This year, I’ll be brief:
(With thanks to Non Credo Deus)
Tag Archive for 'religion'Page 2 of 12
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. 
There’s a very nice new post on A Load of Bright about the similarities of religion and… smoking. I absolutely loved this part:
Isn’t if funny how only smokers crave cigarettes? Non-smokers don’t come out of a stressful meeting with a customer and say “I’m so stressed, I need to unwind. If only I smoked!”. Only smokers think they need to smoke, and only people who are religious think they need religion. In both cases, great harm and suffering is caused, or at least always potentially possible, while the perceived enjoyment and benefit is cheap and shallow. I don’t think people need religion. Personally, I think people are better than that.
Readers of Planet Atheism have probably seen this several times today:
Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.
“Moderate” believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.
“Moderate” atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.
“Militant” atheists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”
And, of course, it’s absolutely correct.
But I’d add another one in the middle:
Agnostics: 2+2 may be 4, or may be 5. Yes, it LOOKS like it’s 4, but I don’t have perfect knowledge, and I want to keep an open mind. Who’s to say the religionists aren’t correct? Who am I to know?
Yes, as long time readers of WotM are probably aware of, I really don’t like agnostics. Sorry if you’re one, but, to me, agnosticism is pure intellectual cowardice.
A fundamentalist theist believes “truth” is separate from reality, and, if they conflict, then reality is wrong. An atheist believes reality IS truth. An agnostic, on the other hand, believes reality is unknowable, and therefore evades the responsibility of trying to understand it. Anything goes. Reality is fluid, ever-changing, unpredictable. We can never truly know anything for certain, since everything we know, every law we take as true, may change tomorrow.
An agnostic — much like a New Age mystic — distorts the concept of “open mindedness” to an absurd level, where there are no laws, no rules, no hard facts, no reality — at least none that can be ever understood. To an agnostic, everything is possible, so nothing is ever certain. Taken to the extreme, nothing is ever even more likely than anything else.
Sorry, but, to me, this is no more rational than believing in an invisible bearded man in the sky, invented by primitive Bronze Age nomads, who, somehow, hates all the same people you do.
Science, much like species, evolves; it’s not based on dogma, so, when evidence contradicts a theory (even a cherished one), the theory must be discarded. This is science’s greatest strength, and, yet, according to creationists and other theists, it’s a “weakness”, since God’s words “don’t change”…
One of the theists’ arguments goes like this: “science explains 95% of it, but the Bible explains 100%! The Bible is obviously superior!”.
The problem is that the Bible doesn’t actually explain anything! Every “explanation” is either magical, or requires something else that is unexplained — and, often, by definition unexplainable. Furthermore, a lot of the available evidence contradicts the Bible’s claims: no, there was never a worldwide flood. No, it wouldn’t be possible for the Ark to carry all those animals. No, the universe isn’t just 6000 years old. No, species weren’t created as they are. And so on.
A variant of that claim (PZ mentions it here) is to say that, since science explains only 95% of something, to trust in science requires faith… and, not only that, it requires as much faith as the religionists’ explanation. What they don’t understand is that those 95% have survived every available evidence so far, while many “scientific” claims in the Bible have been disproved long ago — and only the most willingly blind continue to believe them. The Bible’s claims remind me of Chico (not Groucho, as many people mistakenly believe) Marx’s “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”, or of that claim from an ancient church father, that he would believe black is white if the church told him so.
The other claim by theists (especially creationists) is this: “science explains just 95% of it? Then the remaining 5% are obviously an act of God, and science will never be able to explain them! This proves God exists!”
Next year, that field of science advances another 1%, and you can guess exactly how the theists’ claim will change… and how they will scream it with as much certainty as the year before.
I’ve recently read a comment, and a reply to another comment, in Slashdot, in the “Creation Museum opens” thread. I think both are brilliant. I won’t quote them in full here, but I’d recommend their reading to anyone.
From the initial comment:
I’ve noticed that many slashdot articles about evolution seem to attract a sizeable number of creationists. Because of this, I’ve decided to address the serious (i.e. non-trolling) creationists that frequent slashdot in the hope that I can prevent you from making the same easily avoided mistakes that make so many of your brethren sound like ignorant cretins. Here are some common arguments that creationists use, and why I think that you shouldn’t use them… unless of course you want to be ridiculed. Note: this is by no means a comprehensive list.
(1) “Evolution is just a THEORY”
This is the most common (and the most disappointing) creationist argument I hear on a regular basis. While it’s true that evolution is a theory, this statement is made in an attempt to cast doubt on evolution by implying that evolution is akin to a wild guess that scientists came up with after a night of heavy drinking. Newsflash: it’s not going to work. Most educated people understand that you’re confusing the word “theory” (which means an explanation or model that is capable of predicting future events) with the word “hypothesis” (which means an educated guess). Calling evolution a “theory” isn’t an insult. For the millionth time, I will repeat this: gravity is also “just” a theory (for example, google the “General Theory of Relativity”). I might even add that most scientists would consider evolution to be a better-supported theory than gravity, because of the fact that gravity cannot (currently) be quantized, despite decades of attempts. If you want to debate evolution, fine- but don’t play these childish word games.
Of course, it goes on. Really, read it.
And from his reply, to another user who suggested he participate in a public debate about evolution / creationism:
(2) Creationists often make statements like “Evolution can’t produce new information in a genome” or “We don’t know how old the earth is because carbon dating isn’t useful on large timescales and we don’t know the initial amounts of isotopes and polonium halos disprove old ages anyway”. Answering each one of these statements would require hours of boring, dry lecturing- something that simply isn’t going to happen. And the problem is that creationists don’t just make one of these statements, they make DOZENS of them. Answering this kind of deluge of mis-information in such a way that it can be intelligible to the average person would take an unbelievably long amount of time. As such, even answering questions from the crowd can be a tricky business. How do you explain isochronology and radioactive dating methods in 2 minutes to a young earth creationist? I can barely explain it to a fellow scientist in less than 15 minutes. Now imagine someone standing up and asking two or three of these questions in rapid fire mode, and ridiculing you for not having a snappy answer. This kind of public failure would not look good.
Again, follow the two links and read the entire comments. The first one is “print out and give to friends and family” material, and the second explains the frustration of discussing science with non-scientists to whom “quick, easy answers” (such as “God did it”) often sound a lot better than the inevitably more complex truth.
A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post called “Letting the Bad Guys Name Things“, warning about an increasingly common tactic: name something bad after something uncontestably positive, and your opponents will be reticent to speak against it, even if they realize how badly named it is. For instance, pass a law removing freedoms from people, but call it “Freedom Something”, and everyone will stay silent, because nobody want to be seen as “anti-freedom”. A well-known example is the Patriot Act.
But this post is about another one: “pro-life”. It’s a misleading label, of course, since what they are really about is banning sex outside of marriage, for religious reasons. (Either that, or they haven’t really thought about it, and just go with what feels good: “we’re saving lives!”). Still, it’s a well-chosen one (in marketing terms). After all, who wants to be seen as “anti-life”? That sounds almost like a murderer, or something…
The “antidote” to this problem is to refuse to use their misleading terms, and, instead, call things what they really are. I could give many examples here about the Bush administration, the “war on terror”, the invasion of Iraq, the fact that abortion clinic bombers aren’t called “Christian terrorists”, and so on. But what this post is really about is a term the author of No More Hornets came up with: Pro-Forced Maternity.
I believe this term is infinitely more honest and accurate than “pro-life”. It’s describes what they really want, what they really are about. Not “life”, but control. To force others. And, so, I think we atheists / humanists / secularists ought to spread it. Refuse to use their misleading terms, and describe things as they really are.
So, please, if you agree with this, help spreading the word. Write / blog about this, start using “pro-forced maternity” in conversations, and correct others when they use the common, misleading term (much like the Patriot Act isn’t really about “patriotism”). If this ever reaches the mainstream media (which is perfectly possible), even if they try to “denounce” it as evil secularist propaganda, it could make a lot of people think about this for the first time, and see the “pro-lifers” pro-forced maternity people for what they really are: anti-life, and anti-individual freedom.
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
– Anne Lamott
Like several other bloggers, I wonder if this post on Blogs 4 Brownback, Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine, is a joke. On one hand, it is quite well written in terms of language, and of course the premise is ridiculous, which suggests that this is a new Shelley the Republican. It can also serve as a exaggerated parody of anti-evolution propaganda: a total disregard for facts and reality, because the Bible says differently.
On the other hand, the fact that it’s on a quasi-official blog for a presidential candidate makes it appear serious. Frighteningly so.
If you think about it, however, then you’ll realize one thing: if that is for real, then the author is not doing anything other than being coherent with his own beliefs… because, according to the Bible, the earth really does not move. Why accept biblical infallibility for some things and nor for others? Why use the Bible as an argument against evolution (because many people don’t understand how it works, and don’t know that “theory”, in scientific terms, means something quite different than some wild fancy), but not heliocentrism or a round earth, which are accepted by virtually everyone these days? Where do you draw the line? And why draw one at all?
Either the Bible can be trusted, or not. I obviously think it can’t, but, to most Christians — especially fundamentalist ones –, it can. So why be selective? Would God ever lie? If it says that the earth is flat, then it must be… and, taken to the extreme, if a Christian was taken on a rocket ship and made to look at the earth from space, he’d deny the truth of what he was seeing as “an illusion from Satan”. Or “an illusion from God, to test our faith” (they actually say this one about fossils). Because, to quote Groucho Marx, “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Fundies. Who else can make us laugh and frighten us at the same time?
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