Category Atheism

Goodbye, Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens died today of pneumonia (itself caused by his esophageal cancer), at the age of 62. People more eloquent than I have attempted to sum up his character and the impact of his life, so I won’t attempt it.

Let me simply quote one of his simpler, more distilled adages:

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

and replay one of my favorite Hitch bits, from the Intelligence2 debate on whether the Catholic church is a force for good:

That “Adopt an Atheist” Campaign

By now, you’ve probably heard about BillDo’s “Adopt an Atheist” campaign:

Today we are launching our “Adopt An Atheist” campaign, the predicate of which is, “We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian.”

Here’s what our campaign entails. We are asking everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area […] Let them know of your sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. They may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along.

If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

(emphasis added)

Here’s what I just sent him:

Dear Mr. Donohue,

I have just heard about the Catholic League’s “Adopt an Atheist” campaign, and am intrigued.

I am an atheist, one of those people who, according to you, “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.” But apparently, according to your press release, it is possible that I am actually a Christian without realizing it.

I don’t understand how this is possible, but perhaps one of the atheist-adopters with whom you are working can explain it. I am not a member of American Atheists, so sending mail to them will not reach me. Please ask one of your adopters to contact me.

You also write that “We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian”. Is this true? Is it possible that there might be Christians in my community? Could it be my neighbors, who attend church every Sunday? Or perhaps the pastor who lives two doors down? Who? Perhaps an atheist-adopter can help me figure it out.

I look forward to hearing back from you or your organization.

I’ll post if I hear back. It ought to be a lot of fun.

Book Pre-Review

Well, PZ finally has an ISBN, as well as a title and release date to go with it. Unfortunately Amazon, being the anti-business poopyheads that they are, have apparently decided that just because a book won’t come out for another eight months, that’s enough excuse to prevent people who haven’t read it from leaving first-amendment-protected negative reviews. So I have to leave mine here:

A Review of PZ Myers’s The Happy Atheist: Dancing on the Graves of the Gods

For a “New” atheist, PZ Myers comes late to the party, five years after Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great. Obviously it’s taken him that long to come up with some original ideas that haven’t been covered better by earlier writers. Perhaps the fact that he fears the light and can only emerge from his submarine squid-cave in darkest night to feed upon desecrated eucharists has played havoc with his schedule as well.

Clearly, this is the work of a man in deep denial, not to mention torment. The title itself is an oxymoron: how can an atheist be happy, without the Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring down in his heart, down in his heart today? This is confirmed by the subtitle: after all, you can’t dance on the graves of gods if you don’t believe they exist, can you? Checkmate, atheists!

The text is probably dripping with scorn for religion, and full of gratuitous invective, because he’s that kind of asshole. No doubt he brings up all the familiar crypto-scientismist-materialist cliches about wanting “evidence” and “facts”, and denigrating faith, and accusing religious people of things like the Crusades and the 9/11 attacks, and burning witches, and opposing birth control, and so on ad nauseam. Granted, those things were and are done by religious people, but they had the wrong kind of religion, and how would we know that if it weren’t for faith (the true faith, I mean).

If the comments at his filthy, heathen blog are any indication, it’ll be bought by the carload by his legions of cult-like followers, eager to show the world their allegiance to the Cult of PZ, oblivious to the irony that, in their zeal to destroy religion, they’ve erected another one.

Rumor[1] has it that the first thousand buyers will receive a bonus octopus beanie. This will no doubt boost the book’s sales among the aforementioned cephalopod hordes. But I ask you, did an octopus ever temporarily sacrifice himself to himself to make a loophole in a rule he created in order to save you and me from the torture chamber he created, to punish us for failing to meet the impossible standard he set for us for being the way he created us? No, of course not! That’s absurd! If he had, the cross would have eight arms, not four, and it doesn’t, so there. QED.

In short, this is doubtless another pathetic attempt by a god-hater to destroy all that is good and beautiful in life, and rape puppies. Don’t waste your time if you don’t want to lose your faith and the mansion in heaven that God has set aside for you. Zero stars.

1: My ass, personal communication, 2011.

Happy International Blasphemy Rights Day

Good morning.

Hey, I had an idea for a movie: Jesus comes back to life and starts wreaking zombie havoc in Jerusalem. In the climax, Peter takes him out with a shotgun blast to the head. Think Passion of the Christ meets Army of Darkness.

Mohammed
No? Okay, how about a porn biography of Mohammed, with Ron Jeremy as Mohammed and Jenna Jameson as Aisha?

Okay, how about a simple PSA featuring Buddha promoting Steak & Blow Job Day?

But we’ve got to find a way to tie in these American flag toilet brushes and constitution toilet paper somehow. I’ve got a warehouse full of that shit to sell.

So in case you hadn’t heard, September 30 is International Blasphemy Day, so go out there and find something to blaspheme. It’s fun, and it exercises your first amendment right. Think of it as tai chi for the soul (wait; did I, an atheist, just say “soul”? Isn’t that blasphemy? Oh my loving God, I think it might be. Lord have mercy on me).

Now, blasphemy is the desecration, profanation, marring, or what have you of a sacred item, person, or even idea. And to hold something sacred involves having an irrational attachment to that thing, well beyond its objective worth. For instance, if you would run into a burning church to save an icon, but wouldn’t do the same for an ordinary painting, then you probably hold that icon sacred.

So why would people do that? I think it has something to do with evolutionary psychology, clan protection, and game theory.

Imagine that you’re living ten or twenty thousand years ago, in a village with your clan. There’s no police, no army. Defense is entirely up to you. One day, a group of people from the next valley over come along to steal your food. You fight them, but at some point the tide starts turning against your side, and you think “screw this. I’ll just run off into the hills and live to fight another day.” Of course, you’re probably not the only one thinking this way. So the village defenders run away, the village falls, and you spend the next month surviving on roots, berries, and the occasional rabbit because you don’t have a hunting companion who could help you take down an aurochs or bison.

Okay, now imagine that in the middle of the village is the clan totem pole. This seemingly-ordinary carved tree trunk is the holiest thing you know, and the thought of the marauders using it for firewood, or even coming near it, fills you with disgust. Now you’ve got a greater incentive to defend the village, and won’t be as likely to run away when the fight goes against you. And the more people around you who feel the same way about the totem, the better your side’s odds. Furthermore, since the attackers don’t place the same value on the totem as your side does, they don’t have the same kind of incentive to take it.

So assuming that this just-so story is anywhere close to truth, then sacredness is a mental mechanism that unites clans against the outsiders. It’s a way of ensuring that you have more at stake than would normally appear. It can also serve as a loyalty test: if a new guy shows up in the village, and is willing to desecrate an item that’s sacred to the people in the next village, then you can be pretty sure he’s not secretly working for them.

(The above contains ideas I got from Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Dennett, and probably others.)

Of course, the world we live in today is a far cry from the environment in which we evolved. We have police and armies these days, and a lot of the tribalism that may once have been useful just gets in the way of progress and cooperation these days.

But fundamentally, the notion of blasphemy is: “I hold this object sacred. Therefore you must not say anything bad about it.” Um, thanks but no thanks. You can be as attached as you like to anything you like, be it a flag or a crucifix or your collection of Pokemon cards, but don’t make it my problem. Your club, your rules. Keep me out of it.

So why is it so much fun to blaspheme? Basically, it’s like poking the fundies with a metaphorical stick; they can’t help but jump in a most amusing manner. And that’s the other thing to remember about sacred objects: the things you hold sacred also control you. And personally, I’d rather not be controlled by a statue or a piece of cloth.

PS: L. Ron Hubbard was an unimaginative hack.

“Avowed”

The New York Times ran a piece about the David Mabus affair (tl;dr version: he’s a mentally-ill troll who’d been sending death threats to people for years, and was finally arrested after enough people complained to the police).

It begins:

Over the years, someone writing as David Mabus made himself known to scientists and avowed atheists across North America in thousands of threatening e-mails and violently profane messages on Twitter.

The phrase “avowed atheists” annoyed me, because I see it a lot. I even twatted about it:

The phrase “avowed atheist” still annoys me, though. When’s the last time someone was an “avowed Baptist”?

Then I realized that with an entire browserful of Internet at my disposal, I could answer that question.
Read More

Josh McDowell: Atheism Wins in a Fair Match

This piece in the Christian Post caused me much amusement:

Atheists and skeptics now have equal access to our children as we have, which is why the number of Christian youth who believe in the fundamentals of Christianity is decreasing and sexual immorality is growing, apologist Josh McDowell said.
[…]

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.
[…]

“[…]I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”

Yes, folks, McDowell is saying that Christianity can’t compete on a level playing field. That if people are exposed to both Christians’ and atheists’ arguments, that the Christian ones fail. And if that’s not an admission that Christian apologists don’t have any good arguments, I don’t know what is.

But of course he’s right to worry about skeptics speaking out. Skepticism is all about how to figure out what’s true and what’s not; what sorts of methods of inquiry tend to yield valid results and which don’t.

Then, for some reason, the article turns to the topic of pornography.

The Campus Crusade staff also said around 90 percent of the 16-year-olds, according to the latest statistics, had viewed pornography. And 80 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds had had exposure to hardcore pornography. In a recent study, teenagers were asked if pornography was acceptable, and 67 percent of the men and 59 percent of the women said “yes,” he added.

Interest in porn is nothing new, and I don’t know any guy who hasn’t found a copy of Playboy or Hustler in his father’s nightstand (or something similar), so these are numbers without a context. There’s not enough information here to conclude that the Internet has turned us all into sex-crazed horndogs; it’s quite possible that we’ve been that all along. I also suspect that society has mellowed over the past few decades to the point where many more people are willing to admit watching porn.

At any rate, I’m not sure what this has to do with Christianity, except insofar as every major religion tries to control its members’ sex lives. (Hey, I said “member”, so it’s like a cock joke. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and tell me I suck.)

Bottom line, I think McDowell’s worried that his church isn’t the only game in town anymore. And with good cause. But unlike him, I don’t see that as a problem.

(Update: Oops! Forgot to give credit to Jesus & Mo for pointing me at this story.)

Who Needs Morals, Anyway?

The most-often-asked question when debating morality with theists is, “but where do you get your morals?” Of course, if the theist says “I get my morality from the Vedas/Quran/Bible/Dianetics”, that doesn’t help, since it just raises the question that Matt Dillahunty posed at his debate at UMBC: let’s say some being comes along and says, “I am a god. Here’s a book with my moral system”, then so what? How do we decide whether the system in the book is any good?

I thought I’d step back for a moment and ask, what if there were no morals?

Maybe there are no rules, or no one to give them. Maybe there are rules, but nobody knows them. Maybe the rules are known, but they’re ignored, and there is no mechanism for enforcing them, not even a twinge of guilt. What then?

I don’t think anyone has any trouble imagining this sort of world: theft and lying are rampant, people will kill each over a can of beans and not feel remorse. In fact, there wouldn’t be any cans of beans, because the industry required to produce them couldn’t exist without some kind of stable society and the ability to form long-term associations. A world where you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, lest your own child stab you in the back.

Okay, so this vision may not be accurate. Maybe some combination of game theory and psychology can show that there might be amoral societies where life doesn’t suck as much as what I described.

But I think it’s safe to say that the vision of a world without morals that I described above, or the one that you imagined, represents our fear of what would happen without some sense of morality.

If you’re with me so far, then presumably you’ll agree that then morality is a way of avoiding certain Bad Things: living in fear, being killed or seeing your loved ones killed, and so on; and also of being able to get some Good Things: establishing trust, assuring some level of stability from day to day, and so forth.

We may not agree on anything. You might want to security cameras on every street corner, to make the risk of being robbed as small as possible, and I might feel that the feeling of not being watched all the time is worth the occasional mugging. But if we can agree in broad outline that certain outcomes (like being killed) are bad, others (like knowing where our next meal is coming from) are good, then morality reduces to an engineering problem.

That is, it’s simply(!) a matter of figuring out what kind of world we want to live in, what rules will allow us to get along, and how to get there.

Obviously, this is a thorny problem. But nobody said this was going to be easy. Well, nobody who wasn’t trying to sell you something. As is the case with every engineering project ever, not only are there conflicting requirements, but they change over time. Everyone wants to put their two cents in, and everyone thinks their personal pet cause is the most important one of all. Finding a solution requires political and diplomatic negotiation, and convincing people to give up something in order to strike a deal. It’s enough to make your head spin.

But this strikes me as a huge problem, not an intractable one. We can tract this sucker. We have enough history behind us, and enough data collection methods, that we can see what works and what doesn’t, which sorts of societies are worth living in and which aren’t, and try to figure out how to get where we want.

Saying “I get my morals from an old book” is a lazy cop-out. It’s the response of someone who doesn’t want to look at the problem, let alone try to solve some part of it. And if you’re not going to help, the least you can do is stay out of the way of those who are trying to fix things.

Atheist Language

It occurs to me that it doesn’t make sense for an atheist to say “sure as hell”. I mean, you wouldn’t say “I’m as sure that Mordor exists that I ain’t volunteering for this assignment” (note to self: try using the phrase “sure as Mordor” and see how it goes over).

From a purely factual standpoint, it’s much better to say “sure as shit”, since shit is known to exist. Unfortunately, the use of that phrase isn’t always appropriate. The best I’ve been able to come up with so far is “sure as Shinola“, but I’m sure you can do better. Discuss in the comments.

Fitna in Arkansas

Fitna is an Arabic word meaning something like “disorder” or “unrest”. It’s often used as a justification for women covering themselves up, by not tempting men into lustful thoughts and the depravity and civil unrest that are sure to follow.

Now, I’ve always found this argument rather insulting: it basically says that men are weak-willed, that the moment we see an exposed elbow, we’ll go into some testosterone-fueled frenzy, unable to think straight, stopping at nothing in our craving for sex.

In other contexts, this is not considered a virtue. If I walk past you with my new iPad 2 or whatever the hot toy du jour is, and you like it so much that you steal it from me, that makes you a thief who needs to learn some self-control.

Now, obviously it’s polite to refrain from drinking in front of an alcoholic, or smoking in front of someone who’s trying to quit, but as a rule, people should be expected to control their antisocial emotions (although there’s an interesting exception, that I keep hoping to write about).

So anyway, the reason I bring this up is because of the bus ads in Arkansas, which you’ve probably heard of by now: in brief, the Central Arkansas Coalition of Reason wanted to put some billboards on buses, saying “Are you good without God? Millions are.” The Central Arkansas Transit Authority had a fit, but decided that it couldn’t legally stop them. So instead, they demanded that the CoR pay a $36,000 deposit to insure against vandalism. As a person at the company that handles advertising put it,

“in reality, Arkansas is the buckle of the Bible Belt and I can easily envision zealots or upstanding citizens with a strong faith acting out.”

In other words, fitna. The transit authority and its advertising agency are afraid that the good people of Arkansas, once they see an atheist ad, will fly into a fury of vandalism and won’t be able to help themselves from keying the bus or slashing its tires.

Arkansans, is that really how you want to be seen? Unable to control your temper or play nice with others? Because if so, you may want to get a nice, modest gingham burqa to cover up your wimminfolk. I’m sure there’s someone out there who’ll be happy to sell you one.

Update Fri Jun 17 12:50 2011: Fixed broken HTML. HT alert reader Fez.

Countdown to Backpedaling Widget

Over on the right, in the sidebar, you should see a countdown clock entitled “Countdown to Backpedaling”. (If not, then something went wrong.)

If you’ve been listening to Ask an Atheist, then you should recognize this as a widget version of the Countdown to Backpedaling clock. And if not, then you should definitely be listening to them. Because they’re cool.

At any rate, it’s a clock that counts down to May 22, the day after Jesus’ return and the Day of Judgment, when the backpedaling and excuses begin.

So anyway, now you want to know a) where to download this, b) how to install it, and c) how to complain to me about all the problems you’ve had with (a) and (b).

Download

The main download page is .

If you’re using WordPress, you can download , put it in your wp-content/plugins directory, and with any luck, a “Countdown to Backpedaling” widget should magically show up in your “Widgets” control panel. You can then drag it into position, and it should work.

If you’re using some other software, you’ll want . Installation depends on what you’re using, of course, but you should be able to insert it anywhere that takes HTML.

Configuration

The main configuration option is the “show_secs” variable at the top. If you want to see seconds in the countdown, set it to true. If you find the seconds’ flashing annoying, set it to false.

You can also look through the CSS part, and edit as you please. You might need to change the width.

I might improve on this, if time permits and I don’t get raptured before getting around to it.

If you have any comments or complaints, leave a comment. Bug reports accompanied by a rum and Coke will get higher priority. Bug reports accompanied by a patch will get even higher priority.