actually be taking place, but here in the United States, where there are more churches than you can shake a pair of crossed sticks at, where all their major religious festivals are legal holidays, where their God is regularly invoked when convening government councils and at every election stump speech, and even on the money.
The form this persecution takes is that Christianity is not given a favored position above all other faiths; we don't allow them to pray in schools, or teach their theology in science classes, or have chunks of their scripture carved into granite monuments on federal grounds.
The fact that other faiths aren't allowed to do those things either is beside the point as far as these guys are concerned. Because they have been in the majority in the United States for so long, and because they have long had such a strong political constituency, Christians have a sense of entitlement as profound as it is mistaken. To them, it is ridiculous that a Buddhist or Hindu should open Congress with a prayer; I agree, but they fail to see that a Christian prayer is just as inappropriate, despite the latter having gotten away with it for so long.
Yes, I said "gotten away with it" and that's exactly what I meant. It is simply wrong, and indeed unConstitutional, that people of other faiths, and no faith, are forcible proselytized by Christians under the auspices of what is supposed to be a secular government.
A good example of persecuting Christians is here; evangelical Christians in the USAF, feeling secure by virtue of being in the majority, mistreated harassed and threatened an atheist for no other reason than his nondeistic beliefs and his wish to set up a support group for himself and others of similar beliefs.
I'd be really interested in hearing from any Christians who want to support this kind of behaviour.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Pat Condell responds to Osama
If you're not familiar with Pat Condell's videos, they're well worth watching. You can see a bunch of them here.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
CNN asks how strong my faith is
CNN is requesting submissions under the title How strong is your faith? This rather presumes that the respondents will have religious faith:
I responded anyway, with the following:
I live by faith in what is manifest, rather than by invisible, unprovable and improbable tales from the infancy of our civilization.
This universe is magnificent in its scale in time and space, and marvellous in the hard-won complexity of the life in this infinitesimal corner of it. It seems to me sad and absurd that so many people feel they must cling to the simple myths of times long past.
Our lives are brief, but a frantic denial of their inevitable end is as childish as insisting that we are the entire point of the universe. I am reveling in my time, sharing the excitement of discovery with the other brief sparks I encounter, loving the wonderful accident that put me here. I need no faith in another life, my cup overflows in this one.
If others need their ancient, well-worn, classical hand-tooled lies to comfort them, then they are welcome to them. I won't pretend to respect them for it, and I certainly do not respect the silly fables themselves. If the religious try to impose their arbitrary beliefs on society through politics, I shall naturally oppose them, especially when their ideas detrimentally impact the lives of me and mine, or indeed anyone who suffers.
I don't believe religion is truly under attack; it is simply no longer receiving the unwarranted deference it has grown accustomed to. I consider that a very good thing which will in the end benefit us all, excepting perhaps those who derive a living or a spurious authority from the promulgation of ancient lies and mistakes.
My faith is strong, since it is rooted in the provable, not in old myths.
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I responded anyway, with the following:
I live by faith in what is manifest, rather than by invisible, unprovable and improbable tales from the infancy of our civilization.
This universe is magnificent in its scale in time and space, and marvellous in the hard-won complexity of the life in this infinitesimal corner of it. It seems to me sad and absurd that so many people feel they must cling to the simple myths of times long past.
Our lives are brief, but a frantic denial of their inevitable end is as childish as insisting that we are the entire point of the universe. I am reveling in my time, sharing the excitement of discovery with the other brief sparks I encounter, loving the wonderful accident that put me here. I need no faith in another life, my cup overflows in this one.
If others need their ancient, well-worn, classical hand-tooled lies to comfort them, then they are welcome to them. I won't pretend to respect them for it, and I certainly do not respect the silly fables themselves. If the religious try to impose their arbitrary beliefs on society through politics, I shall naturally oppose them, especially when their ideas detrimentally impact the lives of me and mine, or indeed anyone who suffers.
I don't believe religion is truly under attack; it is simply no longer receiving the unwarranted deference it has grown accustomed to. I consider that a very good thing which will in the end benefit us all, excepting perhaps those who derive a living or a spurious authority from the promulgation of ancient lies and mistakes.
My faith is strong, since it is rooted in the provable, not in old myths.
Monday, August 13, 2007
My Original Sin, and Innocence
Although it would take decades more for me to fully separate myself from my Catholic faith, the first crack from whence the chasm grew came about when I was thirteen or so.
Fittingly, perhaps, it was the story of the Original Sin which did it.
That was my third (or possibly fourth - long ago, gentle reader, and I didn't keep a diary) year at a Catholic secondary school in the English town where my father had decided to finish out his career with the USAF. (Both my parents held dual Irish and American citizenships, so there was no barrier to his retiring there.)
Prior to that I had experienced only secular American schools on various Air Force bases, and the change had actually made me rather devout. I was even an altar boy (and no, I was never sexually abused, nor to the best of my knowledge were any of the other boys). Even more significantly, now that I was taking Religious Education classes I began to read the Bible thoroughly, and apply a great deal of thought to what I read. That, and a dab of the deadly sin Pride, were to be the beginning of my downfall or liberation, depending on your point of view.
The story of the Original Sin, the Fall from Grace, was a natural fit for a class full of gawky adolescents struggling with puberty, I suppose. It was the first subject for which we were required to write a lengthy essay expressing our own thinking on a religious matter, and we were to concentrate on how it related to our own onrushing adulthood.
As it happened the subject was one I'd already been worrying at outside of class, because something about the story bothered me. What bothered me was this: Adam and Eve (and all their descendants, which also bothered me but that's another story) were punished for disobeying God. That was the Original Sin. This is the fundamental story of humanity's relationship to God, and it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that there's a gaping hole in the narrative logic which I have never seen addressed.
My concern was this: We were told that Adam and Eve were given the choice between good and evil, and chose evil by disobeying God... but at the time they did not know good from evil, not having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so how could they possibly know it was evil to disobey God?
It seemed utterly wrong to me, because we were otherwise told that sin follows the intent - that to consider adultery was to have committed it, for example. To punish Adam and Eve (incredibly harshly) for doing something which by definition they couldn't know was wrong seemed impossible to justify, like holding a pre-verbal child to the standards of an adult.
(I hope I've made my objection clear; I have rarely if ever gotten a religious Christian to understand it, or at least to admit they understood it.)
Now, the Catholic Church does not in modern times insist on taking the Bible completely literally, which does save them from having to explain some of the more obvious impossibilities. (Then they dispose of the advantage by declaring the Pope infallible ex cathedra but that's yet another story.) Acceptance of (suitably theistic) evolution was allowed even thirty years ago, and the Eden story could be regarded as a parable, an allegory, a story essentially but not literally true. (Unlike, say, virgins getting pregnant or three-day corpses returning to life, but that's yet another whole collection of stories.)
So, since it was just a story, I decided to rewrite it. My version, somewhat condensed, went something like this:
I was rather pleased with my effort. Not only did it avoid holding the first people culpable of evil despite their innocence from evil, and not only did God come off less of a vindictive bastard, but even the serpent caught a break from the blame-fest... yet it still retained and even expanded upon the themes of natural justice, of the loss of innocence and the shouldering of responsibility, plus it put in a good deal more about the nature of love.
Did I mention the school practiced corporal punishment? My ass was bruised for a week.
The physical beating was nothing compared to the guilt trip they put on me, though. Rewriting a bible story? I learned it was the blackest sort of heresy, and my soul was a hair's breadth from being used as Lucifer's cigar lighter. Oh, I can joke about it now, but I believed then, and the idea terrified me to tears, even more than the idea of them calling my parents in. I avoided both fates by agreeing to hie me to the church to confess and repent directly after school, which I did. And yet, and yet...
It did not escape me that I was suffering dire punishment, and threats of more punishment, infinitely worse punishment, for doing something I hadn't even known was wrong, and with the best of intentions. More, in the course of haranguing me and batting aside my explanations, my teachers had made clear to me that hellfire awaited many, many innocents - millions of them, in fact, millions guilty only of not knowing what God considered a crime, not knowing what God wanted.
It also didn't escape me, upon reflection, that God could have avoided all that, by being just the teensiest bit clearer in his wishes and evident in his presence... and therefore he must have wanted it to be that way.
As I said in the beginning, it took decades more to get where I am; one decade to fully shake the belief, I'd say, one to shake the belief in belief, and this last one to fully commit myself, publicly and proudly, to fighting the evil skewing that religion does to the minds of even - dare I say it? - the innocent.
Fittingly, perhaps, it was the story of the Original Sin which did it.
That was my third (or possibly fourth - long ago, gentle reader, and I didn't keep a diary) year at a Catholic secondary school in the English town where my father had decided to finish out his career with the USAF. (Both my parents held dual Irish and American citizenships, so there was no barrier to his retiring there.)
Prior to that I had experienced only secular American schools on various Air Force bases, and the change had actually made me rather devout. I was even an altar boy (and no, I was never sexually abused, nor to the best of my knowledge were any of the other boys). Even more significantly, now that I was taking Religious Education classes I began to read the Bible thoroughly, and apply a great deal of thought to what I read. That, and a dab of the deadly sin Pride, were to be the beginning of my downfall or liberation, depending on your point of view.
The story of the Original Sin, the Fall from Grace, was a natural fit for a class full of gawky adolescents struggling with puberty, I suppose. It was the first subject for which we were required to write a lengthy essay expressing our own thinking on a religious matter, and we were to concentrate on how it related to our own onrushing adulthood.
As it happened the subject was one I'd already been worrying at outside of class, because something about the story bothered me. What bothered me was this: Adam and Eve (and all their descendants, which also bothered me but that's another story) were punished for disobeying God. That was the Original Sin. This is the fundamental story of humanity's relationship to God, and it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that there's a gaping hole in the narrative logic which I have never seen addressed.
My concern was this: We were told that Adam and Eve were given the choice between good and evil, and chose evil by disobeying God... but at the time they did not know good from evil, not having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so how could they possibly know it was evil to disobey God?
It seemed utterly wrong to me, because we were otherwise told that sin follows the intent - that to consider adultery was to have committed it, for example. To punish Adam and Eve (incredibly harshly) for doing something which by definition they couldn't know was wrong seemed impossible to justify, like holding a pre-verbal child to the standards of an adult.
(I hope I've made my objection clear; I have rarely if ever gotten a religious Christian to understand it, or at least to admit they understood it.)
Now, the Catholic Church does not in modern times insist on taking the Bible completely literally, which does save them from having to explain some of the more obvious impossibilities. (Then they dispose of the advantage by declaring the Pope infallible ex cathedra but that's yet another story.) Acceptance of (suitably theistic) evolution was allowed even thirty years ago, and the Eden story could be regarded as a parable, an allegory, a story essentially but not literally true. (Unlike, say, virgins getting pregnant or three-day corpses returning to life, but that's yet another whole collection of stories.)
So, since it was just a story, I decided to rewrite it. My version, somewhat condensed, went something like this:
There were in Eden two Trees, a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge. God, who was knowing*, did not want Adam to become as God was, and therefore warned Adam that if he ate of the latter he would surely know death.
Now it happened that the serpent, who was one of God's earliest creations, found himself becoming too slow to obtain his customary food. The serpent therefore ate instead the fruit of the Tree of Life, and that night to his astonishment he shed his skin and became young again.
Eve saw the serpent and, amazed at the transformation, asked the serpent how he had become so beautiful. The serpent duly told her that he had eaten the fruit of the Tree, and had shed his skin during the night, and been made clean and new by it. Eve decided therefore to eat from the Tree also, thinking to make herself beautiful for the pleasure of Adam's sight.
Unfortunately, she plucked the fruit of the wrong Tree; she ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and not the Tree of life.
Adam came upon Eve just as she ate, and he was horrified at the thought that his heart's love would die, simply because he'd failed to pass God's warning on to her. When Eve explained to Adam that the serpent had already eaten of it, that it would not kill them, and that in the morning they will have beautiful new skins, Adam wanted so mightily to believe her that he began to doubt his memory of God's warning.
In any case he did not want to live without Eve, if she were to die, so Adam bit into the fruit also.
Alas, when the sun rose their skin was not made new as the serpent's had been, and for the first time it appeared ugly to them, for they saw how it had the beginnings of age upon it. Ashamed for the first time of their nakedness, they set about making new skins for themselves out of leaves and thread. Thus it was that when God came looking for them, they were hidden in the forest by their clothes. Their shame had hidden them from God's sight, and when God realized this His Heart filled with angry grief.
God then proceeded to tell them that they would now know death, and age, and sorrow, and pain. God was not imposing punishment on them by this; rather, those things had already existed in their lives, but they didn't know those things. They were unconscious of the meaning of death, in their innocence, but now they knew death, just as God had originally warned Adam he would.
By eating of the Tree of Knowledge, they had indeed become like God; they had become adult, in fact, and not even God could ever return to them the Eden of their former innocence.
---
* Not, you'll note, all-knowing, any more than he was in the original.
I was rather pleased with my effort. Not only did it avoid holding the first people culpable of evil despite their innocence from evil, and not only did God come off less of a vindictive bastard, but even the serpent caught a break from the blame-fest... yet it still retained and even expanded upon the themes of natural justice, of the loss of innocence and the shouldering of responsibility, plus it put in a good deal more about the nature of love.
Did I mention the school practiced corporal punishment? My ass was bruised for a week.
The physical beating was nothing compared to the guilt trip they put on me, though. Rewriting a bible story? I learned it was the blackest sort of heresy, and my soul was a hair's breadth from being used as Lucifer's cigar lighter. Oh, I can joke about it now, but I believed then, and the idea terrified me to tears, even more than the idea of them calling my parents in. I avoided both fates by agreeing to hie me to the church to confess and repent directly after school, which I did. And yet, and yet...
It did not escape me that I was suffering dire punishment, and threats of more punishment, infinitely worse punishment, for doing something I hadn't even known was wrong, and with the best of intentions. More, in the course of haranguing me and batting aside my explanations, my teachers had made clear to me that hellfire awaited many, many innocents - millions of them, in fact, millions guilty only of not knowing what God considered a crime, not knowing what God wanted.
It also didn't escape me, upon reflection, that God could have avoided all that, by being just the teensiest bit clearer in his wishes and evident in his presence... and therefore he must have wanted it to be that way.
As I said in the beginning, it took decades more to get where I am; one decade to fully shake the belief, I'd say, one to shake the belief in belief, and this last one to fully commit myself, publicly and proudly, to fighting the evil skewing that religion does to the minds of even - dare I say it? - the innocent.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The Theist's Moral Advantage
The existence of a God automatically creates an ultimate standard of right and wrong because whatever God (often through His priestly class) declares to be right or wrong, is so. Even things which any normal human being would instinctively consider abhorrent, such a mutilating the genitals of a child, become moral if they are commanded by God.
This is very attractive to people who aren't very comfortable working things out (thinking) for themselves, which covers most theists. They don't have to put any real consideration into the morality of their behaviour; it suffices that they do as they're told by the people they consider moral authorities.
If the Pope tells them to campaign against condom use in AIDS-stricken regions, or the God-anointed Tsar tells them to ghettoize and starve Jews, or the local parson tells them to chain and drag a homosexual behind their pickup truck, then they'll obey, because obedience to the Word Of God is the greatest virtue, as is demonstrated time and again in the holy books.
There is no better exemplar than Abraham, who is accounted most holy because of his unquestioning willingness to kill his beloved child because the voice in his head told him to, prior to changing its mind at the last minute. (Pity it didn't change its mind before all the other childslayings and genocides, but ours not to reason why, eh?)
That voice in his head was actually the voice of the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY; we know this because Abraham did rather well for himself afterward, and was even promised that his descendants would be looked after also, as long as they obeyed a few simple rules mostly about diet and genital mutilation. Had Abraham or his descendants done badly at any point, we'd have known that he was just a nutcase after all.
Do you see how superior this system is, compared to that of the rationalist? You never need spend any mental effort wondering what is the right thing to do, because a kindly priest or anointed king is always there to inform you. There's even an automatic feedback system, because if it turn out that they're false priests or kings then it will be obvious when God foils their plans.
The poor atheist, on the other hand, is beset with uncertainty, having to constantly think about what the best course of action is, with no guarantee from authority that they are right; the atheist has to actually consider what is best for everyone, has to see the situation from everyone's point of view, not just their/the priests'/God's preferences.
It's exhausting, really. Small wonder that theism tends to attract the morally as well as the intellectually lazy. Who wants to go to all that trouble of gathering evidence and thinking and testing the validity of your beliefs, when you can just outource it all to God and/or His representatives?
And after all, how far wrong could we go in just following orders we've been assured are lawful?
This is very attractive to people who aren't very comfortable working things out (thinking) for themselves, which covers most theists. They don't have to put any real consideration into the morality of their behaviour; it suffices that they do as they're told by the people they consider moral authorities.
If the Pope tells them to campaign against condom use in AIDS-stricken regions, or the God-anointed Tsar tells them to ghettoize and starve Jews, or the local parson tells them to chain and drag a homosexual behind their pickup truck, then they'll obey, because obedience to the Word Of God is the greatest virtue, as is demonstrated time and again in the holy books.
There is no better exemplar than Abraham, who is accounted most holy because of his unquestioning willingness to kill his beloved child because the voice in his head told him to, prior to changing its mind at the last minute. (Pity it didn't change its mind before all the other childslayings and genocides, but ours not to reason why, eh?)
That voice in his head was actually the voice of the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY; we know this because Abraham did rather well for himself afterward, and was even promised that his descendants would be looked after also, as long as they obeyed a few simple rules mostly about diet and genital mutilation. Had Abraham or his descendants done badly at any point, we'd have known that he was just a nutcase after all.
Do you see how superior this system is, compared to that of the rationalist? You never need spend any mental effort wondering what is the right thing to do, because a kindly priest or anointed king is always there to inform you. There's even an automatic feedback system, because if it turn out that they're false priests or kings then it will be obvious when God foils their plans.
The poor atheist, on the other hand, is beset with uncertainty, having to constantly think about what the best course of action is, with no guarantee from authority that they are right; the atheist has to actually consider what is best for everyone, has to see the situation from everyone's point of view, not just their/the priests'/God's preferences.
It's exhausting, really. Small wonder that theism tends to attract the morally as well as the intellectually lazy. Who wants to go to all that trouble of gathering evidence and thinking and testing the validity of your beliefs, when you can just outource it all to God and/or His representatives?
And after all, how far wrong could we go in just following orders we've been assured are lawful?
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Choosing beliefs
In common with more prominent atheists I'm often asked why I "choose not to believe in God"; I must confess the question makes very little sense to me as expressed.
I didn't choose not to believe in God, any more than I chose not to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. I'm not being flippant in the comparison; in all of those cases I once believed but no longer do. In each case what caused me to abandon my belief was the lack of real evidence for, and the abundance of logical evidence against, what was in the end a ridiculous proposition. The only distinguishing factor between them is that a majority of putative adults profess still to believe in God, and at that some of them still profess a belief in Santa Claus as well.
That is also, incidentally, the reason why I maintain my small campaign against belief in God, but not against Santa, the Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. My son is in little danger of retaining his belief in the latter three, because they are conspiracies amongst the Illuminati; the spurious 'evidence' of money beneath the pillow, of baskets full of fertility-themed candy, and of presents beneath the tree (and the occasional radio report of flying reindeer sightings) are all set up by adults who know full well that it is just a lark, a bit of fun we allow ourselves to perpetuate on the kids.
Not so the equally ridiculous tales of religion. These are perpetuated by adults who really, genuinely believe in them, even though they describe events like virgin births and dead people getting up and strolling about, events every bit as ridiculous as a rabbit laying pastel-coloured eggs. Kids are necessarily ignorant of how the world really is, but they are not stupid, and they are very very good indeed at detecting adult sincerity, and they give great credence to any
stories which their adult teachers sincerely believe. My son respects my sincere and hard-won beliefs, but his respect for my beliefs butts up against his respect for the contradictory beliefs most of the other adults in his life express.
The only reason I'm okay with that is that my strongest belief is that the best thing for a human being to learn is not a fact but a robust process of evaluating facts, and most of the other adults in Speed's life agree with that, even though they often don't apply it to their religious beliefs. I have faith (based on evidence) that my kid can think for himself, given half a chance.
Which returns me to he beginning of this essay; why, even in the face of overwhelming social disapproval, do I "choose" to disbelieve in God?
It's because it isn't a choice. I don't choose what to believe; I believe what seems to me to be true. I suspect that's true of us all, but all too many of us accept as true what we are told as a child is true, right up to the point where our parents admit to putting the money under the pillow. If we never learn to think for ourselves, then we simply look around us and gather a gestalt of what our neighbors believe to be true. If the majority of them believe that a six-armed goddess controls our lives then we do too; if the majority believe a Jewish carpenter born of a virgin rose from the dead and is therefore our only chance of salvation, we do too.
I am so constituted that the opinions of my neighbors, even of my family, is secondary; by the grace of sheer luck in my genetics and environment, I ended up with a mind incapable of believing anything which is internally inconsistent or which contradicts the world around
me. It's actually difficult for me to see things from the point of view of someone who can; I have friends and coworkers who freely acknowledge that the tale of Noah's Ark is literally impossible, but who "choose to believe" it anyway, in the face of the inherent contradictions and impossibilities. This is literally incomprehensible to me; I acknowledge that it is true they do, but I cannot comprehend it. HOW can someone believe a tale which their own understanding denies the possibility of? It is utterly beyond me.
Many a theist takes the position that this is a deficiency in me rather than them; that 'faith' is an absolute good, that to believe in things for which there is no evidence is a true ability, and not a disability of the normal functioning of a rational mind. In the short term that may
even be true, I think; a society which can produce suicide bombers has a tactical advantage against one which cannot, and a society which enforces a uniformity of viewpoint on any given ethical dilemma will be able to react more quickly than one which does not.
Nevertheless, the history of science shows that the society which is able to abandon bad ideas in favor of new and better will outstrip the society which insists it already has all the right answers; at one time that was the Islamic world outstripping the Judeo-Christians because they were more open to new ideas, later in the Enlightenment it was the Judeo-Christian outstripping the Islamic sciences for the same reason. Today it is the secular world which outstrips both, bogged down as they are in Iron Age texts bound up in outdated cosmogonies.
Why do I reject the idea of God, a supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who is nevertheless concerned with my personal well-being? Come on, why would I *not* reject it? Do you take me for a fool?
Ah, yes, perhaps you do. "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God." Well, it's easy to call names, of course, but does the evidence back it up? Who is truly the fool, the one who accepts childhood teachings and sticks by them despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, or the one who admits that ideas can be wrong, even when they are traditional, or popular, or comforting? Who is the fool, the one who changes his or her views in the face of the evidence, or the one who puts on blinders to avoid seeing an inconvenient truth?
I have often heard, in the course of debates on atheism, the idea that it takes more 'faith' not to believe than to believe. That is simply a lie, but I see its root; it does take more *courage* to tell your neighbors and family that they are being fools than to simply go along with the conventional wisdom. I have absolutely no doubt that my son has and will have the ability to see through the illogicalities and irrationalities of all the silly stories he is told, from the Easter
Bunny to the Tooth Fairy to Santa Claus to Jesus; my hope in so publicly opposing Christianity and all other religions is that he will learn from me, by example, the courage to be honest about disbelieving even the most popular nonsense.
--
Blasphemy is a victimless crime!
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