Yes, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Ahoy there, and all that. 
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
While this post hasn’t got any replies so far (mainly, I believe, because the image has already been posted by other members of Planet Atheism, so it’s probably not new to readers of this blog), its equivalent on my technology blog did draw a few ones, which inspired me to write this (right here, because it’s really not appropriate for the other blog).
Consider the three Abrahamic religions. What do they have in common?
First, they tell you how the universe / world began, using a story that was clearly the best thing that some primitive desert nomads or shepherds could come up with. Most “sophisticated” believers, these days, don’t take those stories literally, and accept evolution, an old earth, heliocentrism, a huge universe, a round earth, and so on. Only American fundies and Muslims seem to take those stories literally, no matter the opposing evidence; they probably believe their god put that evidence there as “a test of their faith”.
Then, the religions give believers some rules:
1- the first kind are rules that, while not terribly original, are, in general, a good idea. Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t kill someone just because you feel like it, and so on.
2- then come the laws that can be annoying to follow, but it’s not the end of the world. Don’t eat that type of food, don’t wear this, wear that, do this on that day of the year, and so on. As I said, these can be annoying (for instance, what if you’re forbidden to eat your favorite food?), but most believers can live with them and obey them.
3- finally, there are the “harder” rules. Kill people who do this. Kill people who do that. Stone to death those who don’t do this. Or those who do that on a particular day of the week. Fight tooth and nail against the “enemies of God / the faith”. In fact, giving your life for that is the greatest thing you can do, and with the greatest reward.
Now, it should be obvious that a “moderate”, as usually described, is someone who follows just 1 and 2, while an “extremist” follows 3 as well.
But… how can the latter be called an “extremist”? Doesn’t the term imply that he is distorting his religion, or using it as an excuse for something unrelated, or adding something to it? To me, it does. But that’s not the case at all…
… it’s the moderates who are distorting religion, by removing things from it! Either because they don’t want to end up in prison or dead, or because their morality has evolved beyond those of the holy books’ writers, and so they recognize the immorality of those parts of their religion, but are nonetheless incapable of applying that judgment to the rest.
Are Bin Laden, or the 9/11 hijackers, or American abortion clinic bombers, “extremists”? Not at all, in my opinion — unless you call call a man who pays his taxes in full “an extremist taxpayer”. They’re simply not ignoring the unpleasant parts of their faith. They’re the only devout believers out there.
Which really paints a nice picture of their religions…
The “Is There a God?” has a new post called I’m not an atheist, I’m areligious. I was writing a comment there, but it was getting too long, so I’m posting it here.
While I agree with most of the post (that religion is to blame for the Crusades, the Inquisition, 9/11, Hitler’s anti-semitism, and so on), I have to disagree with this part:
The way I look at it to know there is no god requires the same amount of faith as it does to know that there is a God. Since I have yet to see convincing proof either way I can’t fall on one side of the argument or the other.
Non-belief in gods requires as much “faith” as non-belief in unicorns, and the default position should be “where’s the evidence?”, not “I can’t tell one way or another”.
Can one prove there is no god? Of course not, much like the aforementioned unicorns, or Russell’s Teapot, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But all those are extraordinary claims, and, as Carl Sagan said, they require (and everyone should demand) extraordinary evidence. There is absolutely none, so non-belief is the only logical, rational position, and it requires no “faith” at all.
Incidentally, while it’s impossible to prove the non-existence of any gods at all, one can certainly prove the non-existence of most particular gods, in several ways:
1- self-contradictory, logically impossible claims (such as omnipotence)
2- divergence from reality (e.g. holy books whose factual claims are contradicted by historical research, or contradictions such as the Problem of Evil)
3- tracing the religion’s origins and discovering / proving that the religion’s creator was lying, deluded, or didn’t even exist.
Other people have already mentioned this review of Hitchens’ “god is not Great” by Richard Dawkins, so merely telling you about it is fairly useless. However, I just have to share this bit with anyone who didn’t read the full article:
The onus is not on the atheist to demonstrate the non-existence of the invisible unicorn in the room, and we cannot be accused of undue confidence in our disbelief. The devout churchgoer recites the Nicene Creed weekly, enumerating a detailed and precise list of things he positively believes, with no more evidence than supports the unicorn. Now that’s overconfidence. By contrast, the atheist says the humble thing: of all the millions of possible entities that one might imagine, I believe only in those for which there is evidence – trombones, pelicans and electrons, say, but not unicorns or leprechauns, not Thor with his hammer, not Ganesh the elephant god, not the Holy Ghost.
Lovely.
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