The Great Atheist Rapture

So, remember the superstitious folks who think that Jesus will make his great comeback tour on May 21, 2011? Well, Ray Garton, during his recent interview on the Irreligiosophy podcast, had a simple but brilliant idea that I think deserves to be spread around:

If you have superstitious friends, family members, coworkers, etc. who believe in rapture twaddle; and if they know you’re an atheist, then on May 21, sneak out and leave a pile of clothes behind. Make them think you’ve been raptured.

The downside of this is that May 21, 2011 falls on a Saturday, so it won’t work with coworkers, unless you work Saturdays. But maybe you can come to dinner with your family, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, change into spare clothes that you’ve stashed under the sink, and sneak out the window. Or something. Use your imagination.

Arguably, me posting this might give the game away, but I’m not too worried about that: the people who’ll be fooled by this trick won’t read this. They probably recoil from any atheist site as if they’d been burned with pornographic acid or something.

(And speaking of the May 21sters, here’s a shout-out to the Countdown to Backpedaling.)

Secular Bible Study: The Song of Solomon

Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, today’s Secular Bible Study is about the Song of Solomon.

And you thought there wasn’t any erotica in the Bible.

Anyway, my notes are here (and also Org-Mode format).

Deconversion Story

Over on YouTube, Evid3nc3 has a movie about his deconversion:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSy1-Q_BEtQ&w=560&h=345]

I say it’s a movie because at nearly three hours (and counting; it isn’t finished yet), it’s really a documentary movie. But I think it’s well worth the time to watch it: for one thing, instead of just talking into a camera for three hours, he uses graphics to illustrate his points and to provide references.

For another, he covers the fact that religion “degrades gracefully”, as they say in systems parlance: there are multiple components, but none are essential (kind of the opposite of “irreducible complexity”). For instance, the phone system and power grid have lots of interconnected nodes, so that if, say, a station in Chicago breaks down, the rest of the system is unaffected: you can still make calls from Los Angeles to Mobile. The sound quality might suffer, or the system might only be able to handle a smaller load, but calls will still go through.

Likewise, there are a number of elements supporting religion: the morality it provides, the power of prayer, the influence of other believers, and so on. Even if you knock one of these out, e.g., by demonstrating that creationism is bunk, the other elements remain. Evid3nc3 goes through these and shows how each one, in turn, crumbled when he examined it closely.

His story also resonates with me because we both started out the same way: by trying to figure out the whole “God” thing, but also preferring truth over comforting fiction. Of course, big parts of his journey are different from mine, but the endpoints are similar.

New Venue

I’ve been invited to be a contributor at Secular Perspectives, a blog associated with the Washington Area Secular Humanists.

My first piece is up now, and begins thus:

Have you ever watched a movie where some people are stuck in a broom closet or a train compartment, and wondered “Gee, I wonder how they managed to fit the camera operator in there with all those people”?

The trick, of course, is that they don’t: there’s a set with four walls that make the closet, and they remove one of the walls to allow the camera to shoot the scene. Then they can replace that wall and remove a different one, to shoot the scene from another angle.

All of these pieces of film are then edited together so that as you’re watching the movie as it cuts back and forth from one shot to the next, you’re also seeing scenery and props jumping in and out of existence (with the occasional revealing mistake — glasses inexplicably filling up, cigarettes magically growing longer and shorter, and so forth).

A similar phenomenon goes on in arguments and claims about gods.

Morality Debate, Part 3

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Matt’s response:

Matt: It’s absurd to think that Moses was required for people to know that killing is wrong. We live in society, we interact with each other, and we can see the consequences of our actions. That’s all it takes.

He agrees that truth is truth, regardless of what anyone thinks.

Truth is an emergent property of the universe. Morality arises from the interaction of thinking, reasoning beings in society.

Jacobse clarifies that if we know killing is wrong, it’s not because Moses delivered that law. He rambles on for a while about “narrative”, and how atheists can discover moral truths, before coming back to his central point: that he wants there to be an ultimate authority for what’s right.

He adds that he could enjoy a beer with Matt.

And then he turns right around and blames eugenics on “the atheist experiment” in the 20th century. This is the beginning of the Godwin theme that will make up most of his argument for the rest of the debate.

Truth has a personal dimension

If I understand correctly, he’s saying that truth is a person. Which is patent nonsense.

Stay tuned for part 4, in which Matt FAQs up the priest.

(See what I did there? “FAQs him up”? No? Should I have gone with “Kung FAQ grip” instead?)

Morality Debate, Part 2

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Hans Jacobse’s opening statement:

The first problem comes less than two minutes in: “Atheism, properly understood…” In other words, “I’m about to tell you what you believe”, not a promising beginning for a fruitful debate.

He continues:

Atheism, properly understood, allows for no objective existence of anything non-material, not made from matter. Philosophical materialism is the philosophical ground of atheism.

One word: software.

Software is non-material. It is, if I understand the definition that Jacobse gives later on, transcendent. On one hand, you can change a book by altering the ink pattern on its pages; on the other hand, you can convert the ink patterns to air vibrations or a flow of electrons, and still have the same book.

This is not some abstruse academic question. It is a practical matter that comes up every time you agree to a software license that says you own the DVD, but not the program on the DVD. It keeps an army of intellectual property lawyers employed. So I hope Jacobse isn’t saying that atheists deny the existence of non-material things like music, mathematics, and personalities.

I would argue as a historian that atheism cannot exist except in a Christian society. I would argue that. It’s actually an outgrowth of our Christian heritage.

I’m sure this will come as a shock to atheists in Japan, India, and Israel, to pick but a few.

does atheism even acknowledge the independent existence of the transcendent, or any being, or even principle apart from matter, apart from that which can be quantified using the tools of science? The answer, at least if the atheist is true to his premises, must be no.

Again, thank you for telling me what I believe. What would I do without you?

You can’t see it in the video, but there’s a mounting pile of strawmen behind his podium.

He goes on to trot out the “no ultimate authority” boogeyman.

But the value he [the atheist] places on one moral act over another is necessarily derivative, which is to say dependent on a view of the universe, of nature and reality, that is not his own.

In other words, we’re incapable of figuring things out on our own.

But even other religions recognize what I consider an elementary fact of the universe: man cannot live by bread alone, which is to say that man is more than the molecules that shape his body.

This seems trivially true, given that the molecules that make up our bodies get recycled every so often, even while we continue to be the same person. And no one argues that a given person is equivalent to a few bucks’ worth of water and other chemicals. The arrangement of those chemicals is crucial.

I think what he’s tap-dancing around is that if the universe is “merely” arrangements of matter, then there’s no magic, and he wants there to be magic.

Truth is a category of existence. A transcendent category of existence, which is to say truth exists apart from any comprehension that I may have of it.

I think this is as close as he ever gets to defining the term “transcendent”.

The truth, and thus morality, can never escape a sort of continuous relativism in the atheist paradigm. Imprisoned, that is, to the shifting winds of the day.

I’ve addressed this elsewhere. Even if our discussions of morality don’t include an ultimate supreme authority, our morality won’t be arbitrary because it’s tethered to reality: we can look at specific actions and events, be it the Holocaust or a parking ticket, and decide whether we like those outcomes, and what sorts of rules we can come up with to codify them.

The most maddening part about this presentation was the way that Jacobse erected an army of straw men, punctuated with the occasional present-company-excluded, and ignored the points that Dillahunty made in his opening statement just prior.

But it gets worse.

Humanism on Metro

Seen on Metro yesterday (clickify to embiggen):
Humanism ad

It’s one of the Consider Humanism ads. Specifically, the one about women.

Morality Debate, Part 1

Matt Dillahunty’s opening statement in the debate on “The Origin of Human Morality” at UMBC on Wednesday:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkMAJai5D3c&fs=1&hl=en_US]

He addresses two common misconceptions about morality: first, that secular morality borrows from religious morality. And second, that secular morality does not include an external authoritative source for morality, and that this is somehow a problem.

He argues that since religions disagree with each other on moral questions, so it is not the case that a deity has shown up and given us a clear set of moral rules. And even if a god did show up and clearly tell us what its values are, how can we tell whether those values are correct? (See the Euthyphro dilemma).

We should, he says, seek correct answers, not necessarily easy ones.

Matt Dillahunty at UMBC videos

The folks at the Atheist Experience blog have posted video of last night’s debate at UMBC, with Matt Dillahunty and Hans Jacobse.

There seem to be only three videos, but the titles say there should be nine. Hopefully the other six will show up in due course.

I hope to have a post up soonish with my comments.

Want to Restore Sanity? Join the Club

Do you want to restore sanity and rationality to political discourse? Sure, we all do!

But do you also want to promote sanity and rationality in general? Then you should join the Washington Coalition of Reason this Saturday on the National Mall as they participate in the Rally to Restore Reason.

Look for the #unitedcor hashtag on Twitter.

Oh, and the guys from the American Freethought podcast will be there as well. They’ll also be announcing their location on Twitter, so find out where they are, then stop by and say hi.