Category Atheism

Thank You for Telling Me What I Believe

Not too long ago, I got
this reply
from one Ælfheah to a comment of mine:

‘Atheism’, for your information, does not mean a lack of religion, or, for that matter, a lack of religious beliefs. Abram was not an atheist before God revealed Himself to him.

‘Atheism’ means a belief that God does not exist. Merely not believing in God is commonly called ‘agnosticism’. An agnostic is someone who is (theoretically) prepared to believe in God if he is shown some evidence – which is of course a fallacy, given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

And more recently, S. forwarded
this article
by Sam Storms at the ironically-named Banner of Truth:

Do honest atheists exist? By honest, I don’t mean atheists who pay their taxes and keep their promises and choose not to steal or lie. What I mean in asking the question is whether or not there exists an atheist who honestly believes there is no God.
…

I contend they do not. I contend that they are living and speaking in denial of what they know to be true. I contend that they are labouring to persuade themselves of what is indelibly and inescapably inscribed on their hearts: that there is a God and that they are morally accountable to him.

(emphasis added.)

Gosh, isn’t it kind of these people to tell me what I believe? I
wonder whether they’d be happy to turn the tables and allow me to tell
them who is and isn’t a True Christian.

Storms bases his claim partly on
Romans 1:20,
by way of John Calvin, to add a bit of argument-from-authority sauce
to his argument from authority.

The other half of the argument is the venerable argumentum ad
wow:

  1. Look at the universe and the trees and stuff.
  2. Wow.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

The Bible says everyone believes in God. If anyone claims otherwise,
it must be because they’re lying, not because there’s an error in the
Bible.

Ælfheah, on the other hand, seems to want to redefine 95% of
self-described atheists as agnostics. And his definition of an
agnostic, as someone who would believe in a god if there were good
evidence, fits 95% of the self-described atheists I’ve met.

Except that he then commits the all-or-nothing fallacy:

given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

Okay, technically he’s right: if God is infinitely powerful, then a
feat like building pyramids like the ones in Egypt could be
accomplished either by God, or by humans, or by space aliens. Other
feats, like putting Venus in orbit around Saturn, could be done either
by a god or by sufficiently-powerful aliens, and so forth. Any given
feat could be the work of aliens who are advanced and powerful enough
to accomplish that feat, but are not infinitely powerful. So
in that sense, no evidence is sufficient to establish the existence
of an infinitely powerful god.

But at some point, the question becomes moot. If we’re talking about
aliens who can create universes, rearrange time and space like Legos,
and know everyone’s thoughts, then they may as well be gods, for all
practical purposes. If such a being were demonstrated to exist, you
might as well behave as if it’s infinitely powerful.

But of course theists haven’t demonstrated anything like that. The
argument between theists and atheists isn’t over whether the being
that rearranged stars to spell out “I am the LORD thy God” in Aramaic
as seen from Earth was infinitely powerful, or merely extremely
powerful. The argument is whether there’s any good evidence
for any gods at all.

I can see where this all-or-nothing approach can be useful: “I’ll
never get all of the bugs out of this program, so I won’t do any
debugging”; “I’ll never know everything, so there’s no point in
learning anything”.

So anyway, a True Christian™ is someone who covers himself in
strawberry jam on Fridays while singing medleys of show tunes. All the
rest of you who call yourselves Christians are just lying to
yourselves and to me to mask the shame of not liking jam.

Exploiting Personal Tragedy to Advance Ideology

You may have heard of the tragedy of Jesse Kilgore, the college
sophomore who commited suicide after, as
WingNut Daily reported,
reading The God Delusion and having a crisis of faith.

Now, just when you thought the Disco Tute couldn’t sink any lower,
they’ve produced a
melodramatic episode
of their Intelligent Design the Future podcast about this
(the “melo” part is literal: the whole ten-minute episode is
underscored with soft minor-key acoustic guitar and piano music, so
that it sounds like a cross between a eulogy and a soap opera). It
presents the same story that the WND article does: that Kilgore was a
good Christian kid who went off to a secular college, where a
professor either assigned, or challenged him to read The God
Delusion. After Kilgore went out to the woods and committed
suicide, his father found the book under his son’s bed, with a
bookmark on the last page.

The narrative is that Jesse Kilgore killed himself because he read
Dawkins’s book and lost both his faith and his will to live. Yes, it’s
as bad as I make it sound. If you thought the WND article was sleazy,
this is worse.

Now, I don’t know why Jesse Kilgore decided to end his life. No one
life can be summarized in an article and a ten-minute show. I’m sure
there was a lot more to him than we’ve seen. For all I know, he got a
girl pregnant and couldn’t live with that. He didn’t leave a suicide
note, so we’ll probably never know for sure. All we have is
speculation, mostly by grieving friends and relatives.

With that out of the way, the ID the Future show is a treasure trove
of wingnut tropes: we’ve got Good Kid vs. Bad College; Brainwashing
Professor; Reading Opposing Ideas Will Poison You; and many more. For
a group that keeps insisting that they’re not creationists, they seem
to have borrowed an awful lot of ideas from
Big Daddy.

There’s the assertion that Jesse felt alone because he was one of the
only Christians on campus. The school that he was attending,
SUNY Jefferson Community College,
is in northern New York state (unless, of course, both WND and IDtF
got it wrong, which is not something that can be excluded). I can’t
imagine any college campus in North America where most of the
population isn’t Christian.

Then there’s the notion that the nameless biology professor was using
his authority to tell students what to believe. From what little I’ve
seen of religious homeschooling techniques, I suspect that this is
projection: these people teach their kids that “these are the facts,
and they’re true because I said so”, and can’t imagine teachers
leading students to conclusions by showing them the evidence. And in
my experience, the latter is far more common on college campuses than
the former.

PZ Myers put it best (paraphrased from memory): “We don’t teach
students that the sky is blue. We teach them how to go outside and
look up. And yeah, if they come from an environment where they were
told that the sky is green, that’s likely to cause problems.”

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Jesse killed himself
after reading The God Delusion, therefore he did so
because of it. Classic
post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The subtext, of course, is that learning is dangerous. So don’t go
getting any ideas about going to college and exposing yourself to
foreign ideas.

In fact, this theme is repeated several times: Jesse is said to have
been a fervent debater and defender of The Faith; he went to a secular
school because he wanted to challenge himself; everyone was sure he
could withstand anything secular academia could throw at him.
Throughout the piece, foreign ideas are talked about in the same terms
one would describe a disease.

Well, I’m sorry, but if your ideas can’t survive contact with reality,
they’re not worth holding on to. I’d say the lying taint-pustules at
the DI should be ashamed of themselves for promulgating such crap, if
I thought they could feel shame.

Me? Pissed? Oh, just a tad.

(See also
Ed Brayton’s post
at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

(Update, Dec. 19, 18:49: Oh, lookee! I beat that hack, O’Leary, to this story.)

Foxholes and Shoe Leather

Carnival of the Godless
We’ve all heard the expression “There are no atheists in foxholes”. As I understand it, it means something like:

It’s easy to be self-reliant when everything’s going well. But when times are tough, when the situation is desperate, you will find that you’re not able to fix everything by yourself, and will need to turn to someone else for help. And in really dire straits, you will swallow your pride and turn to God.

Yes, in desperate times people resort to desperate measures. But they’re called desperate measures for a reason: they’re things you normally want to avoid doing.

If I collapse and my heart stops, I’ll be happy for the EMTs to beep-beep-beep-clear!-Zap! me back to life. But that doesn’t mean that I want people to go around zapping me with 1000 volts through the chest.

Starving people will eat anything that looks even vaguely edible, including tree bark and shoe leather. It even helps a little, in that they feel less empty. But that doesn’t mean we should stop eating apples in favor of apple tree bark (though I’m sure you could charge a pretty penny for it in certain boutiques).

The thing about desperate measures is that they come with huge down sides. In certain situations, amuptation, lobotomization, and even suicide may be the best available option. But it’s a good idea not to resort to them before you have to.

And those are just the desperate measures that work. Many desperation measures don’t. In the Middle Ages, plague-ridden towns would exterminate the local cat population, under the belief that said cats had to do with evil magic. And, of course, desperate people have always prayed to whichever gods they thought might help.

As a rule, “If I had no option but to do X, so I’ll do X when I do have other options” is not a good way to live one’s life. And while I’m not so arrogant to say “fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau” — who knows, I might one day resort to prayer in case there’s someone out there — in my right mind, I see no reason to believe that it does any good, and honesty compels me to atheism.

Godless Buses

Local CBS affiliate WUSA 9
reports

The American Humanist Association, located in Washington, will announce its “Godless Holiday Campaign” on Tuesday with ads on Metro buses and in newspapers. The slogan for the campaign is “Why Believe In a God? Just Be Good for Goodness Sakes”.

The campaign coincides with bus ads by the British Humanist Association. The British ad reads, “There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.
…

Speckhardt says there will be full page ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times helping to launch the campaign.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything about this at the AHA’s
site. (Update, Nov. 11: Pictures of the ads here.)
But it’s still cool. The consensus among the crowd that attended
PZ’s talk
(and subsequent
hepatic ethanol solubility experiments)
was that the way for us godless heathens to get a voice in society is
to stand up and make ourselves known.

Of course, the other bit of consensus was that with a segment of the
population as argumentative and independent-minded as ours, it’s
nearly impossible to get organized enough to speak with a single
voice, especially since “there are no gods” is no more a rallying
point than “I don’t like sports”.

But still, it’s a step in the right direction.

(HT Shelley.)

(Update 2, Nov. 12: The Post had a story about this as well.)

Letting Go of God

Julia Sweeney
writes
that the DVD of her one-woman show Letting Go of God will be available on Nov. 21. Squeeee!

As a preview, here’s a video she uploaded of what appears to be an early version of one of the scenes in the show. If you’re offended by it, then you’re probably Bill Donohue.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNELNq4XJKs&hl=en&fs=1]

The Band Saw Effect

Ron Strelecki posted a comment over at chez Julia, which I think deserves wider circulation:

I regularly experience what I call the “band saw effect”. That’s the feeling I get when I am at a tool store looking at a $600 band saw that I need to do just one little thing. I can’t pay $600 for a band saw, and then return it after I cut one little piece of wood. I think to myself, “If I was a member of a church, there’d be a dozen old guys with band saws sitting in the back of their sheds. All I’d have to do is ask one old guy, and he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, Mike’s got a band saw…’ and then I’d go over to Mike’s and drink lemonade, do my band saw thing… maybe I’d get his VCR clock to stop blinking 12:00… everybody wins.”

That’s the kind of service that a Church really serves. Old guys with tools… Atheists have none of this. There is no gathering point. There’s no hangout. Churches serve a load of very real functions that you can’t imagine needing until they aren’t there. Like, how do you know your mechanic isn’t ripping you off? If he has to sit two pews away from you for the rest of his life and you babysit his kids, he (probably) won’t.

He’s right, of course. And this is one of the great benefits of religion: having a circle of friendly people.

On one hand, I want to say that people who identify themselves as atheists are the ones independent or antisocial enough not to care what other people think, or that they can’t in good conscience join a church. (As opposed to people who may not believe in any gods per se, but are members of a suitably-liberal church, and/or keep their doubts to themselves for the sake of fitting in.)

On the other hand, I want to say it’s our own damn fault: it’s not as if there aren’t any secular organizations to join, be it Toastmasters, the local library’s book-reading club, or just happy hour on Friday with your coworkers.

There are even explicitly atheist social organizations, like the Atheist Community of Austin, or the Beltway Atheists in Washington.

They Liked It

If I may boast for a bit, it looks as though the folks at the ACA liked my April Fools piece, enough to mention it on the latest episode of The Non-Prophets (about 6:00 through 6:30 minutes into the episode). (You can listen to the intro to hear where the phrase “Dillahunty International Studios” comes from. Short version: it’s really the host’s apartment.)

Monique Davis Concedes Every Religious Argument

(Update, Apr. 10: Rep. Davis has apologized to Rob Sherman. Good on her. Oh, and the hearing described here wasn’t about the moment of silence thing.)

Eric Zorn reports an exchange in the Illinois General Assembly between State Rep. Monique Davis and Rob Sherman, an atheist who opposes Illinois’s law mandating a moment of silence:

Davis: I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children. […] What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous—

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!

(Emphasis added. Oh, and the audio is also available.)

Stop right there. Reread what she said. She said it’s dangerous for kids to even know that there’s such a thing as atheism.

Davis conceded right there that religion has nothing going for it. If your viewpoint is so weak that it can’t tolerate so much as the existence of an opinion that you’re wrong, then you’ve lost; your viewpoint isn’t worth having.

Read More

Great Christina

Allow me to pimp Greta Christina’s Blog, for no other reason than that she’s worth reading, including a few articles that I wanted to write, but she beat me to it:

Why Religion Is Like Fanfic compares religious apologetics (why does the Bible say that Judas hanged himself in one passage, but that he exploded in another?) to fans coming up with explanations for incongruities in their favorite TV shows and book series.

On The Amazingness of Atheists… And Why It’s Doomed is about why the contemporary atheist movement will blow over, and why this is a good thing.

Go and show her some love.

D’Good Idea, Actually

Back in November, Dinesh D’Souza asked, “Are Atheists the New Gays?”

Dawkins has also suggested that atheists, like gays, should come out of the closet. Well, what if they don’t want to? I don’t know if Dawkins would support “outing” atheists. Can an atheist “rights” group be far behind? Hate crimes laws to protect atheists? Affirmative action for unbelievers? An Atheist Annual Parade, complete with dancers and floats? Atheist History Month?

To answer D’Souza’s first question, no, he doesn’t. And as far as I know, hate-crime laws should protect atheists as much as anyone else.

As for the parade and Atheist History Month, those sound great! (Or should I say “fabulous”?) Where do I sign up?