Stasis

To the regular readers of this blog and those who may happen upon it in the future.

For some time now I have been maintaining five blogs on atheism, namely:

Atheism is Dead

Atheism Dissected

Richard Dawkins – Scientist or Activist?

Sam Harris – Mythbuster or Mythmaker?

Dan Barker – One of America’s Leading Atheists

I have been posting to each of these (and a couple of others such as Life and Doctrine) every few days. Considering the current state of my day to day life I have decided to focus my efforts on Atheism is Dead.

Anything and everything that I write about atheism will be posted to Atheism is Dead.

I will be posting to this blog much less frequently. Thus, you best bet for the latest is to check Atheism is Dead regularly and this blog on occasion (subscribing to the feed may be of use).

Shalom and hope to see you over yonder at Atheism is Dead.

aDios,
Mariano

PS: feel free to write comments to any posts in this blog—I will still keep up with them.
Continue reading Stasis...

Christopher Hitchens – The Totalitarian, Dictatorial, Tyrannical Worldview

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and will be posted on June 6, 2009 AD

Continue reading Christopher Hitchens – The Totalitarian, Dictatorial, Tyrannical Worldview...

New Atheism – Further Evidence of Its Deleterious Effects, part 2 of 2

As stated in part 1, the typical New Atheist fallacies committed by Christopher Hitchens during his debate with Jay Richards are further compounded by the lay New Atheists as exampled throughout the internet. In this case, I will consider the picture perfect example of a fallacy compounder in the form of Aidan Maconachy (from his article “Christopher Hitchens Debates Creationist Jay Richards”).

Following on the heels of Christopher Hitchens’ statements he wrote,

“Hitchens made the very good point that centuries of ‘barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death’ hardly leads one to believe in a beneficent designer God.”

Obviously, this means that if someone steals your car and runs someone over with it, your car was not designed by a beneficent engineer—right? Nay, rather this solidifies the doctrine of the fall.

Aidan Maconachy also notes that,

“Richards responded by describing God as the ‘definition of goodness and love’. However his all-loving deity for some reason turned a blind eye to the holocaust and the other epic atrocities that scar human history. His argument from science was equally unconvincing.”

Setting aside the emotive references to the Holocaust, et al I think that he is missing the point: that God is the definition of goodness and love is meant to draw attention to the fact that without God’s standards of goodness and love the most that the atheist could do is claim that they personally disapprove of the Holocaust but since the Nazis disagree with their personal disapproval we are at a stalemate that was only broken when the allied forces survived as the fittest over the Nazis.

Aidan Maconachy then makes reference to the virgin birth and resurrection question and the “science has nothing to do with his world view” point and writes,

“And that's the crux of it. How can people like Richards try to enlist science in their quest to ‘prove’ God, when they also believe biblical fairy tales?”

Yes, this is the crux of it, if God exists then the Bible is not necessarily filled with, note another emotive term here, “fairy tales.” In fact, it is the very fields of, and methods of, science that were established largely by believers in God that uncovered laws in the universe and the continuity to which they give rise. As far as we know, laws do not proceed forth from arbitrary collocations. When continuity is broken, such as when a dead body rises, we can discern the possibility of a miracle. Jay Richards holds that the scientific evidence for a creator leads, eventually perhaps, to a chain of causation which concludes in the Bible’s theology.

I actually do not understand how atheists deny any miracles at all. It would be more logical for them to state that for example, Jesus rising from the dead was no act of God but a serendipitous combination of natural laws in an unexpected and or rare chance event.

Aidan Maconachy notes that “It makes it appear that they are only using science as a partisan tool, reducing it pretty much to a pseudo-science.” Ditto, seems like an appropriate retort since there are atheist-activist-scientists who infer atheism from biology and others who claim that science and atheism are inseparable. Yet, science has nothing to offer atheism (see my essay Omni-Science).



Aidan Maconachy wrote that Jay Richards,

“described God as ‘a transcendent, eternal, personal being.’ The problem with this glorious picture, is that the God of the bible was in fact more like a mean spirited psychopath, than anything approximating Richards’ description.”

Yes, the childish emotive assertions continue. The statement is that since the God of the Bible is like a mean spirited psychopath He cannot be a transcendent, eternal, personal being. This is a non-sequitur. Let us grant the emotive statement and state that God can be like a mean spirited psychopath and also be transcendent, eternal and a personal being (although, maybe not personable). I am forced to wonder if such simple to correct logical fallacies are overlooked due to the amount of time, energy and focus being placed on the adrenaline spiked excitement of the emotionally charged pseudo-arguments.

Aidan Maconachy seeks to reinforce his likening of the God of the Bible to a mean spirited psychopath by noting that “The biblical deity described himself as ‘a jealous God.’”
Yet, in his eagerness to discredit this God and accredit Christopher Hitchens he overlooks another very basic point: jealousy is bad when it is misplaced but good when it is well placed. In other words, jealousy could be based on petty misunderstandings, etc. but could also be a well founded and an appropriate reaction.

Sadly, he further compounds this error by writing that God “routinely called for the slaughter of those he deemed unworthy.” This is just generic enough to be meaningless. Yet, it does function as a self-serving jab: routinely and deemed unworthy are simply generic and unfounded.

He further states, “It wasn't enough to slaughter the fighting men - the women, children and livestock had to be wiped out also to satisfy his craven lust for vengeance.” Do not forget that as an atheist he not only has nothing but personal preference by which to condemn such actions but he is also condemning the past actions of the ancient Middle Easterners whom, on his view if followed logically and biologically, were acting in accord to the less evolved morality of their time. He fails to note that what was routine was these culture’s practice of human, often child, sacrifices to false gods and that the God of the Bible gave them hundreds of years to repent. In effect, these cultures condemned themselves.

The last part of Aidan Maconachy’s article is something that a critic of atheist could not make up, being so picture perfect as an example of the New Atheist movement’s deleterious effect upon discourse.

He writes, “Although Hitchens made a strong showing, he won by default. The glaring flaws and contradictions in Richards' argument guaranteed it. Attempting to prove ‘God’ verges on silly.” Need any more be said?
Christopher Hitchens won by default because since attempting to prove God verges on silly, Jay Richards was doomed to glaring flaws and contradictions.

Of course, these are not real flaws and contradictions but are those which an atheist defender of the indefensible New Atheist tactics is forced to concoct. They either concoct these pseudo-flaws and pseudo-contradictions in order to claim theistic failure, due to basic lack of knowledge about what they are attempting to criticize or because they are simply incapable of meeting the arguments on the argument’s own merits.
Continue reading New Atheism – Further Evidence of Its Deleterious Effects, part 2 of 2...

New Atheism – Further Evidence of Its Deleterious Effects, part 1 of 2

I have witnessed it time and time again; the deleterious effect of the New Atheist movement. This movement has popularized a particular polemical tactic whereby being vociferous, emotive, belittling, propositions, assertions, and concocting arguments from outrage and arguments from embarrassment replace rational discourse.

It is easy to do: log onto a website, find something with which you disagree, write a comment employing childish verbiage that does not counter-argue but merely pokes fun, then disregards any responses to your comment, move on to the next one, and do it all again.

Such was the case when Christopher Hitchens debated Jay Richards. Christopher Hitchens attempted a cleaver strategy, or so he and his adherents thought, that only served to demonstrate his lack of basic rationality. It demonstrated this tenfold of his adherents in another typically sad New Atheist tactic: utter lack of skepticism, lack of critical thinking, merely rooting for my guy, he must be right.

Thus, part 1 will deal with Christopher Hitchens and part 2 with Aidan Maconachy, one of his defenders.

The following quotations are taken from the Stanford University article by Shelby Martin, Hitchens knocks intelligent design.

From the get go, Christopher Hitchens stated, “I can’t imagine it’ll take me 14 minutes to demolish intelligent design, as I refuse to call it.”

Unfortunately, he thought that an argument against design was to assert his unfounded presuppositions as to what a thing was designed for. For example, he oft cites the extinction of 98% of all species which have ever existed. Yet, the issue is to ask why he presupposes that a designer would intend each of its designs to last forever. Perhaps, the designer meant one design to give rise to the next. Perhaps, the designs were meant to ware out. Perhaps, __________ (fill in the blank). Presuppositions about a design’s purpose or utility are about as convincing an argument against design as was Stephen Jay Gould’s panda’s thumb argument. He criticizes the design of the panda’s thumb at the very same time that the pandas are happily stripping bamboo leaves from branches with it (why he even calls it a “thumb” is questionable).

Thus, after making an argument from outrage which made reference to “barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death” he stated “What kind of design? What kind of caprice, what kind of incompetence, what kind of cruelty?” Christopher Hitchens declared “Whose design?” and there came the obligatory hoorahs and standing ovations “from many audience members, including a dozen wearing ‘Atheists of Silicon Valley’ T-shirts.”

Jay Richards, quite rightly retorted that “A sneer is not an argument.”

Following, Jay Richards “encouraged the audience to see atheism and theism as two competing hypotheses” and presented the following arguments: “simple moral truths,” “that nature seems to be organized rationally and mathematically,” the “fine-tuning principle,” “Anything that begins to exist must have a cause for its beginning,” “irreducible complexity,” “Processes that require foresight are inaccessible to natural selection.”

How did Christopher Hitchens respond to each of these, et al, and then to the cumulative case which they build?

He asked Jay Richards “Do you believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin?” and “Do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?” to which Jay Richards answered in the affirmative.

But how is this a response and what is the point? Christopher Hitchens then stated, “I rest my case. This is an honest guy, who has just made it very clear science has nothing to do with his world view.”

Yet, the cumulative case was meant to see if we could come to certain supernatural conclusions. Christopher Hitchens should have actually counter-argued and attempted to conclude that such supernatural tenets are unviable. But he chose to disregard the argumentation that Jay Richards believes leads to a supernatural conclusion. Thus, science does have to do with his worldview. You may ask how inferring a designer from nature could imply a virgin birth and resurrection but you would be putting, as Christopher Hitchens did, the shotgun before the horse. The argument was not to the point of specifying particular doctrines but only at the point of inferring a designer. Christopher Hitchens extricated himself from the steps which the debate was taking and instead, moved far beyond the parameters of the debate.

At this point the moderator, Ben Stein posed a question of his own to Christopher Hitchens, “Many people are deeply religious. Are they just stupider than you?”

To which Christopher Hitchens replied, “I think I am smarter than most people.” Most is a word that is fascinating to me because it is so very generic: most could mean 99% but it could also mean 51% yet, 51% is awfully close to half. At any rate, this is another deleterious effect of the New Atheist movement: the self-assurance of proclaiming oneself to be more erudite than thou. Of course, “smart” is very generic as well. I have known some very book smart people who would not know common sense or real world smarts if their lives depended on it. But for all I know, Christopher Hitchens could very well be smarter than 99% of people—what of it? Does smart make his particular worldview true?

I would imagine, and imagine because I do not know, that the reason he chose to abscond from the rational steps of the debate and attempted to make a point is that he was simply incapable of handling a science based debate. In fact, he has stated that he bases his scientific believes upon the proclamations of atheist activists in the guise of scientists. To Prof. Richard Dawkins he stated,

“I'll take things you and Richard say on the human and natural sciences, not without wanting to check, but I’m often unable to but knowing that you are the sort of gentlemen who would have checked. If you say, ‘the bishop told me it so I believe it’ you make a fool of yourself it seems to me, and one is entitled to say so.”[i]

Yes, you understood it correctly: if you say “the bishop told me it so I believe it” you make a fool of yourself and one is entitled to say so. But if you say “the gentlemen scientists told me it so I believe it” you are intelligent and well informed without having to life one finger.

Christopher Hitchens concluded by asserting another presupposition and another argument from, or for, embarrassment, “The world as we know it works as the world might be expected to work if it did not have a designer…We can finally grow up if we resign ourselves to this increasingly inescapable truth.”
But how does he know what a world would be like without having been designed? This is tantamount to a fish who, having lived its entire life in water, surrounded by water, claims that whatever this “water” is that people are going on and on about is unnecessary to it because it has lived its whole life without it. It simply does not realize that without water there is no fish. Without water it does not life, survive, or thrive. Yet, it is blind to this fact because water is a part of its being. The very same water that makes life possible for it is the very same water that it does not recognize because it knows nothing but water.

If the universe was designed, the atheist is living within the design and cannot see beyond it because the designer designed the material realm in which time makes cause and effect relationships possible. The atheist notices the material causes for material effects and concludes that there is an infinite regress of material causes for the material effects. They cannot see that there is something outside of the water, something that placed the water in the tank, something that PH balanced the water, something that maintains the water at a certain temperature, something that cleans the tank and something that provides the sustenance.

Lastly, if you were as smart as Christopher Hitchens, if such a thing were possible, you too will “finally grow up” or else, be thou embarrassed.

However, the most fallacious statement is that we are simply to “resign ourselves” to atheism because it is the “increasingly inescapable truth.” Yet, the exact opposite represents the fats of the matter, modern science has uncovered more evidence for a creator than has ever been known before—it is no wonder that Christopher Hitchens decided to bypass the actual topic of the debate, “Atheism vs Theism and the Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design,” and made the usual very, very popular but very, very fallacious pseudo-counter-arguments.

Such are the deleterious effects of the New Atheist sect.

[i] See the “On Scientific Authoritarian Faith” section of my essay The Quadripartite Equine Riders

Continue reading New Atheism – Further Evidence of Its Deleterious Effects, part 1 of 2...

Does the Bible Command Rape?

Some myths are so difficult to kill that one begins to wonder whether there is a wooden stake or silver bullet out there somewhere.

I constantly run across and am confronted by atheists who make the statement that in the Bible God commands rape.

By now, it is like some sort of nightmarish game. I tell them that this is nothing but an atheist myth and wait to see what they do next.

Inevitably they do take one of the following steps:
1) They disappear, being contented with taking a jab while not wanting to actually engage in reasonable discourse.
2) They merely repeat the assertion.
3) They make generic allusions to what they think they recall that the Bible stated.
4) They paraphrase the Bible.
5) They attempt to recall what interpretation of the Bible was promulgated by a celebrity atheist activist, an interpretation that they consider infallible and believe on faith.
6) They quote a partial verse, one verse or even a couple.
7) Inevitably, regardless of which of the above action they take, they consider themselves triumphant.

One interesting counter tactic is to ask how or why they condemn rape as being immoral Dan Barker does not believe that it is absolutely immoral and Sam Harris believes that rape played a very beneficial evolutionary role (see here and here. Richard Dawkins has also made some interesting comments about rape). Indeed, how do they condemn the actions of the ancient Middle East since they believe that morality is evolving? How then could they condemn the actions of those with less evolved morality?

Two of their favored pull-quotes, if they are even informed enough to be able to reference any text, are:

“As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves” (Deuteronomy 20:14).

“keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately” (Numbers 31:18).

Let me state that as disturbing as the atheists find the cherry-picked-Bible-pull-quotes, I find it very disturbing that they read these texts and infer rape.

They are inventing the idea of rape and reading it into the text (this is eisegesis and is hermeneutically inappropriate).

Let us consider the facts of the matter:
To begin with, we may note Deuteronomy 20:10 states, “When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.”

Assuming that war ensues, once it is over they were to “remain outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person, and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. Purify every garment, everything made of leather, everything woven of goats’ hair, and everything made of wood” (Numbers 31:19-20).
This ensures the health of soldier and war captives.

In the case of the women mentioned in the texts noted above, if a man was interested in one of them he was to:
Provide her with housing.

Allow her one month to mourn.

Then they may get married.

And if they later divorce, she was to go free and not be mistreated (see Deuteronomy 21:10-14).

No rape at all anywhere. Rather, cleansing after a war, the provision of a home, time to mourn, marriage and if need be, freedom and protection from mistreatment.

Of course, these facts will very likely be completely ignored and followed by various complaints about God commanding war and killing children and cattle, etc., etc., etc.

Sadly, very much prompted by the New Atheist sect of atheism many atheists are not interested in engaging in skepticism in a reasonable manner but interested in besmirching, take jabs and move on to the next target.
Continue reading Does the Bible Command Rape?...

The Godhead’s Goathead

And now for something a bit different:

National Public Radio is running a project called:
“This I believe - a public dialogue about believe—one essay at a time”

They placed my essay on their website.
If you are so inclined as to read it, The Godhead’s Goathead



Continue reading The Godhead’s Goathead...

Argument for God’s Existence from Jewish Folklore

The Jewish Encyclopedia retells a bit of Jewish folklore about “Abraham's life in his Chaldean home as told by the Palestinian rabbis of the second century, and afterward further developed under the influence of Babylonian folk-lore.”

Basically, after Abraham is born the “councilors and soothsayers of Nimrod” want to kill him.

“Terah then went home and hid his son in a cave for three years.

When, on coming out of the cave, Abraham saw the sun rising in all his glory in the east, he said to himself: ‘Surely this is the Lord of the universe, and Him I will worship.’ But the evening came, and lo! the sun set and night befell him, and seeing the moon with her silver radiance, he said, ‘This, then, is the Lord of the world, and all the stars are His servants; to Him I will kneel.’

The following morning, when moon and stars had disappeared and the sun had risen anew, Abraham said: ‘Now I know that neither the one nor the other is the Lord of the world, but He who controls both as His servants is the Creator and Ruler of the whole world.’”

The story goes on to state,

“Forthwith Abraham asked his father: ‘Who created heaven and earth?’ Terah, pointing to one of his idols, replied: ‘This great image is our god.’ ‘Then let me bring a sacrifice to him!’ said Abraham, and he ordered a cake of fine flour to be baked, and offered it to the idol, and when the idol did not eat it, he ordered a still finer meal-offering to be prepared, and offered it to the idol. But the idol did neither eat nor answer when addressed by him, and so Abraham grew angry and, kindling a fire, burned them all.

When Terah, on coming home, found his idols burnt, he went to Abraham and said: ‘Who has burned my gods?’

Abraham replied: ‘The large one quarreled with the little ones and burned them in his anger.’

‘Fool that thou art, how canst thou say that he who can not see nor hear nor walk should have done this?’

Then Abraham said: ‘How then canst thou forsake the living God and serve gods that neither see nor hear?’”

Continue reading Argument for God’s Existence from Jewish Folklore...

American Humanist Association (AHA) and Purity in Charity

In my essay The Red Light of Punishment I considered the atheist argument that theists do not perform charitable deeds for pure motives because theists function under a system of reward and punishment. Of course, atheists are subjectively imposing purity of intention as a virtue. Yet, the reason why their argument fails is that: it presupposes that they can read the minds and discern the motives of theists and it does not take into consideration the ulterior motives of atheist who perform charitable acts.

The American Humanists Association (hereinafter AHA) is raising donated funds during a time of worldwide recession nor in order to help the needy but in order to push the fallacious argument from pure intentionality. They are raising donated funds in order to place ads on American buses that will read, “Why believe in God? Be good for goodness’ sake.”
The ad presents a fallacious non sequitur and I have already written on the campaign and a similar one in the UK in the following essays:

Atheist Charity - A Huge Success

Another Atheist Charity - A Huge Success

Charity - Secular Liberals vs. Religious Conservatives

In this essay I was interested in considering the question of what a pure motivation is and whether the AHA practices what they preach (with donated funds).

Being an atheist does in no way ensure that the performing of charitable acts is done according to the alleged virtue of pure motives (I exampled some of them in …Red Light…).

Let us consider one such example from the AHA themselves. On the front page of their website they state:

“Be good for goodness’ sake and support our ad campaign. Contributions are matched by the Appignani Million Dollar Challenge.”

Just what is “the Appignani Million Dollar Challenge”?


An AHA Press Release entitled Humanism Gets Million Dollar Boost from Louis Appignani explains.

“During an awards ceremony at the 67th annual conference of the American Humanist Association (AHA) Friday night, humanists from across the United States witnessed a turning point for a movement which has been edging closer to ‘mainstream.’ Louis Appignani…awarded the AHA a check in the amount of $250,000 and indicated it was a down payment on his million dollar challenge grant…
Met with cheers and applause, Appignani explained that he has pledged to match donations made to the AHA up to the amount of one million dollars. With over a quarter million already raised against the challenge, Appignani presented the check at the Humanist of the Year banquet…a revelation that was met with overwhelming public support. An enthusiastic crowd donated tens of thousands of additional dollars following the awards ceremony, indicating an excitement within the humanist movement…

‘We're indebted to Lou Appignani for his generous gift,’ said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. ‘His donation to the movement will help us develop more and better programs and initiatives. In addition, his excitement for and dedication to humanism and the AHA can't help but be contagious, and we expect it will galvanize our members and supporters for some time to come. For that we can't thank him enough.’

The announcement was made during an awards ceremony that recognized distinguished politicians…”

So let us infer some of the motivations that may have, I say may have, been a factor:
Firstly, the announcement with Lou Appignani’s name and mention of his generous donation is on the very front page of the AHA’s website on the world wide web. He is having his name advertised to the planet as being a charitable guy.

Next, the AHA published a “press release,” which is meant to be released to the press so that they and he may be all the more so patted on the back.

The donation was made during an “awards ceremony” where you publicly praise individuals. The individuals just happen to be politicians and it never hurts to scratch a politician’s back because they will likely do the same for you.

Lou Appignani’s pure actions were “Met with cheers and applause.”

Was “met with overwhelming public support.”

And the end result was that “An enthusiastic crowd donated tens of thousands.”

Moreover, the AHA itself states that they are “indebted” to Lou Appignani.

This is because “his excitement…can't help but be contagious” which is good for the goose and gander alike.

Lou Appignani’s wealth is expected to “galvanize our members and supporters.”

Lastly, for his pure giving “we can't thank him enough.”

I freely admit that these are inferences. Yet, the question is valid: is this what they mean by be good for goodness’ sake? Award ceremonies for politicians, hundreds of thousands of dollars received as donations before a crowd that is virtually wooing, worldwide advertising of the puritan’s name, indebtedness and thankfulness for the money and the expectation of wallet opening contagion?

This may very well be part of the counterargument against the fallacious argument from pure intentionality and certainly evidence that in a time of worldwide recession the AHA are raising donated funds in order to aggrandize themselves.
Continue reading American Humanist Association (AHA) and Purity in Charity...

Christopher Hitchens – Too Sexy for Abstinence?

In his debate with Alister McGrath, which was entitled “Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World,” (reviewed here) Mr. Hitchens stated,

“every religion that's ever been is distinguished principally by the idea that we should be disgusted by our own sexuality. Name me a religion that does not play upon that fact.”

I will be glad to name two: biblically based Judaism and Christianity.

Yet, being aware that Mr. Hitchens possesses a rare gift (or curse) for concocting tightly wound combinations of a great number of confused and non-related issues with phantasmagoric results, one can only wonder what he is actually stating or asking.


For instance, what does he mean by “our own sexuality”? If he means do what thou wilt sexually then religion or not, sexuality must be restricted. This as it is self evident.

The Judeo-Christian scripture restricts damaging sexuality but honors and glorifies normative sexuality. God did, after all, invent sexuality.

One can only wonder which, if any, sexual acts Mr. Hitchens opposes.

The Bible is very level headed about sex in the real world and oft describes marital sexual bliss. For example, the entirety of Song of Solomon is, shall we say, “Hot!”

Proverbs 5:18-19 states, “rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love.”

1st Corinthians 7:3-5 seeks to keep both husband and wife sexually fulfilled with each other,

“Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband…Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again.”

For more on the New Atheist’s obsession with sex see my essay Too Sexy for My Theology?
Continue reading Christopher Hitchens – Too Sexy for Abstinence?...

Atheism – The Positive Affirmation of Penn Jillette

Penn Jillette wrote an essay for NPR’s essay project “This I believe.” It is an interesting description of the sect of atheism to which he adheres. Yet, he is of a sect that cannot seem to define or describe their personal interpretation of atheism without belittling those with whom they disagree—along with the obligatory generalizations of theists and fallacious comments.



Here is the entirety of his essay:

“I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this ‘This I Believe’ thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, ‘This I believe: I believe there is no God.’

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, ‘I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.’ That's just a long-winded religious way to say, ‘shut up,’ or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, ‘How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.’ So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.”

Let us parse this essay and so consider its implications:

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do:
I always find it refreshing when an atheist just comes right out and states “I believe that there is no God.” The New Atheist sect has encouraged people who are in reality agnostics to call themselves atheists.
Penn Jillette’s positive affirmation of God’s non-existence is not really beyond atheism, it is a sect of atheism known variably as strong atheism, positive atheism, explicit atheism or critical atheism.[1]

You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word ‘elephant’ includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?:
I may be nitpicking but it may be informative: the question is posed in the present tense and so I could prove that there isn't an elephant by looking right then and there. But how about a moment later well, then I would have to check again when it comes out of hiding. His heartfelt definition is irrelevant because in asking me prove that there isn't an elephant he is asking me to look, listen and feel around. He is asking me to engage my senses to the task of searching for a physical object, a tangible being.


What he is getting at is an atheist complaint that claims that when they are asked to look for God they do so and conclude that there is no God only to be told that they were not looking in the right place, or in the right way. However, the issue is to begin by asking what would be considered evidence of God’s existence? If we do not know what God is we cannot begin by assuming that God gives off physical evidence? For example, let us presume that God is a non-physical being, with natural theology concludes, why should we assume that a non-physical being leaves behind physical evidence? Does a dry object leave behind wet evidence? This is the question of finding “some objective evidence of a supernatural power” of which Penn Jillett wrote.

I'm not greedy:
He is presuming that greed is not virtuous. But why not? As an atheist he can make epistemic statements about morality but not ontological: he can make any moral statement that he wishes but cannot provide any grounding except for his own personal preference (what if my personal preference disagrees?).

…everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more…I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day:
Everything in the world is plenty for his and he has not only won the genetic lottery but the financial one as well. He is a millionaire with adoring fans. He literally does have everything in the world and thus he is satisfied. This is not surprising, especially for a reductionists he believes in absolute materialism and has absolutely all of the material goods he could ever want. Note that he is saying that he has everything and so it would be rude to ask for more. He is not saying I have some, or very little, and it would be rude to beg for more. Yet, if reality is that this “world” is not all that there is then it is not asking for more but merely appreciating everything that there is to life, a life that would just happened to occur in this “world” and beyond.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around:
This is one of the fallacious comments since it does not follow that belief in God leads to purposefully not treating people right the first time. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Note his qualifier “I have to try.” Well, as Yoda, the Jedi Master, stated, “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.’” What if you try and fail? Well, the surely you can be forgiven “by kindness and faulty memories” whatever that may mean—he appears to be saying that he just excuses himself. Note that again, he is asserting morality: “That's good,” “more thoughtful,” “treat people right” but why?


David Fuhs, An atheist defends Christian values made some very telling points (Posted: October 5, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern):

“not all atheists are ‘anti-theists.’ I am an atheist and have been one for a loooong time…I hope that I am, nevertheless, a moral man – due in part to my early exposure to things like the Ten Commandments and due in part to being raised in a primarily Judeo-Christian society…I am not the type of atheist who feels the need to denigrate another man's religion, or who feels the need to try to ‘prove’ that God does not exist. These people are not simply atheist, they are ‘anti-theists,’ and I hate those people…I recognize the value of (most) religions…In a society, religion is absolutely essential to provide a common foundation of ethics, morality, decency and LAW.”

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures:
This is simply a non sequitur since believing that there is a God does not stop anyone learning from all different people from all different cultures. In fact, speaking from a Judeo-Christian perspective, the more scholastically and theologically one becomes involved in Christianity the more one tends to learn about all different people from all different cultures. That some of those ideas as rejected is another issue—with regards to both for theists and atheists.

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate:
How can we agree on reality without God since he is without God and we disagree about reality. Well, because he is basically stating that if we were all atheists, of his sect, and we all believed the same things then we would agree. Yes, agreed: if everyone agreed then everyone would agree. Yet, even on an atheist view we could not agree about reality when you consider that for example, Immanuel Kant claimed that we cannot know reality as it is (note that he claimed to know for a fact that the reality or reality is that we cannot know it—circular self-refutation).

I don't travel in circles where people say, ‘I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith’…‘How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do’:
This is a generic statement and self-servingly narrow as it one relates to those who make such claims as that they believe because they were brought up that way—to believe in an imaginary friend, God.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen…isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future:
Here again we encounter moral assertions: suffering is bad and we should do something about it. But why? His reasoning is also fallacious and self-servingly narrow: he concludes that God does not exist, at least in part, due to the two options which he considers: either God isn't bothered to help or is just testing us. He also implies that it is God who causes suffering. But what about free will? What about what God is doing and claims that He will ultimately do? “No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future” and “God means the certainty of no suffering in the future.” The fact is that atheism does not alleviate us from suffering and it makes it worse by guaranteeing that there is no reason for it, no purpose or meaning, and no redemption. You suffer, you die, goodbye.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have:
This is simply fallacious. How does believing in God make less room? In fact, it is my experience that belief in God is the sure premise upon which to have “belief in” (whatever that may mean in this context) family, people, love, truth, beauty, and even sex and Jell-O.


Overall, Penn Jillette’s essay was interesting and an informative window into his beliefs. Yet, is it sadly tarred by typical assertions, fallacies, narrow thinking and self-serving generalizations.

[1] This is the basic definition of “atheism” offered by The Academic American Encyclopedia, The Random House Encyclopedia-1977, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy-1995, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy-1995, The Dictionary of Philosophy, Thomas Mautner, Editor-1996, The World Book Encyclopedia-1991, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy-1967, The Encyclopedia of Religion-1987, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics-Vol II, Funk and Wagnall's New Encyclopedia-Vol I, Webster's New World Large Print Dictionary, et al.
Continue reading Atheism – The Positive Affirmation of Penn Jillette...

Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 3—On Extraordinary Claims

In succinct Statements, part 1 we considered Morality, Reward, Punishment, and Crowns.
Part 2 was on an atheist Bible knowledge Atheist Says, “this isn’t in the Bible”

This segment will consider a claim that is virtually ubiquitous and uncritically accepted by atheists:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Not so.

Rather, extraordinary claims require adequate evidence.
Continue reading Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 3—On Extraordinary Claims...

Atheism is Anthropocentric – On Making Silence Illegal and Thought Crimes

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and will be posted at 11:00 am on April 7th 2009 AD.

Rob Sherman
Continue reading Atheism is Anthropocentric – On Making Silence Illegal and Thought Crimes...

The New Atheists on Francis Collins - Soteriological Chain of Causation

Please note that this post will be moved and reposted at Atheism is Dead on May 4, 2009 AD.


Continue reading The New Atheists on Francis Collins - Soteriological Chain of Causation...

Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 2—Atheist Says, “this isn’t in the Bible”

Succinct Statements, part 1 brought us a discussion of Morality, Reward, Punishment, and Crowns.

I have been involved in a discussion on another website and an atheist made the following statement:

“How do we know that God is both the standard and the enforcer of good? To my knowledge, this isn’t in the Bible. It’s just something that someone came up with later on down the line to justify an apparent contradiction.”

I have expended quite the bit of time, energy and cyber-ink correcting atheist fallacious statements about the Bible but some statements, such as the above, leave me so flummoxed that my brain begins to itch.

Does this statement even merit a response? Can someone really be so removed from reality and so utterly lacking in biblical knowledge? I am not asking what anyone believed about the Bible but am asking about knowledge of its contents. Note the qualifier, “To my knowledge”—if such ignorance may be referred to as knowledge. Fortunately ignorance, meaning what it does lack of knowledge is remediable. As Prof. Richard Dawkins puts it, “if you're that ignorant you really ought to be doing something about it.”

Perhaps I should respond thusly, “I will provide you with specific citations that will increase your knowledge: open the Bible to the text of Genesis 1:1 and read until you get to Revelation ch. 22.”



A quicker route may be to consider the giving, by God, of the Decalogue—I mean, you can just watch movies about that.

I have heard a lot of references to Sunday School Atheists but this statement does not even qualify for Sunday School, nor kindergarten. I am forced to relegate such lack of knowledge to purposeful ignorance—sadly, purposeful ignorance is not overcome by the provision of information.
Continue reading Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 2—Atheist Says, “this isn’t in the Bible”...

Does God Sink or Swim?

If it be of interest to you:

I just posted a response to Michael Martin’s argument against God’s existence at Atheism is Dead.

The post is Michael Martin – Does God Sink or Swim?
Continue reading Does God Sink or Swim?...

Expelled from Religulous

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead.
Continue reading Expelled from Religulous...

The First Commandment of Thermodynamics

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead at this link.

Continue reading The First Commandment of Thermodynamics...

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Atheist Charity - A Huge Success

Yes, with the help of Prof. Richard Dawkins a new atheist charity exceeded their fundraising goal on the first day!

Get the story hot off the press at: Atheist Charity - A Huge Success


Continue reading Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Atheist Charity - A Huge Success...

Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 1—On Morality, Reward, Punishment, and Crowns

I must admit that I serial blogger that I am (guilty of creating some 22 blogs) a cyber-sloth.



That is to say that whilst online I generally do not take the time to read articles (essays, posts, etc.).
I generally attempt to make use of the internet as a research tool.
When I do encounter interesting articles, particularly long ones, I either print them out so that I can read them at leisure (and while not attached to a monitor) or I save them on a flash drive so that I can read them whenever I have a moment whilst not having to be online.

Conceiving of the thought that I am surely not the only cyber-sloth I thought to begin a series entitled “Succinct Statements” that are meant to be just that: non-all encompassing, short, concise, bite sized, posts. I will begin this series on a few of my blogs.

I can just imagine you crazy modern kids with your cyber-surfing to read posts, view videos on YouTube, playing video games, posting photos on Flickr, and downloading audio files from your Dave Clark Fives, your Cindy Lauper, and all of your modern day music! You whippersnappers!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So, here goes part 1, which considering is on Morality, Reward, Punishment, and Crowns does not seem like a good candidate for a Succinct Statement but I shall make an attempt nonetheless.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


On the topic of my own, temporary, sloth we come to the sloth of the atheist. I have found that there is an anti-scholarly trend amongst atheists when it comes to many, many topics in this case: the contents of the Bible.

Whilst critiquing Prof. Richard Dawkins’ treatment of the Bible’s content an atheist attempted to defend Dawkins’ misunderstanding, misapplications, misinterpretations and misstatements. I asked whether he had actually opened up the Bible in order to ascertain whether Dawkins’ claims were accurate and he stated that since he was already familiar with the texts in question he did not do so but merely accepted Dawkins’ infallible interpretations (hyperbole added). This is not only unscholarly-sloth but demonstrates another atheist trend—lack of skepticism. He lacked skepticism of his own memory of the texts and lacked skepticism of Dawkins’ interpretations (see comments to this post). I too was familiar with the texts but I am skeptical enough of both memory and Dawkins that I actually went through the trouble of opening up the Bible. Upon doing so, I saw that Dawkins was not as wrong as I initially thought—he was even more wrong.

This anecdote is a spring board from which to make a point about the trendy atheist lack of scholarship and skepticism. By scholarship I do not mean to state that if atheists are not Biblical scholars or cannot elucidate esoteric minutia they ought not comment on the Bible. I merely mean to point out what I have noticed whilst considering the manner in which the Bible’s text, what is generally necessary to correct the atheist’s misunderstanding is simply reading a couple of verses before or after their conveniently selective citations. This is true whether dealing with Dawkins, Sam Harris, the ex-pastor himself Dan Barker or John Cyber-Doe blogger or comment poster.

Well, anecdote and spring board behind us now, let us get to business.
An atheist presented a very popular but fallacious argument about Judeo-Christian morality being immoral due to there being reward and punishment involved. I have dissected this argument in my essay: The Red Light of Punishment.

As evidence of the expectation of the receipt of rewards for good deed the atheist referred to “the rewards that believers are supposed to get for their service on earth. You know the verses talking about the various crowns that believers get.”

True, yes indeed, that is what the Bible states but—do what this atheist did not do, keep reading, what do those who receive crown do with them?

Firstly, the crowns are on the heads of the twenty-four elders.

Secondly, they have a “crown of life” (Revelation 2:10) and not rewards for do-goodery.

Thirdly, they do the following with the crowns, “the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: ‘You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power; For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created’ (Revelation 4:10-11).

This is tantamount to stating, “Whatever I have is yours and it is due to you.”

Ok, ok this one did not turn out as succinct as I intended but I will blame the 229 word intro. I will endeavor to produce true succinction in the future.
Continue reading Atheism : Succinct Statements, part 1—On Morality, Reward, Punishment, and Crowns...

Recent “Atheism is Dead” Posts

FYI: Over yonder at Atheism is Dead I have recently posted two essays:

Atheism’s Sales Pitch to Children
Which discusses Philip Pullman’s thinly disguised atheist books. His attempt to deny his atheistic activism. Also, on his attempt to push atheism into religious education classes.

Sweet Home Chicago and Christians Studied
This one attempts to make sense of a “study” based upon a stunningly statistically insignificant sample group but which is, nonetheless, fodder for atheist assertions.


Continue reading Recent “Atheism is Dead” Posts...

Atheist Sunday School

This is a continuation, and confirmation, of my previous essay: “Freethought” Camp of Childhood Indoctrination

Jeninne Lee-St. John wrote an article for TIME Magazine entitled: Sunday School for Atheists



The article was a report on atheist parents who seek to ensure that their children are taught to believe exactly as they do. While is this typically what any and every parent wants, it is refreshing that atheists are admitting that they indoctrinate their children as much as, if not more so than, theists. Atheists are now coming out and admitting that they practice indoctrination of children just like those theistic parents whom atheists have long condemned for doing the same thing.

The practice of atheistic indoctrination of children is, of course, nothing new. I know someone whose father used to tuck her into bed a night, when she was a little girl, telling her that there is no God. The difference now is that the indoctrination is becoming institutionalized in the form of summer camps, classes, various media, etc.

The article states:

“some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. ‘When you have kids,’ says Julie Willey, a design engineer, ‘you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.’ So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to…atheist Sunday school…the weekly instruction supports their position that it's O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.”

Note the qualifiers: reinforce what they want their children to have.

Children's Program at the Humanist
Community of Palo Alto, California.
Photo by Kathrin Miller for TIME

“…One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I'm Unique and Unrepeatable.”

Here we have atheistic hymns and doxologies.

I may be reading too much into this but I thought that it was simply fascinating:

“…Down the hall in the kitchen, older kids engaged in a Socratic conversation with class leader [Peter] Bishop about the role persuasion plays in decision-making. He tried to get them to see that people who are coerced into renouncing their beliefs might not actually change their minds but could be acting out of self-preservation--an important lesson for young atheists who may feel pressure to say they believe in God.”

I do not know if it is a mere semantic accident but—note that even while the class leader sought to warn them about the role of persuasion “He tried to get them to…”
Ok kids, be thou persuaded to beware of persuasion!

Lastly, consider a statement made by one of the parents,

“…‘I'm a person that doesn't believe in myths,’ Hana says. ‘I'd rather stick to the evidence.’”

What evidence?
What is “the” evidence?
Evidence of what?
Evidence for what?
I thought that atheism was merely a lack of God belief—what does evidence have to do with anything?

Note that atheists are not content merely indoctrinating their own children, they also want to stop you from indoctrinating yours and want yours to be indoctrinated into their worldviews—they already do this in what is supposed to be public school classrooms.
I have chronicled these facts in three essays:
Teach Your Children Well…Well, Just Teach Them What We Tell You To Teach Them
Daniel Dennett’s One Way Street of Censorship (Or: On the Hoodwinkification of Children)
Atheism’s Sales Pitch to Children
Protecting the Science Classroom

Also, note that “atheist summer camps for kids” and “an atheist Sunday school” were also mentioned here in a PDF format report on the media’s love affair with atheism.
Continue reading Atheist Sunday School...

“…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 5 of 5

This is part five of a five part essay which consists of my concluding musings.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Definitions
Part 3: Ethics/Morals
Part 4: Science
Part 5: Concluding Musings

Concluding Musings
I ended the previous post making the following point, “…generally speaking, once secularism removes undesired theistic authoritarianism and superstitious ignorance from the realm of science they somehow manage to end up with many of the same scientific conclusions as theists (I mean hard science and not speculation and interpretation of evidence).” Now, let me offer a few of these points of agreement. I will specifically comment with regard to the Judeo-Christian Bible:

According to the Bible, the universe had a beginning.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the universe expands.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the universe consists of time, space, and matter.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the universe functions under the rule of laws.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, no new energy is being created.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the Earth is spherical.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the Earth “hangs on nothing.”
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, the Earth has a hydrological cycle.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
According to the Bible, disease can be controlled by quarantine.
Millennia after the Bible’s statement, science has discovered this fact.
Etc., etc., etc.

I have commented on some of these issue further in an essay responding to an assertion made by Prof. Richard Dawkins, “In the Beginning…”: the Lucky Guess.

When, in the 20th century, scientists declared that they had discovered that the universe had a beginning Judeo-Christianity yawned and said, “Thanks for catching up.” And yet, Christians are faulted for not instantly jumping on the latest scientific bandwagon.

Regarding the scientific discovery that the universe had a beginning, agnostic Astronomer Robert Jastrow wrote:

“Theologians generally are delighted with the proof that the Universe had a beginning, but astronomers are curiously upset. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind—supposedly a very objective mind—when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in our profession. It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases….some prominent scientists began to feel the same irritation over the expanding Universe that Einstein had expressed earlier. Eddington [English astronomer Arthur Eddington] wrote in 1931, ‘I have no axe to grind in this discussion,’ but ‘the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me…I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang…the expanding Universe is preposterous…incredible…it leaves me cold.’ The German chemist, Walter Nernst, wrote, ‘To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundation of science.’ More recently, Phillip Morrison of MIT said in a BBC film on cosmology, ‘I find it hard to accept the Big Bang theory; I would like to reject it.’ And Allan Sandage of Palomar Observatory, who established the uniformity of the expansion of the Universe out to nearly ten billion light years, said, ‘It is such a strange conclusion…it cannot really be true’…Einstein wrote, ‘The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.’ This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.”[1] [bold added, italics in original]

Robert Jastrow further stated:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.…the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy. Some scientists are unhappy with the idea that the world began in this way. Until recently [this was written in 1978] many of my colleagues preferred the Steady State theory, which holds that the Universe had no beginning and is eternal. But the latest evidence makes is almost certain that the Big Bang really did occur.”[2] [bold added]

The Freedom From Religion Foundation mention Bertrand Russell as an example of a motivator of modern social and moral progress. It is Bertrand Russell whom we have to thank for the erudite elucidation about the universe in which we live, he expounded, “The universe is just there, and that’s all.”[3] We have written about Bertrand Russell in our essay Sam Harris and Bertrand Russell: The Dynamic Duo of Demonstrably Deleterious Delusion. Ultimately, all of secularism’s explanations for anything and everything from morality, to life to the universe itself is to appeal to the brute fact—it just is.

I have also written about how secularists generally take two point of view regarding cosmology, in particular the issue of the origin of the universe. They either avoid the pre Big Bang scenario at all cost or they concoct their own scientifically unverifiable mythology by appealing to the sci-fi concept of a multi-verse. Gregory Koukl has made a very telling and succinct statement, “the point of evolution: mother nature without father God.”[4]

Please understand that in the secularist view it is ignorant superstition to believe that God made everything out of nothing but it is scientifically enlightened to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing. It is ignorant superstition to believe that God could exist without having a cause but it is scientifically enlightened to believe that the universe could exist without having a cause. It is ignorant superstition to believe that God is eternal but it is scientifically enlightened to believe that matter is eternal.

It was once scientifically verifiable that human embryos have gill slits, this was proof of ontology recapitulating phylogeny from fish to human (our development retracing our evolutionary genealogy). Now it is scientifically verifiable that human embryos do not have gill slits, and still this is proof of ontology recapitulates phylogeny. But how? Because now the argument is that human embryos do not have gill slits—but they used to. But how do we know that they used to? Because they do not have them anymore, but there are little line where they used to be (they are actually folds in the pharyngeal region, which develop into the thymus glands, parathyroid glands, and eustachian tubes). Apparently, this is when lack of evidence becomes evidence. In secular cooption of science instead of the evidence informing, augmenting, the theory, it is the theory that augments, interprets the evidence. There are scientific cenobites whose authority is such that they make proclamations regarding scientific discoveries based on schools of thought, worldviews, desired outcomes, professional rivalries, emotionalism, assumptions, anti-theistic motivations, etc.

Some scientists, such as Nobel Laureate, Dr. Steven Weinberg, actually hope to use (their redefinition of) science to dismiss theism as mere ignorant superstition as he wonders:

“whether the course of rationalism and humanitarianism is going to continue, and religion will gradually dwindle into something much less important.”

And he hopes to have a part in it:

“I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”[5]

Of course, he is dealing with a convenient, benevolent, redefinition of science and a convenient, malevolent, redefinition of religion.

Now to the issue of basing ethics/morals upon science and the very foundation of this concept which is that we ought to accept only that which is scientifically verifiable.
Let us now learn from Charles Darwin himself where his theory can take us, from his work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1882):

“Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether or not proportionately to his larger body, has not, I believe, been fully ascertained…Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes—With respect to differences of this nature between man and woman, it is probable that sexual selection has played a highly important part. I am aware that some writers doubt whether there is any such inherent difference; but this is at least probable from the analogy of the lower animals which present other secondary sexual characters.”

Here Darwin point out differences in temperament between the bull and cow, wild-boar and sow, stallion and mare and the males of the larger apes from the females. He then continues:

“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands…if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman…man has ultimately become superior to woman” [pp. 557, 563-565]

“many of the wilder races of man are apt to suffer much in health when subjected to changed conditions or habits of life…man can resist with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes; but this is true only of the civilised races. Man in his wild condition seems to be in this respect almost as susceptible as his nearest allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never yet survived long, when removed from their native country” [p. 188]

Also, this from “Eugenics Revisited,” Scientific American:

“The British scientist Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, first proposed that human society could be improved ‘through better breeding, in 1865 in an article entitled ‘Hereditary Talent and Character.’ He coined the term ‘eugenics,’ from the Greek for ‘good birth,’ in 1883…eugenicists helped to persuade more than 20 U.S. states to authorize sterilization of man and women in prisons and mental, and they urged the federal government to restrict immigration of ‘undesirable’ races. No nation, of course, practiced eugenics as enthusiastically as Nazi Germany, whose program culminated in ‘euthanasia’ (‘good death’) of the mentally and physically disabled as well as Jews, Gypsies, Catholics and others. As revelations of these atrocities spread after World War II, popular support for eugenics programs waned in the U.S. and elsewhere.”[6]

Karl Schleunes:

“Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racist…such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples…and validated the conflict between them.”[7]

If we are to inform our ethics/morals with science then we ought to be racists and sexists. There is nothing in a materialistic worldview that would stop us from doing so, take it from Charles Darwin and what was subsequently made of his theory by Communists, Marxists, and Nazis. For example, Nazism was an concoction of social Darwinism, Aryan/Norse mythology, Nietzsche’s philosophy, occultism, etc.

But surely, Charles Darwin was no hardened atheist. Perhaps not, but consider the words of Alfred Russel Wallace’s statements and Charles Darwin’s response (Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-inventor, along with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection):

“‘I fully accept Mr. Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily structure with that of the higher mammalian, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes,’ he conceded. However, man’s intellectual powers and moral sense, among other things, he said, ‘could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone, and…, therefore, some other influence, law, or agency is required to account for them.’ Darwin was naturally upset by what Wallace called ‘my little heresy,’ and he wrote to Wallace in 1869 lamenting, ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’”[8]

In a chapter of his book Orthodoxy entitled The Suicide of Thought G. K. Chesterton’s incomparable wit and quaint British style produces a very telling critique of secularism’s fallacious worldview:

“But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”[9]

With a worldview in which there is nothing but the material, in which we are nothing but glorified animals that are a mere byproduct of random mutations and natural selection, there is nothing to hinder the practice of racism and sexism. Prof. Richard Dawkins argues that we ought to rebel against Darwinism in this regards but never offers a reason why (see my essay Introducing the Dawkinsian Weltanschauung).

If we may offer a succinct and generalized conclusion: secularists do the very same things that they besmirch theists for doing. They believe in absolute materialism without proof. They believe in the absolute truth of the scientific method without proof. They believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They have been guilty of violence, oppression, racism and sexism on massive scales. They have justified themselves by appealing to self-serving definitions of what theists are and what it means to do science. In the end, they are illogical faith based believers that have set up authoritarian dogmatism.

[1] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978), pp. 16, 112-114
[2] Ibid, pp. 116, 14
[3] Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston, “The Existence of God,” in The Existence of God, ed. and intro. by John Hick, Problems of Philosophy Series (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 175
[4] Gregory Koukl, Evolution - Philosophy, Not Science
[5] Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Weinberg, Free People From Superstition
[6] John Horgan, “Eugenics Revisited,” Scientific American, June 1993, p. 130
[7] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road To Auchwitz (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970), p. 30, also see J. Bergman, Eugenics and Nazi Racial Policy, p. 118
[8] Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 310
[9] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)
Continue reading “…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 5 of 5...

“…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 4 of 5

This is part four of a five part essay which takes into consideration various secular group’s concept of science.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Definitions
Part 3: Ethics/Morals
Part 4: Science
Part 5: Concluding Musings

Science

Atheists:

“American Atheists works for freedom from theism, the freedom from dependency on god theories…We accept only that which is scientifically verifiable. Since god concepts are unverifiable, we do not accept them.”[1]

“What is significant, however, is the methodological difference between the use of skepticism, reason, logic, and science on the one hand and fantasy, intuition, and tradition on the other.”[2]

Freethinkers:

“Reason is a tool of critical thought that limits the truth of a statement according to the strict tests of the scientific method.”[3]

“Superstition is rejected in favor of science.”[4]

Humanism:

“Humanists believe that moral values are properly founded on human empathy and scientific understanding.”[5]

“We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems…We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.”[6]

Naturalism:

“Naturalism does not deny the existence of God, either as transcendent or immanent. However, naturalism makes God an unnecessary hypothesis and essentially superfluous to scientific investigation. Reference to moral or divine purposes has no place in scientific explanations. On the other hand, the scope of science is limited to explanation of empirical phenomena without reference to forces, powers, or influences that are supernatural.”[7]

“The hypothesis that the physical universe is a ‘closed system’ in the sense that nothing is neither a part nor a product of it can affect it.”[8]

Secularism:

“Our philosophical worldview is informed by the methods of science, recognizes the evolution of our knowledge and is free from dogma and open to revision as new evidence and more compelling reasons are presented.”[9]

Skepticism:

“The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization … engages in scientific investigation and journalistic research…Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions.”[10]

Philosophical Skepticism:
The Skeptic’s Dictionary states:

“Science can do quite well even if limited to appearances and to probabilities. We can find guides for daily living, including moral principles, without needing absolute certainty…The probabilism advocated for science seems sufficient for practical living as well.”[11]

Clearly, secularism relies upon science for its worldview: their view of humanity, the cosmos, ethics/morals, etc. Science is very important and has been established, championed, and mastered by many theists. However, what we are dealing with here is largely a matter of interpretations of evidence. For example, consider the comments made by the scientists who studied Skull 1470:

“One point of uncertainty was the angle at which the face attached to the cranium. Alan Walker remembers an occasion when he, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of the skull. ‘You could hold the maxilla forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the fact short,’[12] he recalls. ‘How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it.’ Leakey remembers the incident too: ‘Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else.’”[13]

This is an example of in-house interpretations; in this regard some distinction is to be drawn between soft and hard science (for many more examples see Scientific Cenobites). What about asking what made the Grand Canyon, a little bit of water and a lot of time or a lot of water and a little bit of time? Another issue is that secularists accuse theists of having a concept of God that is merely used to fill the gaps of our knowledge. But there are many gap fillers, secularists fill the gaps in our knowledge with time, chance, matter and even imagination, luck and faith.

What are we to do when offered the premise that we can only truly know something about reality by only considering what can be scientifically verified? “We accept only that which is scientifically verifiable.”[14]
The very first question to ask is: has it been scientifically verified that scientific verification is the only true epistemology?
If it has not, the premise is faulty and the statement disproves itself.
Take careful note that when secularists use the term sciencethey may be referring to observation and reproducible experimentation that is falsifiable, they may mean seeking to show that God does not exist, they may mean strictly studying the natural and claiming that they find no supernatural in the natural, they may mean any number of things.

Prof. Richard Lewontin (Harvard University Professor of zoology and biology) admits that scientists have purposefully concocted an apparatus that will produce the results that they desire:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural…we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[15] [bold added, italics in original]

Prof. Richard Lewontin further points out the following with regards to Carl Sagan:

“…he believes that ‘a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us in all times, places and cultures’…He does not tell us how he used the scientific method to discover the ‘embedded’ human proclivity for science, or the cause of its frustration. Perhaps we ought to add to the menu of Saganic demonology, just after spoon-bending, ten-second seat-of-the-pants explanations of social realities…Sagan believes that scientists reject sprites, fairies, and the influence of Sagittarius because we follow a set of procedures, the Scientific Method, which has consistently produced explanations that put us in contact with reality and in which mystic forces play no part…if the exhortation is to succeed, then the argument for the superiority of science and its method must be convincing, and not merely convincing, but must accord with its own demands. The case for the scientific method should itself be ‘scientific’ and not merely rhetorical. Unfortunately, the argument may not look as good to the unconvinced as it does to the believer.”[16] [bold added]

See How Billions of Demons Haunted Baloney While Avoiding Detection for Prof. Richard Lewontin’s full text.

But why do I refer to this concept of science as authoritarian and dogmatic? Consider the words of Scott C. Todd (Department of Biology; Kansas State University):

“Even if all the data pointed to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”[17]

I have elucidated this point in my essay Omni-Science.

H.J. Lipson wrote,

“In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.”[18]

Clearly this is pseudo-science disguised as science. This is an a priori commitment that dictates what evidence is acceptable and what is to be discarded on the basis of a worldview and not upon science.

Now, we must further ask: has absolute materialism been scientifically proved?
If it has not been then the secular definition of science is faulty, the statement disproves itself.

It is at this point that we notice a contradiction in the secular worldview. They claim that science does not deal with the supernatural but that science has disproved the supernatural. In other words, science cannot confirm the existence of the supernatural but it can disprove it, how? Secularists are the first to remind us that one cannot prove a negative. This gets us to secularism’s very own supernatural realm, so to speak. They conceptualize a worldview in which materialism is absolute and the gap fillers must always be materialism, time, chance, etc. They also seem to think that as long as they can imagine a past and future consisting of absolute materialism their claims are therefore justified (see my essay Look Both Ways Two Atheistic Logical Fallacies). Thus, they argue that given enough time, chance and matter could accomplish anything. This has not, of course, been scientifically verified. The secular view, drawn to its logical conclusion, is that until we know everything that there is to know, and everything that there is to know about everything that there is to know, we could never appeal to the supernatural because materialism must be behind everything. This is not science but is merely a convenient, supposed, guarantee that their worldview must be true. Now we can see that having set up a system that can only lead them to materialism they fall into circular logic and can only believe in materialism. It is a self-fulfilling concept: science only deals with materialism, materialism disproves the supernatural, we can only gain knowledge from science, and science always provides evidence of materialism. Therefore, our view, the only correct view, is materialism. They have thus, set up their own authoritarian dogma. Yet, note carefully that uncovering material causes for material effects is only to be expected in a universe created by God since God created the material realm in which material causes produce material effects.

We must again be candid and ask what could possibly be wrong with science, especially when it is exercised within the context of an absolute rejection of theism and its byproducts? The issue is that, generally speaking, once secularism removes undesired theistic authoritarianism and superstitious ignorance from the realm of science they somehow manage to end up with many of the same scientific conclusions as theists (I mean hard science and not speculation and interpretation of evidence).

[1] Introduction, American Atheists - retrieved 11-25-06
[2] Atheists.com FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) , Atheists.com - retrieved 11-25-06
[3] What Is A Freethinker? , Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. - retrieved 11-25-06
[4] Definition, Glossary of Religion & Philosophy - retrieved 11-25-06
[5] Are you a humanist? , Institute for Humanist Studies - retrieved 11-25-06
[6] The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles, Council for Secular Humanism - retrieved 11-25-06
[7] Naturalism, The Skeptic's Dictionary - retrieved 11-25-06
[8] Welcome! , The Secular Web quoting Paul Draper - retrieved 11-25-06
[9] SSA Minimum Statement, Secular Student Alliance - retrieved 11-25-06
[10] Discover Skepticism, Skeptic Society - retrieved 11-25-06
[11] Philosophical Skepticism, Skeptic’s Dictionary - retrieved 11-25-06
[12] Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 160 citing an interview with the author, Potomac, Maryland, 5 Aug. 1984
[13] Ibid, p. 160 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 21 Jan. 1985
[14] Introduction, American Atheists - retrieved 11-25-06
[15] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book Reviews, Volume 44, Number 1 (January 9, 1997) reviewing Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
[16] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book Reviews, Volume 44, Number 1 (January 9, 1997) reviewing Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
[17] Scott C. Todd, “A View from Kansas on that Evolution Debate,” Nature Vol. 401, Sep. 30, 1999, p. 423
[18] H.J. Lipson, F.R.S, “A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, 1980

Continue reading “…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 4 of 5...

“…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 3 of 5

This is part three of a five part essay which takes into consideration various secular group’s concept of ethics/morals.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Definitions
Part 3: Ethics/Morals
Part 4: Science
Part 5: Concluding Musings

Ethics/Morals
We state that we are dealing with the issue of “ethics/morals” as homage to a young man who, with his secular chest puffed up, told me that he was not into morals. No indeed! He informed me that he was into ethics. Yes, I had to be the one to inform him that ethics is a body of morals. The issue is that considering just how many sects of secularism there are, which of their ethics/morals are we to follow? Let us look at some of their statements on the issue.

Brights:

“values, ethics, and conduct derive from a naturalistic worldview, free of any supernatural sorts of entities or forces.”[1]

Humanism:

“without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”[2]

“Humanists believe that moral values are properly founded on human empathy and scientific understanding.”[3]

Secular Humanism:

“emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation.”[4]

Naturalism:

“Reference to moral or divine purposes has no place in scientific explanations.”[5]

Rationalism:

“aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience, independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority.”[6]

Universism:

“Your beliefs and your actions are your responsibility alone…Do what you will, while striving to allow all to do what they will.”[7]

What could possibly be wrong with urging ethics/morals, especially when they are urged within the context of an absolute rejection of theism and its byproducts? The issue is that, generally speaking, once secularism removes undesired theistic authoritarianism and superstitious ignorance from the realm of ethics/morals they somehow manage to end up with many of the same ethics/morals. One exception would be that secularists generally believe that it is right, good, ethical/moral and certainly legal to brutally murder beautiful, perfectly healthy, innocent, and defenseless human beings. Although, we are supposed to merely term this abortion and refer to it as a women’s rights issue. There are many issues entangled with ethic’s/morality’s reality when viewed form a secular perspective. For example, if ethics/morals are not absolute then we cannot condemn any actions at all, not even the ones perpetrated by evil and oppressive theists. If ethics/morals evolved along with our cognitive abilities then they may be the mere byproduct of the random chemical makeup of our brains and therefore, ultimately arbitrary. Moreover, precisely when did a sufficient distinction take place from ape to man so that we became responsible for ethical/moral behavior? Are apes to be held accountable? Prof. Richard Dawkins (whom I wrote about here) has written, “We are not, then, merely like apes or descended from apes; we are apes,”[8] where does this leave us? And if ethics/morals are evolving even now, how do we discern this evolution? According to Prof. Richard Dawkins “it’s in the air” (see here). We certainly could not condemn any past actions since those were the ethics/morals de jour. But how could we condemn an action today if we do not know if it is no longer unethical/immoral? How do I know that an ethical/moral action today will not be unethical/immoral tomorrow? Who will inform us, some great council of secularists? A neo-authoritarianism? A neo-dogmatism? Secularists condemn persecutions by Christians without foundation. Christianity condemns persecutions by Christians with a foundation. When secularists commit evil they violate nothing. When Christians commit evil they violate the moral code.

One issue of concern is that we should never base ethics/morals, our worldview, on science because science is constantly changing. In this case ethics/morals are most certainly guaranteed to be tentative. Moreover, considering the absolute authoritarianism and dogmatism that science represents for secularists there is always a danger that the science de jour will end in concepts that are considered unethical/immoral by later generations. Such is the case of eugenics, racism, sexism, social discrimination, mass slaughter, etc. We will consider these issues, as they have been perpetrated by and in the name of, secularism mixed with science in the next section, part 4.

Before moving on, let us consider one very interesting comment from the Freedom From Religion Foundation as they ask and answer an important question:

“Hasn’t religion done tremendous good in the world? Many religionists are good people—but they would be good anyway. Religion does not have a monopoly on good deeds. Most modern social and moral progress has been made by people free from religion—including…Charles Darwin…Most religions have consistently resisted progress—including the abolition of slavery; women’s right to vote and choose contraception and abortion; medical developments such as the use of anesthesia; scientific understanding of the heliocentric solar system and evolution, and the American principle of state/church separation.”[9]

The obvious and historically verifiable answer would be, “Of course! In every corner of the plant and in every way! Who else has consistently established, funded and administrated hospitals, universities, homeless shelters, adoption agencies, disaster relief organizations, charities, soup kitchens, foster homes, etc., etc., etc.?”

They claim that they would be good anyway. Firstly, we must ask them what good is, since their ethics/morals include the murder of beautiful, perfectly healthy, innocent, and defenseless human babies in unimaginably brutal manners. Secondly, their statement would require omniscience since in no other way could they possibly know that they would be good anyway. They appear to make this statement based on an a priori commitment to the absolute truth of their position: since there is no God, no supernatural agent with the ability to change us, then random chance would have caused these people to become good, somehow and for some reason (or actually no reason at all). And what about bad people, are they destined to be bad? Will it be said of them they would be bad anyway? In this case a viable logical conclusion is that violent/oppressive theists cannot be condemned for merely following what they will be in any case. They also state that religion does not have a monopoly on good deeds even though the question did not imply this, it is merely a zinger of an inference. Then again, some secularists claim that only atheists have pure motives.

They also mention Charles Darwin as an example of a motivator of modern social and moral progress but, as we shall see in the next section, a racist and sexist should hardly be hailed as a positive role model. But perhaps this gives us a window into their concept of good.

The last issue to raise at this point is that, just as in any worldview, there is on the one hand, the stated worldview and on the other, what people choose to do in the name of the worldview. For instance, individual Christians, and even Christian movements/churches, may teach racism, persecution, and sexism but they could never viably substantiate these views from the Bible. The simple fact is that people, regardless of chronology, geography, theology or secularism, have consistently resisted progress.

In his debate with John Rankin entitled Evolution and Intelligent Design: What are the issues?, Dan Barker, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, declared, “Darwin has bequeathed what is good.” In the debate he spends some time explaining that morals can be had without God and that his third generation atheists wife and fourth generation atheist daughter life morally upright lives without God. This may very well be, although I would imagine that it is because they borrow their morals from Christianity as no secular moral concepts have ultimate foundations. The interesting point here is that Dan Barker gives us an insight into just what these morals are:

“I support a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I think it’s a good thing. I think abortion is actually a good thing for society. If I can borrow a religious word, a word that my mother-in-law uses, I think abortion is blessing for many, many, many women.”

There you have it: the brutal murder of innocent and defenseless human beings is moral!
If you are interested in reading more about how Dan Barker deals with the issue of abortion, please see my essay Dan Barker - His Views On Human Dignity.

And why not, just consider the words of Prof. Richard Dawkins:

“nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”[10]

[1] What is a bright?, The Brights' Net - retrieved 11-25-06
[2] Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the American Humanist Association, American Humanist Association - retrieved 11-25-06
[3] Are you a humanist?, Institute for Humanist Studies - retrieved 11-25-06
[4] The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles, Council for Secular Humanism - retrieved 11-25-06
[5] Naturalism, The Skeptic's Dictionary - retrieved 11-25-06
[6] American Rationalist
[7] Universism - retrieved 11-25-06
[8] Richard Dawkins, writing in the Late City Final Edition 4-9-89
[9] Hasn’t religion done tremendous good in the world?, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. - retrieved 11-25-06
[10] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden – A Darwinian View of Life (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995), p. 96

Continue reading “…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 3 of 5...

“…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 2 of 5

This is part two of a five part essay which takes into consideration the definitions of the various secular groups.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Definitions
Part 3: Ethics/Morals
Part 4: Science
Part 5: Concluding Musings

Definitions
In this segment we will consider the self-definition of Atheism, Brights, Freethinkers, Humanism, Naturalism, Rationalism, Skepticism, Philosophical, Skepticism and Universism.

Atheism:

“An Atheist has no religious belief. An Atheist does not believe in a god or gods, or other supernatural entities…We are not a ‘religion.’ The concept of an agency outside of nature with the ability to reach into natural law and control events is supernaturalism, the foundation of any religion. Belief in the existence of that agency is based on faith. An Atheist has no specific belief system. We accept only that which is scientifically verifiable. Since god concepts are unverifiable, we do not accept them.”[1] [this quotation is from a group known as American Atheists]

Let us consider the statement, “An Atheist has no specific belief system.” Obviously, this is a very specific belief; if for no other reason than the negation of it would appear to disqualify one form American Atheists dogmatic definition of what it is to be an atheist.

For instance, American Atheist’s webmaster authoritatively declares:

“Atheists are NOT ‘secular humanists’, ‘freethinkers’, ‘rationalists’ or ‘ethical culturalists’…Often, people who are Atheists find it useful to masquerade behind such labels.”[2]

It appears that The Freedom From Religion Foundation (whom I wrote about here) is, at least in this case, more tolerant, in stating:

“Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.”[3]

The Glossary of Religion & Philosophy agrees:

“Most freethinkers are also atheists.”[4]

Let us consider the fallacy in the very statement in which we find out that “An Atheist has no specific belief system.” We are told that “An Atheist has no religious belief…We are not a ‘religion,’” also, “We accept only that which is scientifically verifiable,” and since supernatural concepts are unverifiable, “we do not accept them.” These are very specific and rigid beliefs for an organization that claims to hold “no specific belief system.”

It is interesting, and useful, to note that some atheists are more accepting of diversity than American Atheists in considering the various sects of atheism. Some point out “…the broad diversity which exists among atheists when it comes to their positions on the existence of gods.”[5] This is also an important point to make, particularly in counter distinction to American Atheists fundamentalism, since there are atheists who claim that atheism is a religion. Such a claim was made by the famous anti-one nation under God atheist activist Michael Newdow on the television show The Pulse (July 12, 2002).

Brights:
Brights dogmatically hold to a naturalistic worldview and reject all others.
A Brights is a person:

“possessing a worldview that is naturalistic…whose perspective, values, ethics, and conduct derive from a naturalistic worldview, free of any supernatural sorts of entities or forces.”[6]

Freethinkers:
A Freethinker:

“forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief…No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”[7]

“The concept of freethought refers to the process of making decisions and arriving at beliefs without relying solely upon tradition, dogma, or the opinions of authorities…In place of tradition or dogma, freethinkers insist upon using reason, logic, and evidence as the bases for forming reasonable and justified beliefs.”[8]

We must ask: what would happen if, as has often happened, it is precisely upon a basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief that a person comes to the conclusion that conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah are reasonable beliefs and that revelation and faith are credible? If they do not allow this they are suppressing the search for truth by which the evidence is followed to the logical conclusion. Or is it a case in which Freethinkers would instantly discredit a person who believed that following the evidence leads to the Bible, etc. This is strict authoritarianism and is not free-thought. It is as if they are saying, “A person ought to follow their reason so long as they do not end up believing anything with which we disagree.” Moreover, the definition of freethough appears to deny that a bible, creed, a messiah’s credentials, tradition, or dogma could be based upon reason and evidence. Perhaps 2+2=4 could be called a tradition, a dogma, or authoritarianism, but it is, nonetheless reasonable and evidentially substantiated. I have written on the Barkerian sect (named after Dan Barker) of Freethough here and here.

Humanism:

“…being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. Humanism is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”[9]

Part of the given definition appears to be based on the fallacy which states that only atheists have pure motives (which is a concept based on a myriad of faulty assumptions):

“Humanists believe we must live this life on the basis that it is the only life we’ll have — that, therefore, we must make the most of it for ourselves, each other, and our world…living a happy and productive life based on reason and compassion.”[10]

This statement appears to be based on another fallacy, which is the concept that religious people do not live full, or fulfilled, lives because they believe in an afterlife. But the truth is that, in some ways, this is a subjective argument: you may say that I do not have any fun because I do not get drunk and I would say that I do not consider drunkenness to be fun. The fact is that religious people live this life on the basis that it is a gift — and that we, therefore, must make the most of it for ourselves, each other, and our world…living a happy and productive life based on reason and compassion. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.” Secularists may be astonished to find out that it is God who urges reason, “‘Let us reason together,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). Jesus taught that one of the first and greatest commandments is “Lord your God…with all your mind” (Matthew 22:35-37) (in this essay I seek to correct misconceptions of this nature).
Moreover, it is another fallacy that religious people do not do anything and just sit there waiting for God to move them with His marionette strings.

“Secular humanists reject supernatural and authoritarian beliefs…Secular humanism emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation.”[11]

Again, we find an authoritarian rejection of authoritarianism. If you cannot be a humanist unless you abide by their definition of what it means to be a humanist then you would be cast out of their authoritarian system—deemed a secular heretic.

Moreover, note that it is very popular to besmirch Judeo-Christianity for its belief in expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. However, with no such system in place the only justice to be had is at the hands of the temporal courts of earth. For one, this means that if the criminal can escape these, then there is no justice to be had. For another, if this anti-supernatural dogma is correct, then at the end of their lives Mother Theresa and Hitler ended up the same way—annihilated. In fact, it may be argued that Hitler lived a more fulfilling life than Mother Theresa since he lived his later years in luxury, enjoying his power and being adored by thousands. Mother Theresa lived a humble life amongst the outcast and disease ridden people that the Hindu system had simply discarded. No punishment for Hitler and no reward for Mother Theresa! When Hitler decided to, quite literally, end his life he did so. Is this justice? Is this moral? Is this reasonable? We will deal with the qualifier the greater good of humanity in part 3 in the ethics/morals section (I have written about the issue of reward, punishment and finite versus infinite life here and here).

Naturalism:

“Naturalism is a metaphysical theory which holds that all phenomena can be explained mechanistically in terms of natural (as opposed to supernatural) causes and laws. Naturalism posits that the universe is a vast machine or organism, devoid of general purpose and indifferent to human needs and desires.”[12]

It is very refreshing to have it openly admitted that naturalism is a metaphysical contention, a point that I will revisit in part 4 regarding science.

Also, note something else that is being openly admitted, namely, naturalism leads to ultimate despair as it claims that the universe is devoid of general purpose and indifferent.

Nobel Laureate, Dr. Steven Weinberg agrees:

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”[13]

TIME magazine states the following with regards to the universe’s final entropy:

“humanity, and perhaps even biology, will long since have vanished. Yet it’s conceivable that consciousness will survive, perhaps in the form of a disembodied digital intelligence. If so, then someone may still be around to note that the universe, once ablaze with the light of uncountable stars, has become an unimaginably vast, cold, dark and profoundly lonely place.”[14]

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure, wrote:

“The astonishing hypothesis is that you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it, ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”[15]

Sam Harris (whom I wrote about here):

“We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss…Only the atheist realizes…how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all…many human beings suffer needlessly while alive.”[16]

Professor of philosophy Daniel Dennett wrote (whom I wrote about here):

“along comes Darwin, who simply shows how all of that design work, all of that creation, can be done by a process that has no purpose, no intelligence and no foresight. It is a very strange inversion of reasoning and it’s very upsetting to people to see that something that seems so obvious is being denied. Darwin does away with the reason for believing in a divine creator. This doesn’t prove there is no divine creator, but if there is one, it — he — need not have gone to all that trouble because natural selection on its own would have created all the biological diversity we see.”[17]

Professor Richard Dawkins (whom I wrote about here), Is Science a Religion?

“we know from the second law of thermodynamics that all complexity, all life, all laughter, all sorrow, is hell-bent on leveling itself out into cold nothingness in the end. They - and we - can never be more than temporary, local buckings of the great universal slide into the abyss of uniformity.”

Incidentally, a famous person once state, “When understanding of the universe has become widespread…Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity”—see my essay Cosmology, Part I to see who the famous person was.

Lastly, we run across a fallacy in the form of a hypocritical argument:

“…belief in the supernatural has lead to a great deal of misery for humanity and needs to be rejected and replaced with critical inquiry, accountability, and science.”[18]

We may begin by asking precisely what critical inquiry has proved that naturalism is absolutely true. We may ask, as has already been stated above, what ultimate accountability is there if there is no supernatural? Yet, the hypocrisy is in isolating the supernatural as the cause of misery. After all, secularism of all sorts, especially atheism, have caused tremendous amounts of misery and have done so in the name of politics, territory, material goods/resources, racism, sexism, wealth and poverty, science, atheism, etc., etc., etc.

Rationalism:

“The mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience, independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority.”[19]

“The doctrine of rationalism holds that the source of knowledge is reason and logic. This is usually contrasted with the idea that faith, revelation and religion are also valid sources of knowledge and verification.”[20]

It is fascinating to note that they give away the fallacy in their position. The first thing that comes to mind (pun intended) is what we conclude if we accept the premise that our minds are nothing but the product, or byproduct, of random evolution (or blind-non-chance-natural selection). In that case, there would be no reason to believe that a random mixture of chemicals in our brains could be trusted to produce any of the things that are sought by rationalists. Evolution is not interested in fact and truth but only in survival and reproduction. The giveaway is the use of the term mental attitude, which would be precisely what it is if their view is correct. But then we would not know if our conclusions are correct. Moreover, since a person with a differing chemical makeup may disagree, we could not condemn them for their particular bio-chemical makeup.

Skepticism:

It is refreshing to note that skepticism is skeptical of skepticism in stating that their knowledge is tentative, at best:

“A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions. Some claims…we can provisionally conclude that they are false.”[21]

One point of interest is that they claim that creationism, among other concepts, “have been tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can provisionally conclude that they are false.”[22] The fallacy in this statement will work itself out in part 4 as we deal with science.

Philosophical Skepticism:

“Philosophical Skepticism is a critical attitude which systematically questions the notion that absolute knowledge and certainty are possible, either in general or in particular fields. Philosophical Skepticism is opposed to philosophical dogmatism, which maintains that a certain set of positive statements are authoritative, absolutely certain and true. Philosophical Skepticism should be distinguished from ordinary skepticism [which does] not necessarily doubt that certainty or knowledge is possible. Nor do they doubt these things because of systematic arguments that undermine all knowledge claims.”[23]

One can instantly see the fallacy to which Philosophical Skepticism is headed, if they are not already firmly ensconced. If absolute knowledge cannot be gained then we would never know absolutely that absolute knowledge cannot be gained. However, if they claim to know absolutely that absolute knowledge cannot be gained, they are actually affirming the reality of absolute knowledge and therefore they defeat their own argument. Moreover, if they are opposed to philosophical dogmatism then they could not condemn claims to authoritative, absolute, certainty, and true knowledge, for to do so would be philosophically dogmatic.

Universism:

“Universism is the world’s first rational religion…and denies the validity of revelation, faith and dogma.”[24]

“Your beliefs and your actions are your responsibility alone. Believe what you will, while striving to allow all to believe what they will. Do what you will, while striving to allow all to do what they will…Sociological problems motivated the recent birth of Universism. Chief among them, that civil society is endangered when we see ourselves first as members of ideological groups. Further, priding oneself as part of an ideological group limits individual growth and creativity. In no sphere of life is this phenomenon clearer than religion, where the divisions have spread to fracture our entire planet. Endless situations arise where our ideas and desires clash, and no philosophy will cease this drama. But Universism can help. Universists are people who recognize that ours is not the only way.”[25]

Here we find the absolute dogma that it is rational to deny revelation, faith and dogma. But we are also told that we ought to believe what we will, while striving to allow all to believe what they will. Apparently we are to let others believe what they will while pointing out just how wrong, just how irrational, they are if they disagree with us. We also encounter a stalled moral system in which we can do what we will, while striving to allow all to do what they will. But what if our will is to hinder others? What if it is the will of others to hinder us?
Also, note that chief among the sociological problems was seeing ourselves first as members of ideological groups and that priding oneself as part of an ideological group limits individual growth and creativity. This comes from the world’s first rational religion that excludes revelation, faith and dogma. But what is the only hope for mankind, who has after all fractured the entire planet? Well, Universism can help but they are not the only way. They are not the only way but neither is revelation, faith or dogma and so what is the way? A pseudo moral system? Pseudo tolerance? If Universism cannot hinder the beliefs and actions of those who fracture our entire planet then they are certainly not the only way and perhaps no way at all.

[1] Introduction, American Atheists - retrieved 11-25-06
[2] THE WEBMASTER, Atheism — What It Is, and What It Isn’t - American Atheists
[3] What Is A Freethinker?, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. - retrieved 11-25-06
[4] Definition, Glossary of Religion & Philosophy - retrieved 11-25-06
[5] Atheists.com FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), Atheists.com - retrieved 11-25-06
[6] What is a bright?, The Brights' Net - retrieved 11-25-06
[7] What Is A Freethinker?, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. - retrieved 11-25-06
[8] Definition, Glossary of Religion & Philosophy - retrieved 11-25-06
[9] Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the American Humanist Association, American Humanist Association - retrieved 11-25-06
[10] Are you a humanist? , Institute for Humanist Studies - retrieved 11-25-06
[11] The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles, Council for Secular Humanism - retrieved 11-25-06
[12] Naturalism, The Skeptic's Dictionary - retrieved 11-25-06
[13] Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Weinberg, Free People From Superstition
[14] “The End,” TIME, 6-25-01, p. 56
[15] John Horgan, “Profile: Francis H. C. Crick – The Mephistopheles of Neurobiology,” Scientific American, Feb. 1992, p. 17
[16] Sam Harris, An Atheist Manifesto (Dec 7, 2005)
[17] Gordy Slack interviewing Daniel Dennett, Dissecting God
[18] SSA Minimum Statement, Secular Student Alliance - retrieved 11-25-06
[19] American Rationalist
[20] Definition, Glossary of Religion & Philosophy - retrieved 11-25-06
[21] Discover Skepticism, Skeptic Society - retrieved 11-25-06
[22] Discover Skepticism, Skeptic Society - retrieved 11-25-06
[23] Philosophical Skepticism, Skeptic's Dictionary - retrieved 11-25-06
[24] United Universists - retrieved 11-25-06
[25] Universism - retrieved 11-25-06

Continue reading “…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 2 of 5...

“…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 1 of 5

This is part one of a five part essay which takes into consideration Atheism, Brights, Freethinkers, Humanism, Secular Humanism, Naturalism, Rationalism, Skepticism, Philosophical Skepticism and Universism. This will consist mostly of from the horse’s mouth information.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Definitions
Part 3: Ethics/Morals
Part 4: Science
Part 5: Concluding Musings

Introduction
The Bible makes an interesting connection between humanity’s purposeful ignorance of God, purposeful abandonment of God, and our corruption of the very concept of God. The Bible also tells us of God’s response to our free will, which is to allow us what we want in such cases; distance from God and further self-affirmation that we are right to reject God.

“…I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’ For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because the thing which may be known of God is clearly revealed within them, for God revealed it to them. For the unseen things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being realized by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, for them to be without excuse. Because, knowing God, they did not glorify Him as God, neither were thankful. But they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man…Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness…For they changed the truth of God into a lie…they did not think fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Romans 1:16-28).

I have noticed a parallel between the above description of idolaters who changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and secularists who likewise changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, i.e., corruptible, materialistic, secular man. The secularists became fools even while professing to be wise because, as we shall see, they end up establishing for themselves the same strict authoritarian dogmatism that they seek to escape.

In this essay I will consider the stated positions of various schools of secularism. I use the term secular generically to mean a worldview that is materialistic, where the supernatural is negated. All worldviews that can be categorized as secular appear to have at least one thing in common: they proclaim that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong, they portray themselves as the intellectual, rational, enlightened, scientific, and philosophic while everyone else is ignorant and superstitious. We will consider the logical consequences, the logical conclusions, to which their positions take us and leave us. We will consider how their views establish a strict authoritarian, dogmatic system while often denying this very fact. Furthermore, we will consider from whence they derive their ethics/morals. And lastly, we will also see that their claim to base their beliefs on science is merely a self-serving redefinition of what it means to do science.
Continue reading “…Professing Themselves To Be Wise, They Became Fools…”, part 1 of 5...

“Galileo - A Story of a Hero of Science”

Over yonder at Atheism is Dead I posted a companion to The Copernican myths

It is entitled “Galileo - A Story of a Hero of Science”

Also of interest might be MedicineMan’s Galileo's Gaffe

Continue reading “Galileo - A Story of a Hero of Science”...

Ockham’s / Occam’s Razor

“Shave an agnostic using Ockham's Razor
and you will uncover an atheist”—anonymous

One concept, or dictum, that is ubiquitously misunderstood, misinterpreted, misused, and misapplied by atheists is Ockham’s/Occam’s Razor.

Here are some examples of how some atheist’s think they can utilize the Razor:

Christopher Hitchens (during his debate with Alister McGrath), “Ockham’s Razor disposes of all the supernatural assumptions that have ever been made.”

Robert M. Price (in “The Jesus Mirage”) claims that there are no, “New Testament miracle stories which cannot most readily be explained, a la Occam’s Razor, naturalistically (as an overblown retelling or an outright fiction).”

Fredrik Bendz (in “Proof that there is no god”) claims that God, “can be excluded with Occam's razor.”

Over at Atheism is Dead MedicineMan has dug into his medicine cabinet and served up an antidote to the atheist fallacious commandeering of the Razor in a post entitled Firmly By The Blade.

Continue reading Ockham’s / Occam’s Razor...

“The Copernican myths”

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and reposted at this link.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Continue reading “The Copernican myths”...

Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part V of V

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Continue reading Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part V of V...

Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part IV of V

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Continue reading Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part IV of V...

Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part III of V

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and posted at this link.




Continue reading Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part III of V...

Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part II of V

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and posted at this link.




Continue reading Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part II of V...

Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part I of V

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and posted at this link.



Continue reading Quentin Smith - The Gratuitous Fallacy, part I of V...

Hitchens in the Hizouse

Over yonder at Atheism is Dead, I posted part one of a three part response to certain challenges posed by Christopher Hitchens.

The post is entitled:
Christopher Hitchens : The Challenges, part I of III

The comments section to that post lead me to write a follow up post while still waiting to post parts II and III regarding Mr. Hitchens.

The follow up in entitled:
Is There a Common Misconception Regarding Absolute Moral Claims?
Continue reading Hitchens in the Hizouse...

PZ Myers – Absconds from Debate, Again!

If evolution had not done away with it PZ Myers could have absconded from another debate with his tail between his legs.

Let us see, thus far, as I can recall from the top of my noggin Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Eugene Scott and PZ Myers flatly refused to debate Creationists. They have provided quaint pseudo-reasons for, at the same time, being alleged champions of reason and science whilst not debating their views against backwards-Bible-belt-fundamentalist-country-hicks.


Now, Dr. Myers has also refused to debate the issue of the existence of god(s). Since he claimed that he only tackles weak arguments for the existence of god(s) because there are no strong arguments, Vox Day invited him to debate the issue on the Northern Alliance Radio Show (broadcast from Minnesota). Dr. Myers turned down the debate by referring to Mr. Day by various ad hominems, stating that he actually read more than a couple of chapters of Mr. Day’s book (The Irrational Atheist) and putting down conservative radio (apparently referring to Mr. Day as odious, christofascist misogynist, beneficiary of wingnut welfare, prominent freakshow participant, insane babbler is some form of refutation in Dr. Myer’s mind).

It is no wonder that the New (and Old) Atheist are so shockingly wrong so stunningly often. They have their fans who follow behind cleaning up their messes and excusing any and everything. Such was the case with Dr. Myers and his screechy monkeys who congratulate him to no end for cowering away from a debate again someone whom they consider easier to topple than a straw man.

Here are some of the relevant posts on this issue:

Vox Day’s, An Invitation to PZ Myers

Fraters Libertas’, And Gallantly He Chickened Out

PZ Myers’, Sorry, Vox, I Don't Debate Crazy Pipsqueaks Any More

Vox Day’s, The Fowl Atheist
Continue reading PZ Myers – Absconds from Debate, Again!...

Christopher Hitchens - Is Christianity Loved to Death?

On October 11, 2007 AD at 5:30 pm a “A debate, dialogue, and discussion” took place between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath which was entitled “Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World” (find the transcript here, find the video here).

The New Atheist, or the old ones for that matter, should be encouraged to speak about the Bible and its contents as loudly and often as possible. This is because in doing so they not only leave the Bible unscathed but end up discrediting themselves.

Mr. Hitchens misrepresents the Bible and the Christian theology that has sprung forth form it in stating:

“…it is in the Christian version that another, called different kind, of immorality is proposed, the worst kind of immorality yet, which is the, the wicked idea of non-resistance to evil and the deranged idea that we should love our enemies. Nothing, nothing could be more suicidal and immoral than that. We have to defend ourselves and our children and our civilization from our enemies. We have to learn to educate ourselves in a cold, steady dislike of them and the determination to encompass their destruction. Who here heard anyone after September the 11th in Holy orders actually say, oh, well we must turn, learn to love these people. Did they dare say that then; of course not. They saw the emptiness and the futility and the immorality of what they would have been caught saying if they even tried it. We have to bear all this stuff in mind. This is not moral teaching at all. We have to survive our enemies, we have to learn to destroy them, especially because they, too, are motivated by the hectic, maniacal ideas of monotheism which really seeks and yearns for the destruction of our planet and the end of days. That's why it's not moral. That's why we have to outgrow it and defeat it.”

Well, perhaps he has a point. After all, the Bible does have Jesus stating, “But I tell you not to resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:39). So there you have it, so let us move on quickly to the next point.

Actually, this is what the pseudo-skeptic would like you to do: a assertion is proposed without quotation and without citation. What I quoted above was actually not Matthew 5:39 but was Matthew 5:39a the verse, the thought, the context, states, “But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” Therefore, this has nothing to do with terrorism or world wars of any sort. What is a slap in the face? Regardless of chronology, geography or theology, a slap in the face is an insult. Thus, if someone insults you, do not insult them back.



Fine, but what about “the deranged idea that we should love our enemies”? Yes, this is certainly a problem, at least for Darwinian kill or be killed survival of the fittest amorality. Let us again actually consider what the Bible states as we consult with Luke 6:27-40:

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.
To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.
And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either.
Give to everyone who asks of you.
And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back.
And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise.”

In the very next verse we begin to find out why such voluptuous generosity is recommended:

“But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.
And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back.
But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil.
Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.”

If you are supposed to be a believer then your generosity aught to be voluptuous and not be done solely in order to get back nor done only to those with whom you already have good relations. Where is there anything about armies attacking or home invasions? Mr. Hitchens appears to see the word “enemy” and he defines it as “terrorist out to murder my whole culture, friends, family and all.” Yet, enemy could be two people such as Mr. Hitchens and Dr. McGrath (although one of them is more apt to think of it in those terms than the other). After all, did not the text refer to “those who curse you…who spitefully use you…who strikes you on the one cheek”?

Another likewise text of the Bible is found in Matthew 5:43-50:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies,
bless those who curse you,
do good to those who hate you,
and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,
that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.
To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.”

Clearly, the point is that if God blessed both the evil and the good, the just and the unjust, so should you. Evil and unjust people have a long history of responding to love.

But what about going as far as loving the actual terrorist enemies that we have? Does that mean that we cannot defend ourselves and our children and our civilization? No. For example, when Jesus interacted with a Roman Centurion He did not tell him to quit the army (Matthew 8:5-8, 10, 13; Luke 7:1-10). When the apostle John was approached by Roman soldiers, “the soldiers asked him, saying, ‘And what shall we do?’” did John tell them to quite the army? No, rather, “he said to them, ‘Do not intimidate [literally; shake down for money] anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14). He commanded them regarding moral behavior. Lastly, we see that after Jesus’ ascension the Apostles reacted likewise in regards to the righteous within the military, “There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian Regiment, a devout man and one who feared God with all his household…Cornelius the centurion, a just man, one who fears God and has a good reputation among all the nation of the Jews” (Acts 10:1-4, 22). Armies are necessary in order to ensure the security of the nation.

Mr. Hitchens’ encouragement to “learn to educate ourselves in a cold, steady dislike of them and the determination to encompass their destruction” caused Dr. McGrath to, rightly, discourage the dehumanization of our enemies (something which somehow Mr. Hitchens managed to deny doing).

Beyond the un-contextual misapplications of the Bible’s text and beyond dehumanization is Mr. Hitchens’ further assertion of how, or whether, these biblical concepts are applied. After all, as he stated, “Who here heard anyone after September the 11th in Holy orders actually say, oh, well we must turn, learn to love these people[?]” I do not know “Who here [at the debate]” heard that but I did hear it at the church services that I attend. Thus, Mr. Hitchens’ is arguing from ignorance, from literal lack of enough information upon which to base a logically valid critique.

He further stated, “Did they dare say that then; of course not. They saw the emptiness and the futility and the immorality of what they would have been caught saying if they even tried it.” Since he misunderstands the text of the Bible (in its immediate and greater context) he misapplies it, since he misapplies it he misunderstands it, and since he misunderstands it he presents an argument from flummox.

As I stated it at a Bible study that I attended: I have prayer for the salvation of Osama bin Laden et al and I would also introduce a projectile into his gray matter, if need be. I can love him as the tremendously mislead and malicious person that he is and I can protect the world, my country, my family and friends by ridding the world of him, if need be.
Continue reading Christopher Hitchens - Is Christianity Loved to Death?...

PZ Myers – Pseudoscienceblogs.com

When I first began delving into the realm of the New Atheist movement I was, so I supposed, confronting the utmost erudition that the movement had to offer. What I found is that the movement is virtually tailor made to appeal to the basest urges within us. Here I am not only referring to the fact that atheism is a consoling delusion but also to the urge to have a laugh at something silly and elbow our buddy in the ribs about it.

The movement produces scientists, supposed skeptics and even ex-preachers who make various authoritarian assertions. Which of their admirers is skeptical enough to be skeptical of them? I do not know, but I wonder.
They appear to constantly make silly remarks about caricatures of “religion” utilizing the same tact as a standup comedian who, as many do, focus almost exclusively on foul language and sex. Why do many comedians do this? Because it is easy, especially if your audience has consumed a number of adult beverages.

Professor PZ Myers has, sadly as so many others have, become a propagandist who seeks to smuggle atheism into science classrooms through the back door and under the guise of science (see here for two examples of this tact and here for Prof. PZ Myers’ further elucidation of this point).

Prof. PZ Myers’ website “Pharyngula” is part of the “Scienceblogs” network. While the premise of Scienceblogs is to give professors access to the masses and the masses access to the professors with regards to science it has morphed into something quite different, as Scienceblogger Matthew C. Nisbet stated it in referring to:

“…the major perceptual hit that the scienceblogs.com community and brand continues to take because of PZ's antics. The Seed sponsored blog portal is supposed to be a place that attracts new audiences to science, but in fact, it has turned into the Web's leading echo chamber of anti-religious rants and sophomoric discussions of atheism, what the physicist Chad Orzel refers to as the ‘screechy monkey’ problem. In a recent interview on the podcast Point of Inquiry, host DJ Grothe asked PZ if he worried that scienceblogs.com was becoming better known as ‘atheistblogs.com.’ It's a question that merits serious consideration, especially in light of recent events.”

Scienceblogger Chad Orzel further stated, in the “screechy monkey” post, The Cost of Not Framing:

“If I'm offended, as a liberal apathetic-agnostic professional scientist, how do you think this comes off to people who are actually religious? People who aren't already predisposed to support science? People who are a bit to the right of center politically?” [bold in original]

Prof. PZ Myers’ personal immaturity is further compounded, and encouraged, by his Pavlov’s monkeys. Just as Prof. Richard Dawkins has apparently given up his position as professor of the public understanding of science to take on the role of professor of the public understanding of atheism, many appear to be doing likewise. One can only wonder for just how many decades these atheist activists have abused and misused their position of privilege and authority to shove atheism down their student’s throats in the guise of science.

ScienceBlogs, for its part, expresses their purposes thusly:

“a digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines. Today, ScienceBlogs is the largest online community dedicated to science. We believe in providing our bloggers with the freedom to exercise their own editorial and creative instincts. We do not edit their work and we do not tell them what to write about…Our role, as we see it, is to create and continue to improve this forum for discussion, and to ensure that the rich dialogue that takes place at ScienceBlogs resonates outside the blogosphere…We believe that science literacy is a pre-condition for progress in the 21st century. At a time when public interest in science is high but public understanding of science remains weak, we have set out to create innovative media ventures to improve science literacy and to advance global science culture.”

Perhaps their mistake was in not insisting on scientific content but basically providing a forum for their bloggers to express their personal prejudices.

Lastly, to be fair to the circa 75 bloggers on Scienceblogs.com I wished to state that I am not painting with a broom and referring to the lot of them as being pseudoscientific. Neither, for that matter, am I claiming that PZ Myers is pseudoscientific when he restricts himself to a discussion of organisms and what he can actually observe about them. The problem that atheist activists are causing, even for people who agree with their scientific and worldview concepts, is that they is turning off the very people who would seem to need exposure to science the most and not providing science education per se but worldview activism instead.
Continue reading PZ Myers – Pseudoscienceblogs.com...

Christopher Hitchens – On the Mutilation of Children’s Genitalia

On October 11, 2007 AD at 5:30 pm a “A debate, dialogue, and discussion” took place between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath which was entitled “Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World.”

Mr. Hitchens stated,

“The mutilation of genitalia of children, who would do that if it wasn’t decided that God wanted it?...The genital mutilation community is entirely faith based.”

Confronted by such a statement one is tempted to launch into a refutation which points out that sadly, yet perhaps purposefully, Mr. Hitchens combines and or confuses female genital mutilation with male circumcision. Female genital mutilation is just that, the barbaric act of removing the sexually stimulating part of the female sex organ. Male circumcision is the removal of a small portion of the male organ which leaves it fully functional for all of its purposes. One is tempted to answer the question of “who would do that if…” thusly, “Parents who value their male child’s health.” Etc., etc., etc.

Yet, I cannot compete against the utterly incomparable words of Anthony Gottlieb (Atheists with Attitude - Why do they hate Him?):

“After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.”

“where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oi Vey!!!!!!!!!!!

This should be the motto on every mohel’s business card!!!!!!!!!!!

No, I could not resist but recall the Seinfeld episode, “The Bris”



We pick up the scene when the mohel comes in:

Hello, hello, I'm the mohel. It's very nice to meet you all...

[A PAN CLANGS TO THE GROUND]

Oh! What was that?!? Jeez. Scared the hell out of me. My god. I almost had a heart attack!

[CALMING DOWN]

Alright I'm fine, I'm fine. Anyway, we're here to perform the mitzvah of the bris and...

[BABY CRYING]
...Is the baby gonna cry like that? Is that how the baby cries, with the loud, sustained, squealing cry, 'cause that could pose a problem. Do you have any control of your child 'cause this is the time to exercise it when baby is crying in that high-pitched, squealing tone that can drive you insane?!!!

…

[THE MOHEL CONTINUES, after Kramer attempted to abscond with the baby]

People compose yourselves. This is a bris. We are performing a bris here, not a burlesque show. This is not a school play! This is not a baggy pants farce! This is a bris. An ancient, sacred ceremony, symbolizing the covenant between God and Abraham... or something.

[THE MOHEL OPENS HIS BAG AND HIS INSTRUMENTS FALL OUT]

I coulda been a kosher butcher like my brother. The money's good. There's a union, with benefits. And, cows don’t have families. You make a mistake with a cow, you move on with your life.

[AT THE HOSPITAL AFTER THE MOHEL CUT JERRY’S FINGER]

Jerry: Well if it isn't Shakey the Mohel! You did a hell of a circumcision there pal. But it's not supposed to be a finger.

Mohel: It was your fault! You flinched!

Jerry: Who made you a mohel? Whadya, get your degree from a matchbook?

Mohel: [HE MAKES A SUDDEN MOVEMENT] See! See! He flinched again!

Jerry: Good mohel picking, Elaine. You picked a helluva mohel.

Mohel: One more peep out of you and I'll slice you up like a smoked sturgeon.

Jerry: Don't threaten me, Butcher Boy.

Mohel: Butcher Boy?!

Jerry: What was this? [HE IMITATES MOHEL'S FLINCHING] What was this?

Mohel: What was this? [HE IMITATES JERRY]

[JERRY AND MOHEL GET INTO A STRUGGLE]

…

Stan (the baby’s father): The baby's fine. There's nothing wrong with the baby.

Mohel: Thank god the flincher didn't harm the baby. I will get you for this. This is my business, this is my life. No one ruins this for me. No on! [TO ELAINE] Here's my card.

Continue reading Christopher Hitchens – On the Mutilation of Children’s Genitalia...

Condolences

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
1918-2008

Russian Nobel laureate who was incarcerated in the Gulag died on Sunday, August 3, 2008.

See here for a succinct post.


Continue reading Condolences...

PZ Myers Said That Scientific Thinking Has a Corrosive Influence on Religious Belief

Note:

I have posted another essay on Prof. PZ Myers over at Atheism is Dead.

It is entitled: Prof. PZ Myers Said That Scientific Thinking Has a Corrosive Influence on Religious Belief



Continue reading PZ Myers Said That Scientific Thinking Has a Corrosive Influence on Religious Belief...

On the Life of Our Thoughts

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and will be posted on June 7, 2009 AD

Continue reading On the Life of Our Thoughts...

PZ Myers - Transubstantiating from Scientist to New Atheist Activist

FYI: This is the other essay that I wrote before PZ Myers - The Desecration Delusion and in relation to PZ Myers Complements Christianity, but in typical dyslexic (and procrastinative) form am posting now - after the fact, and after the act.

Prof. PZ Myers made the point that “When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn't an atheist who lit the fuse…We aren't out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture.” I wonder what he means by “We”? Of course, it could be pointed out that, to name one such example, from 1917 to 1969, the Communists destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches. But my point in mentioning his statements is that I infer that he is stating that there was something wrong with destroying the statues. He appears to think that it is wrong to defame other people’s objects of worship.



















With this in mind, we come to Prof. PZ Myers’ statements, which he posted as “IT'S A FRACKIN’ CRACKER!” about a college student who, as Prof. PZ Myers did not bother pointing out, walked away from a Roman Catholic Mass with a consecrated communion wafer, or Eucharist as a protest against student fees for religious services. Prof. PZ Myers refers to the Eucharist as, “a god****ed cracker.” (I placed asterisks here and will do so again below for the sake of congeniality).

Prof. PZ Myers wrote:

“There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so god****ed stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion…He [the student] walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. It is just a cracker! Catholics worldwide became furious. Would you believe this isn't hyperbole? People around the world are actually extremely angry about this — [the student] has been sent death threats over his cracker. Those are just kooks, you might say…Crazy Christian fanatics right here in our own country have been threatening to kill a young man over a cracker. This is insane. These people are demented ****wits…It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.”

Of interest may be that Prof. PZ Myers ripped a page out of a Bible (see here).
Allow me to agree at this point that “Crazy Christian fanatics” are contradicting the tenets of their faith for making death threats against the student. Although, the fact of this contradiction calls into question whether they can logically be referred to as “Christian.” Moreover, it is sad but true that there are these sorts of fanatics at the bottom of every worldview. I do not know any anti-atheism blogger who have not experienced harassment of all sorts from various kinds of cyber-hacking to death threats and threats of violence against spouses and even children. This proves that this is not a Christian issue nor a “religion” issue but an issue of prejudice in all of its facets.

He continues thusly:

“So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?... if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare…will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart.”

At this point I would like to state that I, being a Christian who partakes in communion, do not believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. One may not be able to talk the faithful out of such doctrines although Prof. PZ Myers’ childish and malicious statements and plans are less likely to succeed than other courses of action. In fact, I have devoted a blog to this specific topic where I deal with the issue from the stand point of logic, history and biblical statements. I have done this with regards to Roman Catholicism's Doctrine of Eucharist, Roman Catholic Maryology and Roman Catholicism's Doctrine of Purgatory. There are ways to handle these issues: death threats are not the way and neither are childish and malicious plans to insult people even further.

After his own malicious contribution to the Eucharist fiasco, Prof. PZ Myers further wrote the following:

“So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email that says I should be fired, that the author would like to kill me, and that I only criticize because Catholics are so gentle and kind.”

He then asks his screeching monkeys to write the President of the University of Minnesota in order to assure him that Prof. PZ Myers is not so bad after all.
Can Prof. PZ Myers really be so clueless? I find myself forced to answer in the affirmative. Let us review his statements:
“I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail”
He had previously stated that “Catholics worldwide became furious,” statistically speaking if “Catholics worldwide became furious” and he got 39 pieces of mail we are talking about fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a miniscule fraction of “Catholics worldwide.”

“because I was rude to a cracker”
Simply read his original statements and it will become self-evident that this was not about being rude to a cracker but about being foul and malicious.

“Four of them have included death threats”
Unquestionably condemnable and contradictory to Christian tenets. Note that I can say that based on absolute Christian morality. But what if an atheist made death threats and even, God forbid, carry them out? On what basis would another atheist condemn their actions? If you know atheism then you know that the answer is personal preference or arguments from outrage. Dennis Prager has rightly stated, “Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.”

“Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired.”
What is wrong with people demanded that he be fired? The fact is that Prof. PZ Myers cannot take it yet, he can dish it out. With regards to science teachers and state science standards that do not infer atheism from biology Prof. PZ Myers demanded “the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.”

“Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected.”
I also thought that it would be a fascinating experiment to see if Prof. PZ Myers had the chutzpa to desecrate a copy of the Koran (aka “Qur′an”) but not, as he erroneously thinks, because only some religious icons must be protected. Rather, because he is obviously being selective. And no, he did not answer as to why he will not desecrate a Koran.

Oh, but he did explain that Catholics are not “all so nice that none of them would wish me harm” because he received a grand total of four death threats out of all “Catholics worldwide” who “became furious.” This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Catholics are so nice that they do not wish him harm.” Ok, we could not say “all so nice that none of them would wish me harm” because “all” means “all” and “none” means “none.” Thus, Prof. PZ Myers would have to state, “all Catholics are not so nice after all and my proof is that out of all the furious Catholics worldwide a grand total of four of them are not so nice.” Of course, this presupposes that the writers were Catholics, or were Christians, or were theists at all. Prof. PZ Myers does not know who they were and I do not either however, I do have an anti-atheism blogger friend who had many, many problems with certain personages claiming to be him while stirring up a ruckus on various websites.

Lastly, we come to a very telling statement that came at the end of his please woo the President post:

“…unlike the religious screeds I'm seeing, you take the time to proofread and send him something that at least looks like a high school graduate wrote it, which will put you way above the level of the hate mail. Be polite and rational, too!”

The fact that he has to make this statement tells you something, tells you quite a bit, in fact. He knows that his monkeys are rabid and as willing to express their prejudice as maliciously and he and so he attempts to pull their reins. Prof. Richard Dawkins also got into the act by begging his readers to Please “WRITE IN SUPPORT OF PZ MYERS”:

“Please take care to write in a good, literate, adult style, in order to increase the contrast between the letters of support and the incoherent, juvenile flaming that will doubtless characterise the letters from the Catholics.”

This is iron sharpening irony. Both of these Profs know that their readership consists, to some large extent, of rabid expressers of malice. Thus, they both have to beg their readers to not behave, or write, as they generally do.



Yet, the ultimate irony is that they are begging their readers, and note this carefully, not to, here it is, not to write as Prof. PZ Myers and Prof. Richard Dawkins are infamous for doing. They have become celebrities, made quite a few shekels and based entire books and lectures on expressing screed, hate, being impolite, irrational, in a non-adult style, incoherent, and juvenile. When this is your modis operandi it only encourages your admirers to act likewise and, sadly, also encourages those who disagree with you to do likewise (at least a statistically insignificant minority of them).
Continue reading PZ Myers - Transubstantiating from Scientist to New Atheist Activist...

Christopher Hitchens – Jesus, the god of War?

During “A debate, dialogue, and discussion” that took place between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath which was entitled “Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World,” Mr. Hitchens made the following statement:

“I'm glad he [Alister McGrath] condemns religious violence…Does Jesus say or does he not say, I come to bring not peace, but a sword. He does say that. Should I take that literally or metaphorically?”

The answer is, literally. This may be substantiate quite easily.

Let us take a moment to make a general point since there is much misunderstanding about what it means to take something literally. It means that you take it as it is intended. If something is intended in a strict/stiff sense (what people generally refer to as literal) you take it that way. If it is a historical reference, we take it as a historical reference. If something is metaphorical, we take it metaphorically. Etc.


In the text mentioned by Mr. Hitchens it is meant symbolically and in a strict/stiff sense. The “sword” is symbolic and the action that the sword performs is strict/stiff.

Mr. Hitchens is fallaciously correlating religious violence with Jesus’ statement. Let us consider the text, which is Matthew at 10:34:

“Think not that I am come to send peace: I came not to send peace but a sword.”

Well, there you have it. Jesus was calling for all out religious war.

Well, let us take a moment to read the very next verse, the verse that would have alerted Mr. Hitchens that he is mistaken in his correlation. Verse 35 states:

“For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.’”

Obviously, “sword” is employed as symbolizing what a sword does: it separates, it divides. For example, Hebrews 4:12 makes this very point,

“For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Therefore, the setting against refers to a dispute about beliefs.

Thus, the text, within its context, is strictly/stiffly literally true. This is what I can prove since if you have been unfortunate enough to have been raised by for example, atheists or agnostics, and have come to believe in Jesus then it is quite possible, as has been my experience, that you have been mistreated simply for believing differently than an atheist or agnostic.


I understand that you may say likewise the other way around and I am sorry to hear about any mistreatment of anyone by anyone. The point was the text and Mr. Hitchens taking the text out of context in order to make a pretext for a prooftext. He, and we, ought to be skeptical enough to at least read the very next verse rather than finding a verse or half of a verse that we quote without citation and use as a springboard for a fallacious assertion.
Continue reading Christopher Hitchens – Jesus, the god of War?...

PZ Myers Complements Christianity

FYI: This is one of the essays that I wrote before PZ Myers - The Desecration Delusion but in typical dyslexic (and procrastinative) form am posting now - after the fact, and after the act.

Recently PZ Myers paid Christianity a tremendous compliment. He paid Christianity a compliment by ripping a page out of a Bible.

He describes the occasion thusly (the post refers to Prof. PZ Myers in the third person but it was “Posted…by PZ Myers”):

“The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless (I also ripped out the page and waved the pathetic thing around a bit, which had several people asking if they could have the bible defaced by PZ Myers afterwards). Then, of course, I summarized some small bits of the story of eye evolution to demonstrate that science has a much deeper and more powerful origins story than that little scrap of piss-poor poetry that half this country wants to make the backbone of our science curriculum…if a god had chosen to tell primitive people how the universe came to be, he/she/it could have done so in just as awe-inspiring a way as the false myths we've got.”

I am at a loss to understand what the point was, except to say that he was clearly appealing to the emotional (and intellectual?) maturity of his audience who could not wait to have their hero deface the bible further. This certainly gives us a window into the preaching to the children’s choir that goes on at the Seattle Skeptics meeting. One could only hope that some, many, or most of the Skeptics were embarrassed by such anti-intellectual tomfoolery.

As I pointed out in an essay about Prof. Richard Dawkins (here) the Bible states that the universe had a beginning, that it consists of time, space, and matter, that it expands, that the earth hangs on nothing, that it is circular, that the Pleiadian star system is bound together by mutual gravitational attraction, that the Orion system has a belt, to name a few facts (Genesis 1:1; Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 42:44; 45:12; 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15; Zechariah 12:1; Job 26:7; Isaiah 40:22; Job 38:31; Job 38:31).
At any rate, besides expressing his personal prejudice, who knows what Prof. PZ Myers’ topic was. Apparently, for his purposes, the purpose of mixing science and atheism, Genesis was vague, wrong, and useless. But what is it with the tough guy, let us say, ripping a page out of the Bible? Prof. PZ Myers paid Christianity a compliment by proving that he is safe and sound besmirching the Bible in a majority Christian country whose government is premised on Christian principles. He knows that the overwhelming majority, by orders of magnitude, of Christians, and Jews, who hear about his childishness will just shake their heads and maybe even pray for him. The authorities are on his side: no, beatings, no jail time, no executions as would surely occur if he were a real tough guy and went, for instance, to Afghanistan and tore a page out of the Qur′an. In fact, I would bet that he would not even have the guts to do that in the safety of America even amongst his immature admirers.

Prof. PZ Myers appears to make the same mistake as many skeptics do, he faults the Bible for not stating more about his particular field of interest. Scientists put the Bible down for not stating more about science. Historians put the Bible down for not stating more about history. Archaeologists put the Bible down for not stating more about where we may uncover artifacts, etc., etc., etc. Yet, the Bible’s message is not about science, history, archaeology nor about anything else that we may be specifically interested in. Its message is about the human condition, sin and salvation. What it does state about, for instance, science is not only accurate but has served as the foundations of the very same modern fields and methods of science that Prof. PZ Myers et al use as a façade for pushing atheism (see my essay Protecting the Science Classroom).

And so, in America he can deface a Bible, keep on expressing his prejudice at will, and still make a nice living by passing off atheistic-activism as if it were science.
Continue reading PZ Myers Complements Christianity...

The Great “God in Society” Atheism / Theism Debate

The Political Enquirer has been hosting a debate entitled, “God in Society: An Atheism-Theism Debate.”

The first post of the debate was an intro to the debaters who are “M” from the blog Atheism is Dead and Leo Pardus from the blog De-Conversion.

Here I am writing a response to one of the arguments that Mr. Pardus made in Round One.

The question posed was:

“Can you please explain why you believe that Theism is beneficial or detrimental/dangerous to society in general?”

Mr. Pardus listed both benefits and detriments as follows:

“Benefits1. Oberlin, Harvard, and Princeton are just a few of the top schools founded, funded, and headed by Christians, and with Christian ideals.2. Churches have funded and founded many health care establishments.3. Many churches are truly marvelous at caring for their members.4. The Christian faith has inspired beautiful works of art, classics of literature, glorious music, and majestic prodigies of architecture.

Detriments
1. Religion has been the caused [sic] of many wars, pogroms. et cetra.2. Religious leaders have been known to justify murder of [sic] the grounds of blasphemy.3. There have been plenty of instances of ill people ceasing to take medication prescribed to them by doctors, and dying as a result. Some Theist have died because they refused blood transfusions on religious grounds.4. Religious believers have been known to ostracize, and in some cases even murder, their children rather than allow them to become atheist or marry someone from a different religion.5. Religious motivations have been behind the destruction of many works of art, book [sic], and so forth.”

Recall that the question was generic and referred to “Theism,” and not to any particular brand. As Mr. Pardus rightly points out, “Theism is just too big and too varied to condemn or venerate en masse.” Granted. However, his answer shifts from particular and exclusive mentions of Christianity in the benefits to the miscellaneous in the determents (more on this in a moment).

The first point is certainly true, the most influential institutes of higher learning were “founded, funded, and headed by Christians, and with Christian ideals.”
The second and third points make odd bedfellows since #2 is broad and #3 unnecessarily narrow. Yes, “Churches have funded and founded many health care establishments” as well as charities, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, disaster relief organizations, adoption agencies, foster homes, etc., etc., etc. Hence the #3 point aught to have been a part of #2 with the end cropped off thusly, “Churches have funded and founded many health care establishments. Thus, many churches are truly marvelous at caring for everyone and anyone.”

The forth point speaks for itself.

All four benefits referred specifically to Christianity. While I am tempted to state, “Thank you very much for the compliment,” it did provide a, perhaps necessarily, narrowly focused answer. Next, in the detriments he offers a more generic answer referring not specifically and not necessarily to Christianity but to generic or miscellaneous theism.

The first answer can be accurately rephrased in at least to ways, such as, “Atheism has been the cause of many wars, pogroms. et cetra.” Or, “Completely non-religious, non-theistic factors have been the cause of many wars, pogroms. et cetra.”

It is very relevant to note that the Encyclopedia of Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2005) was compiled by nine history professors who specifically conducted research for the text for a decade in order to chronicle 1,763 wars. The survey of wars covers a time span from 8000 BC to 2003 AD. From over 10,000 years of war 123, which is 6.98 percent, are considered to have been religious wars. Thus, this answer is generic and applicable to theism and atheism. For example, pogroms were conducted by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik movement.

The second point is somewhat valid although with regards to Christianity it is not a biblical doctrine whatsoever.

In the third point Mr. Pardus is most of all referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses. While those who do not know, or do not care, place Jehovah’s Witnesses under the term “Christian” or even “Protestant” they are, in fact, an aberrant group. One reason being their un-biblical opposition to blood transfusions.

In the fourth case Mr. Pardus seems to have Islam in mind although many other worldviews, including atheism, also do the same or come very close. For example, I, and many like me, can tell you anecdotes of being mistreated by atheist/agnostic family member simply because we do not agree with them.

The last point may also be restated thusly, “Atheistic motivations have been behind the destruction of many works of art, book, and so forth.” Whether it is individual atheists such as PZ Myers who publically ripped a page out of a Bible and subsequently “desecrated” various other objects (see here) to the fact that from 1917 to 1969 the Communists destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches.

At the end of his answer, Mr. Pardus makes the following statement with regards to theists of whom he personally approves in accord to:

“Principles like: Do they help people in need? Do they follow the maxim of, ‘first do no harm’? Do they try to live the ‘Golden Rule’? Can they allow others to believe something different without condemning or attacking them (i.e. Evangelism is fine; sword-point evangelism is not). Any Theist or Theistic group that lives by such principles is probably beneficial. Any Theist or Theistic group that does not, we can all probably do without.”

We should grant that within a debate one cannot take the time to delve into the excruciating minutiae of one’s worldview. However, we should also ask why Mr. Pardus judges all things, all people and their actions, against his own particular views. Why “help people in need…do no harm…the ‘Golden Rule,’” indeed why go “without condemning or attacking”? Obviously, I am not arguing against these principles but I wonder how atheist arrive at them without borrowing morality from theistic systems, particularly from the Bible. How did Mr. Pardus come to view these principles to be of such import that through them he declares whether you are “fine” or whether we can “probably do without” you? This is clearly sword-pointing atheism.

Ultimately, in a question dealing with whether a theist or atheist would be better on foreign policy and international relations as a politician Mr. Pardus stated:

“…if one’s faith fosters a respect and an appreciation for the beliefs and practices of others, that should be a good thing for international relations. Conversely, if one’s personal theology is superior-istic, or condescending toward other faiths, and that faith largely informs one’s foreign policy, then that foreign policy is going to have nothing but headaches and fire fights.”

While I do not care to discuss politics nor its policies it did seem relevant to note that the atheist virtually must be condescending toward other faiths since atheism is superioristic because it is the very ultimate in the concept I am right and you are wrong as one time atheist CS Lewis noted:

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.”[1]

This is not to say that atheist would not make good politicians in the fields of foreign policy and international relations since atheists are in no way constrained to adhere to the activist faith bashing sect of atheism which is unfortunately, both for theists and atheist, in the spotlight these days.

It does a debate no good to jump categories in mid-stride as we saw here: from theism, to Christianity to miscellaneous. Doing so only leads to disjointed arguments.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1960), p. 29
Continue reading The Great “God in Society” Atheism / Theism Debate...

PZ Myers - The Desecration Delusion

oday, the front page of Prof. Richard Dawkins is advertising, “VOICES OF SCIENCE: PZ Myers - Buy it now on DVD.” Oh, PZ Myers is also a scientist? Who would′a′thunk′it?!?!

Well, that is what I get for procrastinating. I had written up two nice little essays on PZ Myers’ shenanigans and before I got a chance to post them he inflicted the coup de grace. Or perhaps better stated, he lowered himself to even greater depths of childishness and humanization.

Well, I am dyslexic so I think that I will post this first and then catch you up on what lead to it in later posts.

In his post, The Great Desecration (Posted on: July 24, 2008 2:00 PM, by PZ Myers) Prof. PZ Myers states, “It is finished,” although considering the childish nature of his own personality and that of his screeching monkeys (see PZ Myers and Pavlov’s Monkeys), he himself is not finished but has probably gained an ever greater audience of people who appear to have much too much free time on their hands by which to be consumed by expressing their prejudices.

What set off the, so called, great desecration was Prof. PZ Myers’ expressed wish to desecrate the Eucharist (a communion wafer consecrated by a Roman Catholic priest). He begins his post by retelling Roman Catholic persecution of the Jews beginning in 1215 AD based on the alleged Jewish desecration of the Eucharist. Interestingly, when atheist Communists persecuted the Jews they needed no such superstitious pretexts.

After retelling various, rightly condemnable, actions of persecutions (condemned based on Judeo-Christian morality, of course) he writes:

“Catholicism has mellowed with age — the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers. Catholicism has been actively poisoning the minds of its practitioners with the most amazing bull**** for years, and until recently, I had no idea that a significant number of people actually believed this nonsense, or that the hatred was still simmering there, waiting for an opportunity to rise up in misplaced defense of absurdity.” [asterisks mine, italics his]

I am tempted to respond thusly:

“Atheism has mellowed with age — the last time an atheist nation rose up to slaughter its non-atheist citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers. Atheism has been actively poisoning the minds of its practitioners with the most amazing claims for years, and until recently, I had no idea that a significant number of people actually believed this nonsense, or that the hatred was still simmering there, waiting for an opportunity to rise up in misplaced defense of absurdity.”

However, this would not be entirely accurate since atheist Communists, as an example, slaughtered non-atheists and atheists alike and are still wielding bloody iron fists wherever they still reign.

Prof. PZ Myers has referred to the Eucharist by many derogatory terms which I do not care to relate here. I did want to mention that while I also disagree with the Roman Catholic concept of transubstantiation. I have actually devoted an entire blog to that specific subject from a logical, historical and biblical point of view. The point being that there are ways in which to deal with such issues.
If you are interested, see this blog: Roman Catholic Doctrine of Eucharist
And, for that matter these: Roman Catholic Maryology and Roman Catholic Doctrine of Purgatory.

Prof. PZ Myers misses the point of some of the statements from some who have written to him on this issue:

“Another common theme has been the attempt to turn away the desecration of a Catholic symbol into the desecration of an Islamic symbol. Obviously, it's not desecration they find disagreeable — it's the idea that someone would offend their weird sectarian sensibilities.”

I would not think that this was not the case but would imagine that their point was that he would be afraid to spit in the face of Islam. However, even this is overstated since in the comfort and safety of America a besmircher of any religion, including Islam, is safe, sound and well on their way to becoming a celebrity that is hounded not by religious fanatics but by invitations to lectures, interviews, book authorship, etc. In fact, the letter he quotes to this effect makes this point clear.

Most of his post is simply not worth mentioning because of his childishness and also, I may add, the childishness and malevolence of those who wrote in to disagree with him. In conclusion he wrote:

“OK, time for the anticlimax….I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus's tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt. By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper.”

Finally, he ends by making various dogmatic proclamations:

“Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.” [bold in original

Yes, perhaps you also can become so enlightened as to abuse your authority as a professor of science in order to smuggle atheism into the science classrooms and to encourage and exhibit childish malevolence.

Oi vey!
Continue reading PZ Myers - The Desecration Delusion...

PZ Myers and Pavlov’s Monkeys

I am certainly no prophet of doom yet, I wonder if Professor Prof. PZ Myers may want to slow his roll, as it were, considering just how influential he is particularly with regards to his admirers.

Scienceblogger Chad Orzel described the commentators on Prof. Prof. PZ Myers’ Scienceblogs.com site Pharyngula, and other Scienceblogs.com commentators, as “screechy monkeys.”

Prof. PZ Myers is not only abusing his position, and blog, by pushing atheism in the guise of science but he is also engaging in anti-science behavior. Granted that online polls are not hard science but it is somewhere in the realm of statistics. This is what Prof. PZ Myers wrote in his post Crash this poll:

“You know how we all love to screw up online polls … here's another one. Scroll down to just below ‘What others are saying’, on the left, where the poll question is:
Do you think the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in our education system?
‘Yes’ is currently leading by about 3:1. If everyone goes over there and votes ‘no’, it will raise Mark Mathis's blood pressure a few points.” [ellipses in original]

One, of many, very telling responses that a screechy monkey managed to type out whist randomly pressing keyboard keys reads, “Done, m'lord. Now the No is leading.”



Well, voting in the way that your lord told you is one thing but what about Prof. PZ Myers’ constant bombastic and vociferous vitriol? God forbid that Pavlov’s monkeys ever take him as seriously as he takes himself and take actions based on his inflammatory terminology. Following are two examples:

Prof. PZ Myers wrote the following at his blog Pharyngula:

“I am a biologist. Like it or not, the Republican party is being led by religious zealots who are anti-biology, who publicly and vigorously oppose reason and knowledge and evidence in my field of study…

the despicable gang of anti-intellectuals who run this country…

Let them find comfort and forgiveness for stupid mistakes in their religion, because I sure as hell am not going to give it to them…the preachers are stridently condemning all us evilutionists [sic] to hell, is a damned ineffective tactic that has gotten us to this point. I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It's time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don't care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.”

Prof. PZ Myers further wrote:

“Yeah, I’m afraid the ‘civilized academic debate’ was settled about a century ago. Scientists have been engaging in that ideal, non-militaristic fashion for quite some time, and still are – those discussions go on in the pages of the journals. Unfortunately, while we have been doing everything in the proper civilized way, the forces of ignorance have not; they have lied their way into considerable power.

Here I am, a biologist living in the 21st century in one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the two biology teachers in my kids’ high school is a creationist. Last year, the education commissioner in my state tried to subvert the recommendations for the state science standards by packing a hand-picked ‘minority report’ committee to push for required instruction in intelligent design creationism in our schools. All across the country, we have these lunatics trying to stuff pseudoscientific religious garbage into our schools and museums and zoos.

This is insane.

Please don’t try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren’t martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.” [italics in original]

Hopefully, Prof. PZ Myers will manage to keep his monkeys considerably sedated.
Continue reading PZ Myers and Pavlov’s Monkeys...

The Red Light of Punishment

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Does God Prefer Atheism?

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Prof. Antony

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Bill Maher’s Errata

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Protecting the Science Classroom

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Quentin Smith’s Gratuitous Fallacy

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Omni-Science

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Positive Atheism - Cliff Walker : Relative Ethics and Absolute Condemnations

This Essay Consists of the Following Sections:
Absolute Relativism
A Quandary?
Arguments from Authority
Atrocious Outrage
Atrocious Lack of Resistance
Atrocious Slavery
Atrocious Genocide
Atrocious Human Sacrifice
Atrocious Male Chauvinism
The Filter of Human Reason
In Conclusion
Some Studies Studied

This essay is Part 2 in our critique of Positive Atheism’s Cliff Walker’s attempts to criticize the Bible. In Part 1 I dealt with his attempts to counteract “Bible Week.” In this case I will consider his writing on the issue of whether we can be ethical/moral without God.[1] Cliff Walker was responding to an inquiry from someone seeking to justify their presuppositions by “doing research for an Independent Study at Rutgers University, New Jersey, to provide empirical data showing that one can be ethical or moral without God.”

To his credit, Cliff Walker points out that various such studies are of questionable accuracy for various reasons. I have found that Vox Day has done a admirable job in both referring to such studies drawing out their details, as well as discussing their problems and referencing more balanced studies. These may be found in Vox Day’s book “The Irrational Atheist” (downloadable here) p. 19-20, 103, 119-120, 127, 145, 182, 188 to name a few (I will provide some examples below after the Conclusion under Some Studies Studied).

I would like to beging by pointing out one of those meaningless statements for which Cliff Walker has an apparent fondness, “if there is no God, then all who are ethical became that way without Him!” (italics in original). This is certainly true given certain materialistic presuppositions. However, may we not state, “if there is no God, then all who consider themselves ethical became that way by conveniently subjective definitions of what is ethical!” Or, given a certain set of theistic presuppositions we may state, “if there is a God, then all who are ethical became that way by Him!”

Cliff Walker also presents an alleged quandary, “Does God approve of something because it is right, or is something right because God approves of it?” Presupposing absolute materialism, may we also quandarize thusly, “Do atheists approve of something because it is right, or is something right because atheists approve of it?”

Absolute Relativism:
No, my friends my quandarizing is not farfetched. Consider that Cliff Walker wrote:

“I use the terms good and evil and right and wrong as shorthand, for the purpose of discussion, to describe how many people think. My current understanding of reality does not recognize any intrinsic good or evil.” [italics in original]

This statement is of crucial importance for various reasons. For instance, we must logically read “My current understanding of reality does not recognize any intrinsic good or evil” as “As an atheist I know that all we have in the way of ethics is personal opinion, what I referred to as ‘how many people think’ but I will use the terms good and evil and right and wrong anyhow since without them I could not besmirch the Bible, God, Christians, or religiosity in general. Thus, I will do so even while admitting to having no logical reasons but merely a convenient way to express my personal prejudices.”

Thus, given that there is no intrinsic good or evil, any condemnations of the Bible, God, Christians, or religiosity in general are based upon “how many people think” but if “many” other “people think” otherwise then Cliff Walker’s condemnations are either simply null and void being relegated to the realm of personal preference or perhaps outweighed by the number of many more people who think otherwise. He is arguing from relative ethics and therefore discredits his own condemnations (exactly as was done by Dan Barker as evidenced in my essay Dan Barker and the Alien Rape Voyeurs).

A Quandary?:
Cliff Walker presents an ethical quandary as follows:

“If the gods approve of things because they are pious, we still don't know why they are right. But if things are right because the gods approve of them, then morality is arbitrary, is it not? Would not incest and murder have been morally right if the gods had approved of it? To say that the gods would never approve of incest or murder is inadequate, because the point is that this alternative has the gods defining the pious, whereas the other has the gods merely acknowledging what is and is not de facto pious.”

Let us simply grant absolute materialism and reconsider the quandary based on this worldview:

“If the atheists approve of things because they are pious, we still don't know why they are right. But if things are right because atheists approve of them, then morality is arbitrary, is it not? Would not incest and murder have been morally right if atheists had approved of it? To say that atheist would never approve of incest or murder is inadequate, because the point is that this alternative has atheists defining the pious, whereas the other has atheists merely acknowledging what is and is not de facto pious.”

Interestingly enough, I shared some correspondence with an atheist about the issue of incest. Please pardon me for keeping this anonymous but I am not interested in embarrassing anyone. If you wish to disregard this admittedly one example of one discussion with one atheist, feel free to do so. Both of us agreed that incest was immoral. I asked why he considered incest immoral. He thought it odd that I was asking for his reason since we agreed on its immorality. I asked again why he thought it immoral. He was flummoxed and again answered by asking me why I was asking. Yet again I asked why and once again he did not answer but was still confused as to why I would ask why. Then, you guessed it, I asked why, to which he finally stated, in part but in substance, “I have a visceral dislike…”
Good, so do I. However, this is an argument from personal outrage. Moreover, people who commit incest do not have a “visceral dislike” and in fact, rather like it. Thus, we are in the realm of my visceral dislike can beat up your like. Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about incest rather, some people decide that they like it and some do not. Lastly, if you do not and they do then just who do you think you are to shove your subjective morality down their throats?

Arguments from Authority:
Before coming to the particular appeals to “Scriptural Atrocity” I would like to mention, perhaps as an aside but an aside that is important, that Cliff Walker makes a point by referring to Plato’s work Euthyphro. I drew out an argument in my essay What Happened to Reginald Finley’s Skepticism? to the effect of: why do atheists tend to appeal to the authority of an argument made by people who may have never existed and to texts which for all we know are fictionalized redactions? Mr. Finley had referred to Hippocrates while Cliff Walker refers to Plato, his work Euthyphro and by extension Socrates. But just how does Cliff Walker know that Plato and Socrates ever existed? How does he know that Plato and Socrates are not simply fictitious characters, mythical ancient wise prototypical philosophers?

More importantly are the following questions:

How do we know anything that Plato and Socrates said or wrote?
When did they make the statements quoted by Cliff Walker?
How do we know that?
When was the statement recorded?
Who recorded it?
How do we know that?
What is the span of time between the statement and the recording?
How do we know that?
What is the span of time from the recording to the first manuscript?
How do we know that?
How many manuscripts are there?
How do they compare?
How do we know that what is written is accurate?
Etc., etc., etc.

The point being that when it comes to the Bible, skeptics demand that all of these questions, and more, be answered to their satisfaction. Yet, the skeptic may quote anyone with full authority without providing a single shred of evidence. I understand very well that they will simply do away with my concerns and merely retort that none of that matters because they could simply state that, for instance, Plato and Socrates never did exist but the arguments attributed to them speak for themselves. Fine, but why appeal to apocrypha then? Just make your own arguments without appealing to potentially fictional characters.

Atrocious Outrage:
We now come to Cliff Walker’s arguments form outrage in a section entitled “Scriptural Atrocity.” We know that they are such arguments for at least two reasons:

1 - He admits that he is relying on personal opinion and therefore he defines, categorizes and reacts to the “atrocity” based on his opinion. If someone did not think that these were atrocities then they would not be. In fact, he prefaces this section thusly, “I will now venture into a brief examination of the Bible, which advocates or commands the following atrocities that many modern people find abhorrent.” Again, we find proof that he is appealing to the personal preference and outrage of “many modern people.”

2 - The texts to which he refers are conveniently selectively quoted. In fact, in this section he makes some 13 assertions, he gives the citation to 12 texts but he only quotes a mere 10 words (and I am counting “a,” “to,” and “the”). This amounts to Cliff Walker expressing his opinions and ending the sentence with a parenthesized citation. This gives the effect of, “Here is what the Bible states, in my own words, but here is the citation. Trust me, it’s there and states what I say it does.” I certainly appreciate the citations and hope that “many modern people” would actually look up the texts and read them with a consideration of immediate context, greater context, grammatical context, historical contexts, cultural context, etc.

It appears that Cliff Walker does not keep such considerations in mind and therefore constantly draws fallacious inferences. He appears to think that “followers of the Bible” follow the Bible because they are not as well informed as to what the Bible contains. In Part 1 I quoted him stating, “people think the Bible is good simply because they never read it.” [italics in original], in this case he wrote, “most adherents are oblivious to much of this material.” Rather, they do read it and are not oblivious but they read it in order to understand it and not simply in order to find pull quotes form which to premise unfounded allegations. Cliff Walker is constantly pulling texts out of context to make pretexts for prooftexts.

Before we consider each of the “atrocities that many modern people find abhorrent” let thou be reminded that there is no need to consider any of these texts since, according to Cliff Walker’s very own standards, I could simply respond by stating, “I do not view them as atrocious.” He could very well retort by stating, “Well, then you support atrocities and are therefore immoral/unethical.” I could respond thusly, “What, pray tell, are your definitions of good and evil and right and wrong?” He would then refer to personal and convenient preferences to which I would state that he has his and I have mine.

Now we will consider each of the “atrocities” as he has enumerated them:

Atrocious Lack of Resistance:

“(1) ‘resist not evil’ (Matthew 5:39)”

Well, there you have it, three words that encapsulate the whole of the Bible’s statements regarding evil (which does not intrinsically exist). If you venture beyond the three words that Cliff Walker quotes you will very quickly notice that the text refers to a slap in the face. Throughout human history this has been considered an insult. Thus, if someone insults you, do not insult them back.

Atrocious Slavery:

“(2) human slavery: e.g., selling one's daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7), beating one's slave to death (legal, as long as death lingers and is not immediate), condemning the opposition to human slavery in I Timothy 6:1-5 (consult King James or Douay readings: newer versions cover this up), keeping virgins of conquered tribes ‘for yourselves’ as sex slaves (Numbers 31:14-18)”

Let us take this one in turn:
Human slavery - I covered this topic in Part 1 in my section “Slavery: Spurns and Property.” The bottom line is that skeptics generally read the word “slavery” in the Bible and interpret it with the worse that Alex Haley wrote in “Roots.” While the Bible is dealing with something different which is typically better termed “servitude.” This is particularly so in the New Testament’s concept of willing servitude “doulos,” or servitude that was meant to allow one to repay a debt that they could not afford, a “bondservant.”

Selling one's daughter into slavery - Having the malevolent, malicious and inhumane concept of slavery firmly etched into our minds, as well it should be, it is very, very difficult to read this text of scripture in consideration of the historical and cultural context. Thus, were one to state that being sold into “slavery,” here referring to a “maidservant,” was beneficial for the daughter as well as the whole family, we simply recoil. However, she was being sold to live in a household that would care for her. To begin with, this form of servitude was not for life, or till death, but expired in the seventh year. In fact, Exodus 21:5 refers to a servant wanting to stay and would “plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my sons. I do not want to go out free.” Why would Kunta Kinte not want to leave the white devils who cut half of his foot off? Again, we are not dealing with the same concepts. The servant has a nice place for himself, his wife and his children and wants to keep his job.

There were more restrictions placed upon dealings with maidservants, “she shall not go out as the menservants do” (v. 7).
If her “master” agreed to marry her but does not then he had to “let her be redeemed” and could not “sell her to a strange nation” because “he has dealt deceitfully with her” (v. 8, consider that carefully: he was not allowed to deceive her).
If she was to marry the son then the “master” was to treat her as his own daughters (v. 9).
If the “master” married her and then practiced polygamy she was not to enjoy any less goods (food, clothing, etc.) than before, she was to remain well cared for (v. 10).
Finally, if the “master” did not marry her, and therefore did not care for her as a wife, or if his son did not marry her, and therefore was not cared for as a wife and daughter, or if she became part of a polygamous marriage and was not cared for properly, she was free to leave the household (v. 11).

Unfortunately, Cliff Walker did not provide a specific reference to his comment about “Beating one's slave to death (legal, as long as death lingers and is not immediate).” However, he may have been, mistakenly, referring to Exodus 21:12-13 since they are directly following the elucidation of the dealings with the maidservant. Incidentally, note that he certainly did not quote but nor did he even cite v. 7-11 but his selective comments were on a selective verse and given a selective citation, conveniently so.
In any case v. 12-13 read, “He that strikes a man, so that he dies, shall be surely put to death. And if a man does not lie in wait, but God delivers him into his hand, then I will appoint you a place where he shall flee.” Simply stated Cliff Walker is not recognizing the legal distinction between murder and manslaughter.

Condemning the opposition to human slavery - in I Timothy 6:1-5 (consult King James or Douay readings: newer versions cover this up) - Let us avoid the conspiracy and consult the recommended versions:

King James, “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort. If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings. Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.”

Douay, “Whosoever are servants under the yoke, let them count their master worthy of all honour; lest the name of the Lord and his doctrine be blasphemed. But they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but sever them the rather, who are partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort. If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to that doctrine which according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but sick about questions and strifes of words; from which arise envies, contentions, blasphemies, evil suspicions, conflicts of men corrupted in mind, and who are destitute of the truth, supposing gain to be godliness.”

What is the topic of the text? Note that it is not strictly slavery but how a Christian slave and a Christian slave owner are to comport themselves. Note that the text refers to “doulos,” willing bondservitude. Note that doulos is the way that Paul, James, Simon Peter and Jude refer to their service to Christ (Romans 1:1; James 1:1; 2nd Peter 1:1; Jude 1:1). Paul particularly describes this as “though I am free from all, yet I have made myself servant [doulos] to all” (1st Corinthians 9:19). Ultimately, we learn that Jesus Himself became a doulos, “For let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Himself the form of a servant [doulos], and was made in the likeness of men. And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).

Keeping virgins of conquered tribes ‘for yourselves’ as sex slaves - Note what I stated before about Cliff Walker’s mixture of extremely selective and convenient quotations with fallacious inferences. In this case, it is clear to see that he quotes “for yourselves” and then simply invents the phrase “as sex slaves,” a Freudian slip perhaps. Regulations regarding war captives were very strict. In the case of a woman, if a man wanted to marry her he had to give her time to recover from the shock of war, she was to be taken into the home and “shall sorrow for her father and her mother a full month” (Deuteronomy 21:13). But if after marrying her he wanted to divorce her he was to “let her go where she will. But you shall not sell her at all for silver, you shall not make a slave of her, because you have humbled her” (v. 14). Here “humbling” appears to refer to her being depressed and or having lost her virginity (while married).

Atrocious Genocide:

“(3) genocide (Deuteronomy 31; Genesis 7; Deuteronomy 20:16; and especially Joshua 11:20, where God deliberately hardens the enemy's heart to war against Israel to the end that Israel can justify slaughtering them); slaughter of civilians during wartime – including infants and pregnant women (Isaiah 13:16-18; Hosea 13:16)” [italics in original]

Let us take this one in turn:
Genocide - This argument is tantamount to the “problem of evil” argument in that, to state it succinctly, if God has a reason or purpose for “allowing” evil then the problem is not so much the evil as our reaction to it, our misunderstanding of it and our condemnation of God for not revealing the reason or purpose for every evil that occurs. While we do not have detailed lists of reasons for such judgments against entire nations we do have some basic guidelines. For instance:
God judges entire nations when their practices were truly appalling such as: sacrificing children/humans to various gods by burning them alive, engaging in bestiality as a form of worship, using children as temple prostitutes, etc.
God gave these nations opportunity to repent. For instance, Jeremiah 18:8 states, “If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” The whole book of Jonah revolves around this concept. In fact, Jonah, “the reluctant prophet,” is actually disappointed with God’s mercy so that once God forgives the inhabitants of Ninevheh he states “I knew that you are a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:1). God responds, in part, thusly, “Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who can not tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4:11). Also, you may have noted that above Cliff Walker cites Deuteronomy 20:16 while overlooking verses 10-11 which state, “When you go near a city to fight against it, then proclaim an offer of peace to it. And it shall be that if they accept your offer of peace, and open to you, then all the people who are found in it shall be placed under tribute to you, and serve you.”

Moreover, God would perform marvelous miracles in order to get the attention of various nations so that they would turn from worshipping false gods and serve Him. Consider the plagues in Egypt which demonstrated, in turn, God’s overpowering of the various false gods associated with frogs, flies, etc. Thus, the Egyptian’s messenger was Moses. Assyrian’s (of Nivenveh) was Jonah. The Babylonian’s was Daniel, etc.

Furthermore, in Genesis 15:16 God tells Abraham, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” In other words, God did not just give Abraham the land of nations that we “not so bad after all” or as some term it “garden variety pagans.” God would not allow Abraham and the ever growing Jewish nation to conquer a peoples unless their sin had reached its full measure. Of course, in such cases we are dealing with a complex interaction between God’s omniscience, He did know that their sin would reach its full measure, and the human perspective, “Come on, give’em time to repent!” Keep in mind that four generations amounts to circa 300 years.

Especially Joshua 11:20, where God deliberately hardens the enemy's heart to war against Israel to the end that Israel can justify slaughtering them - Cliff Walker again neglects to mention or cite the fact that verse 19 mentions that these nations did not take the option of making peace, “There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon.”

The hardening of the heart refers to solidifying resolve. Or, as it is elucidated in Romans 1:24-28, it is when God gives people over to do that which they have their hearts intent on doing. Have you ever told your children, “Don’t do that. You are going to fall down and get a scrape.” Yet, upon their insistence you say, “Fine, go ahead and do it.” What happens next? They fall down and get scraped, which turns into a lesson for them and, most importantly here, others who witnessed the event.

In other words, these nations were so intent in nor only continuing their atrocities and atrocious worship systems but they refused to repent even after centuries of opportunity and finally warred against Israel with whom they could have made peace. Therefore, God “allowed” them to bring their sin to its full measure.

Atrocious Human Sacrifice:

“(4) human sacrifice: ‘a tribute to the Lord’ (Numbers 31:40), not to mention the whole concept of Jesus as a human sacrifice, plus Isaac's ‘sacrifice’ was ordered by God (Abraham's willingness is praised to this day) and the sacrifice of Jephthah's unnamed but not unsung daughter was never condemned in Scripture.”

Let us take this one in turn:
Human sacrifice - The claim that the Bible commands, encourages, or allows human sacrifice is a simple one claim manner by which to discredit anyone that would make such a fallacious assertion. It is indicative of the very depths of lack of knowledge to make such a claim—assertions, paraphrases, and half verses not withstanding. But I will not merely retort with assertions of my own but will respond to each in turn.

A tribute to the Lord - Let us make an attempt at understanding Cliff Walker’s rationale: he introduces the concept of “human sacrifice” quotes “a tribute to the Lord” and references Numbers 31:40 which reads, “And the persons were sixteen thousand; of which the LORD'S tribute was thirty and two persons.” This is simply a reference to, as Cliff Walker has stated “tribute,” and not human sacrifice. The Hebrew here is “mekes” and refers to enumeration, computation, proportion to be paid, tax. The reason that the LORD'S tribute was 32 persons(’s worth) is that while the congregation in general paid this tax calculated to one in fifty the soldiers paid one in five hundred.

Jesus as a human sacrifice - This argument is contrived because human beings did not offer Jesus as a human sacrifice in the Temple, on the altar, to God.

Isaac's ‘sacrifice’ was ordered by God - This was an order that God then ordered not to be carried out so how is this human sacrifice since no human was sacrificed?

Abraham's willingness is praised to this day - This is more complex than stating that his willingness to sacrifice Isaac is praised. One issue is that Abraham demonstrated his willingness to follow God. According to the customs of the various false gods of the time human sacrifice was a common everyday occurrence. Note that for some odd reason the skeptics never seem to condemn the actual human sacrifices conducted by the various ancients but only their contrived fallacies about the Jews. Next, after Abraham demonstrated his willingness to follow God in the customary manner, God makes it clear that human sacrifice is not something that He wants. Moreover, this text (Genesis 22) is saturated with prophetic symbolism as I have elucidated in the “Some Jewish Comments and Symbolism” section of my essay dealing with Islam entitled, Who Was Abraham Told to Sacrifice, Isaac or Ishmael?
Lastly, note that the New Testament states:

“By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your seed shall be called,’ concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense (Hebrews 11:17-19).

Abraham is said to have known that this God, whom he was getting to know, would raise Isaac from the dead if need be. Incidentally, note how different the Biblical use of the term and concept of “faith” is than that which some religious people and atheists alike have made it. Abraham offered Isaac by faith meaning: by basing his actions upon knowledge, rationale and intellect. But how so? Because it states that he was willing to offer him up with the foreknowledge that it had been promised to him that his descendants would be wrought though Isaac. How could this be if Isaac dies having produced no seed? Thus, Abraham reasoned that “God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” Is it any wonder then that “Abraham said to his young men [who had traveled with him], You stay here with the ass. And I and the boy will go on to this way and worship, and come again to you” (Genesis 22:5). “I and the boy will go…and come again to you”—we both will go and we both will return.

The sacrifice of Jephthah's unnamed but not unsung daughter was never condemned in Scripture - Wait just a moment, if, as Cliff Walker claims, the Bible commands human sacrifice why would the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter be condemned in Scripture? I elucidated this text in detail in my essay about Prof. Richard Dawkins’ mishandling of it, Planting God More Firmly on His Throne (when you open the essay used the “control+f” function to search for “On page 243” which will take you to the relevant section). This text either states that Jephthah took it upon himself to sacrifice his daughter or, more likely and in keeping with the text’s immediate context as well as the Bible’s greater context, he sacrificed an animal in her place.
As for Cliff Walker’s comments, he offers the explanation without even knowing it. He states that Jephthah’s daughter was “unnamed but not unsung” and “never condemned.” Let us assume the worse and momentarily grant that she was sacrificed: the condemnation is in the fact that she was “not unsung.” Judges 11:40 states that “the daughters of Israel went yearly to tell again of [or “to lament”] the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in a year.” Every single year Israeli women congregated in order to tell again of the event - the condemnation became a nationwide annual event.

Three of the texts that provide the Bible’s view on human sacrifice are as follows:

“When the Lord your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying , ‘How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.’ You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way; for every abomination to the Lord which He hates they have done to their gods; for they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:29-30).

“And you shall not let any of your seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shall you profane the name of your God. I am the LORD” (Leviticus 18:21).

“they built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin” (Jeremiah 32:35).

Atrocious Male Chauvinism:

“(5) the oppression of women through an institutionalized and systematic double-standard (an entire study, instituted throughout the Bible).”

This is quite interesting, Cliff Walker makes an enormous assertion and refers the skeptic to well, the entire Bible. So there you have it skeptic, if you want to double check his claims just read the entire Bible. Well, this fallacious assertion betrays a tremendous lack of knowledge of that which he seeks to condemn. Let us simply note a few texts:

+ The Bible states that both men and women were created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27 also see Genesis 5:2).
+ New Testament teaches, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ…There is neither…male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28).
+ There are entire books in the Bible named after women (Esther and Ruth).
+ There were women Judges in the Old Testament (Judges 4:4).
+ In the Bible we find women prophetesses (Exodus 15:20; 2nd Kings 22:14; 2nd Chronicles 34:22; Isaiah 8:3; Luke 2:36; Acts 21:7-9).
+ Jesus showed Himself to be a servant of both men and women.
+ Jesus had male and female disciples.
+ In the New Testament we find women deacons (Romans 16:1-2).
+ We find women teachers, such as Priscilla who taught right along side of her husband Aquila (Acts 18:26).
+ Women taught the younger women (Titus 2:3-4).
+ The first disciples at the empty tomb were women (see Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1).

In this section Cliff Walker also states:

“Meanwhile, would you have the audacity to teach your five-year-old not to commit adultery, to bring even a ten-year-old to an understanding of that Commandment? Besides, is the burden of that Commandment equally distributed between an eighteen year old and an eighty year old? Does the Bible even apply this commandment equally between men and women?...most adherents are oblivious to much of this material, as are the alleged followers of the Bible — who would be shocked and dismayed if you showed them a passage like Ezekiel 23:20.”

Meanwhile, would you have the audacity to teach your five-year-old not to commit adultery, to bring even a ten-year-old to an understanding of that Commandment? - It would be interesting to hear what Cliff Walker has to say about today’s public school sex ed. classes wherein by the youngest age possible our children are made privy to every sort of sexual act in humanity’s arsenal. In any case, such commandments may very well be taught to very young children in manners that are generic until such time as they develop the maturity and cognitive abilities to deal with the concept as a whole. I know that this is shocking but it is beneficial for the individual, the marriage, the family and society in general to not commit adultery and to have such concepts as go along with it fully incorporated such as respect, gratefulness, lack of envy, not breaking up other people’s marriages or our own, etc., etc., etc.

Besides, is the burden of that Commandment equally distributed between an eighteen year old and an eighty year old? - I find this question difficult to decipher and so will answer it at face value: yes it is, neither an 18 yr old nor an 80 yrs young man should commit adultery.

Does the Bible even apply this commandment equally between men and women? - Yes, neither men nor women are to commit adultery. In fact, it is difficult to commit adultery unless a man and a woman are involved (recent rulings by California courts not withstanding).

...most adherents are oblivious to much of this material, as are the alleged followers of the Bible — who would be shocked and dismayed if you showed them a passage like Ezekiel 23:20 - Apparently, Cliff Walker is being prudish. The text, which he did not quote, reads, “For she lusted for her paramours, whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.” This chapter presents a metaphorical description of Jerusalem personified as “Oholibah” who was God’s but symbolically committed adultery with other nations/gods. As I also had to state in Part 1, skeptics cannot seem to decide whether to besmirch the Bible for being too prudish or two realistic, explicit or honest about sexuality (see my essay Too Sexy for My Theology? On the New Atheist Obsession with Sex).

The Filter of Human Reason:

“In short, the alleged Scriptures are all run through the filter of human reason, and always have been.”

This is how the premise of this section of Cliff Walker’s article is stated. This statement itself is actually premised upon various fallacies. Firstly, let us notice a false dichotomy in that he is juxtaposing “alleged Scriptures” on the one hand and “the filter of human reason” on the other. But from whence did he get the idea that the twain shall never meet? They were meant to meet, they were supposed to meet and they, as admitted, met. Considering life and logic as we know it, God could not make a statement that was not filtered through human reason since the manner in which we are designed makes it so that all information, from the conceptual to the sensual, is filtered through our minds/brains and therefore subject to human reason. Moreover, God is the very one who urges us thusly, “let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). In fact, Judaism considered illiteracy to be a sin. Having studied various Rabbinic writings it is no wonder to me that my people have always been known to be intellectual and became more than capable as scientists, businessmen, lawyers and all things analytical, technical and cerebral.

Cliff Walker continues his though thusly:

“Even the New Testament attests to the fact that the Pharisees, though much slandered by the Gospel accounts, had liberalized what is surely the most brutal of all the Mosaic laws: that requiring parents to haul a rebellious son out to the gates of the city and demand that the city elders stone him to death. The Pharisees, to their credit, interpreted this law so that it would be almost impossible to carry out – even if human standards might be tempted to suggest that the child had it coming to him!”

I have dealt with this in Part 1. The first thing to note is that while Cliff Walker, conveniently selects one verse while ignoring the various statements in the Bible about this issue, states that we are dealing with “a rebellious son,” which means just about every child ever born. However, the Bible refers to stubborn, rebellious, disobedient, gluttonous, drunkards who “smiteth” and curse their parents and have already been chastened (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9 and Deuteronomy 21:18). Thus, the references are to someone who is stubborn in their rebellious disobedience and is violently drunk to the point that they beat up their very own parents, lives off of their hard work in a gluttonous manner, then curses them, and has already been chastened. The term used by Cliff Walker “demand” is simply invented to give his condemnation strength. In fact, a stoning offense did not mean that you could simply execute people on the spot. Beginning at Exodus 18:13-26 we see a careful judicious system being established.

But Cliff Walker is not done yet, he continues the statement quoted above thusly:

“But Jesus denounces this humanitarian ‘filter-ing’ of the Mosaic law in Matthew 15:
[1] Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,[2] Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.[3] But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?[4] For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.[5] But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;[6] And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.[7] Ye hypocrites …
As ruthless as Christians have been and as bloody as their history reads (and even with this reminder from Jesus that the child-stoning law is still in effect, in that he sternly denounces the Pharisees for liberalizing it), I have not studied any era of Christian history where the orders of either Moses or Jesus were invoked to justify the execution of one's own son!”

Considering Cliff Walker’s falsely dichotomous juxtaposition between scripture and human reason it is no wonder that he fails to understand the point here.
The scribes and Pharisees, in essence, said to Jesus We have made up some rules, why do your disciples break them?
Jesus answers, in essence, Your rules? What about God’s rules? You break God’s rules by inventing and imposing your rules instead. God commanded that the father and mother be honored and that those who cursed their parents would be put to death. But you, in essence, allow parents to be cursed if and when it will profit you personally.

How? Because what is being dealt with here is a concept whereby something that would have been beneficial to the parents is being taken by the son and given to the Pharisees, for their profit. One might say that the gift was now going to, as it is contemporarily stated, “Doin’ the Lord’s work” so what is wrong with it? Because caring for one’s parents was more important. This is true even if a televangelist states that God will kill him if you do not send him a certain outrageous amount of money by a certain date (remember that?). Ergo, “ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites…”

Let us draw the thoughts together:
In one case we were dealing with hand washing (a very specific ritualistic sort).
In the other, judicious stoning.
Then the issue was the gift, known as Corban: a gift to God.

There were good reasons to restrict the judicious stoning since it was obviously meant to be a deterrent. It was the ultimate “Wait until you father gets home!” but since that did not work it became “Wait until the city elders hear about this!”
There was no good reason for redirecting something beneficial to the parents towards the Pharisees (no “good” reason but certainly selfish reasons).
Thus, the point is: Why do you condemn the breaking of your rules when you yourselves break God’s. With the conclusion being Just as you realize that God’s rules are sometimes meant to be deterrents so do we realize that yours are likewise not, so to speak, “set in stone.”

In Conclusion:
Overall, Cliff Walker does not present any serious argument’s against the Bible as a moral guide, particularly since he utterly ignores all of the Bible’s benevolence. Moreover, he utterly ignores the atheistic regimes who have not merely matched, but surpassed the Bible’s atrocities. And finally, he admits to basing his definition of, and condemnation of, the Bible’s atrocities on his personal preferences and thus, lacking any absolute moral standards, he end up only discrediting himself by demonstrating a lack of knowledge regarding that which he seeks to discredit as well as ending up voicing mere arguments form outrage.

Some Studies Studied:
I will now quote from Vox Day’s book “The Irrational Atheist” in regards to various studies regarding morality, charity, etc.[2]

Religious Wars:
It may be of interest to note that the Encyclopedia of Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2005) was compiled by nine history professors who specifically conducted research for the text for a decade in order to chronicle 1,763 wars. The survey of wars covers a time span from 8000 BC to 2003 AD. From over 10,000 years of war 123, which is 6.98 percent, are considered to have been religious wars - [gleaned from p. 103]

Misc.:

“there is a plethora of evidence that a comparison of all atheists to all Christians will not favor the former, whether one looks at crime rates, divorce rates, birth rates, democratic participation, or charitable giving.” [p. 182]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“See chapters IV and XIII for evidence in support of this statement.”

Sexuality:

“[Sam] Harris claims that religious prudery contributes daily to the surplus of human misery while bemoaning the existence of AIDS in Africa and other sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. But this widespread disease is the direct result of the sexual promiscuity that Christians condemn as immoral and which Harris praises as the pursuit of happiness. More to the point, scientific research shows that religious individuals are both happier and more sexually satisfied than non-religious individuals.” [p. 119-120]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“‘This kind of pattern is typical—religious involvement is associated with modest increases in happiness.’ Nielsen, M. E. (2006) “Religion and Happiness.” Retrieved 20 May 2007 from http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/happy.htm.”
“‘Previous research has produced mixed results. Davidson et al. (1995) reported that religious commitment (as measured by frequency of church attendance) did impact on ‘physiological’ sexual satisfaction, but not ‘psychological’ satisfaction. Davidson and Moore (1996) found no relationship between sexual satisfaction and religiosity among female undergraduates. . . . The three items related to religiosity, when considered together, did account for a small, but statistically significant amount of the variation in sexual satisfaction.’ M. Young, G. Denny, T. Young, and R. Luquis. ‘Sexual Satisfaction in Married Women,’ American Journal of Health Studies, 2000.”

“Sam Harris cannot be trusted with statistics…Sometimes such deception is easy to detect. While talking about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in The End of Faith, Harris cites a study showing that abstinence-pledged virgin teens were more likely to engage in oral and anal sex in an attempt to create the impression that those teens were more likely to contract an STD. What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” [p. 127]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“Martin, Samuel, ‘A Two-Letter Word for Little Miss Pure: It Begins with N.’ The Times, 26 June, 2007”

Incarceration:

“I previously referenced the number of atheists being held by the prison system of England and Wales, where it is customary to record the religion of the prison population as part of the Inmate Information System. In the year 2000, there were 38,531 Christians of twenty-one different varieties imprisoned for their crimes, compared to only 122 atheists and sixty-two agnostics. As Europe in general and the United Kingdom in particular have become increasingly post-Christian, this would appear to be a damning piece of evidence proving the fundamentally criminal nature of theists while demonstrating that atheists are indeed more moral despite their lack of a sky god holding them to account.” [p. 19]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“There are some silly bits of information floating around the Internet claiming to prove that Christians are fifty times more likely to go to prison than atheists. Of course, by cherry-picking this data, one could claim that English and Welsh Christians are 315 times more likely to go to prison than atheists and be superficially correct. One would have to be an intellectually dishonest ass to do so, though.”

“However, there also happened to be another 20,639 prisoners, 31.6 percent of the total prison population, who possessed ‘no religion.’ And this was not simply a case of people falling through the cracks or refusing to provide an answer; the Inmate Information System is specific enough to distinguish between Druids, Scientologists, and Zoroastrians as well as between the Celestial Church of God, the Welsh Independent church, and the Non-Conformist church. It also features separate categories for ‘other Christian religion,’ ‘other non-Christian religion,’ and ‘not known.’ At only two-tenths of a percent of the prison population, High Church atheists are, as previously suggested, extremely law-abiding. But when one compares the 31.6 percent of imprisoned no-religionists to the 15.1 percent of Britons who checked ‘none’ or wrote in Jedi Knight, agnostic, atheist, or heathen in the 2001 national survey, it becomes clear that their Low Church counterparts are nearly four times more likely to be convicted and jailed for committing a crime than a Christian.” [p. 20]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“3.84 times more likely, to be precise. Census, April 2001, Office for National Statistics. While Christians account for 39.1 percent of the English and Welsh prison population, they make up 71.8 percent of the total population.”

Life Expectancy:

“Studies have shown that those without religion have life expectancies seven years shorter than the average churchgoer,[*] are more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol, and be depressed or obese,[**] and they are much less likely to marry or have children. Their criminal proclivities strongly suggest that they are less intelligent on average than theists and High Church atheists alike, and they also outnumber their High Church counterparts by a significant margin, as the following table of various polls demonstrates:” [the table to which he refers are found on p. 20]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
* “‘Religious attendance is associated with U.S. adult mortality in a graded fashion: People who never attend exhibit 1.87 times the risk of death in the follow-up period compared with people who attend more than once a week. ’ Hummer R., Rogers R., Nam C., Ellison C. G. ‘Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality:’ Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 1999.”
** “Although it seems that Baptist women who read Left Behind novels but don’t go to church regularly are the most at risk for excess poundage. Krista M. C. Cline and Kenneth F. Ferraro, ‘Does Religion Increase the Prevalence and Incidence of Obesity in Adulthood?’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 2 (2006): 269”

Charity:

“It has been established that Christians give three times more to Charity[*] and are less criminal than the broad spectrum of atheists; experiments at the Economic Science Laboratory suggest that this might be because they believe that their actions are known to God. In variations on an envelope experiment designed to test random charity on the part of a subject who was given ten dollars as well as the opportunity to share it anonymously, the knowledge that the experimenter was watching increased the subject’s likelihood of giving by 142 percent and the amount given by 146 percent.[**]” [p. 145]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
* “‘In 2000, religious people gave about three and a half times as much as secular people—$2,210 versus $642.’ Ben Gose, ‘Charity’s Political Divide,’ The Chronicle of Philanthropy. 23 Nov. 2006”
** “Landsburg, Steven. ‘Stuffing Envelopes’: Reason, March 2001. The dollar difference increased from $1.08 to $2.66 if the subject thought the amount of his contribution would be known to the observer.”

Bright Family Values:

“Dennett further claims that ‘brights’ have better family values than born-again Christians based on ‘the lowest divorce rate in the United States’ which depends on the flawed 1999 Barna study instead of the 2001 ARIS study he makes use of later in the book, a much larger study that reaches precisely the opposite conclusion. It is certainly a quixotic assertion, considering that these family value atheists are half as likely to get married, twice as likely to divorce, and have fewer children than any other group in the United States. [p. 188]

Vox Day’s Footnotes:
“Barna calculated divorces as a percentage of the entire group, not as a percentage of marriages within that group. Since according to ARIS 2001 more than half of all atheists and agnostics don’t get married, this is an apple-orange comparison. If one correctly excludes the never-married from the calculation, then atheists are 58.7 percent more likely to get divorced than Pentecostals and Baptists, the two born-again Christian groups with the highest rate of divorce, and more than twice as likely to get divorced than Christians in general.”

[1] ©1995-2006 Positive Atheism’s Cliff Walker, One Can Be Ethical And Moral Without God
[2] Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc., 2008), p. 202
Continue reading Positive Atheism - Cliff Walker : Relative Ethics and Absolute Condemnations...

Positive Atheism - Cliff Walker : Weak Bible Week Poster

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The Dawkins Correlation

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Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher: The Dynamic Duo of Demonstrably Deleterious Delusion, Part 2

This essay consists of the following sections:
The Good Book??? An Atheist Altar Call!!!
The High Rating
Personal Incredulity
The Vociferous Viper
The Deathbed Fallacy

“It’s just ridiculous! [laughter]”

The first Dynamic Duo of which I wrote consisted of Sam Harris and Bertrand Russell. This, part 2’s, tag-team consists of Prof. Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher. The two teamed up on Bill Maher’s show (HBO Broadcast Transcript, Episode #613, April 11, 2008). I present a succinct version of the discussion below.

The Good Book??? An Atheist Altar Call!!!:
Bill Maher asked about Prof. Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion”:

MAHER: Why this book and why now?
DAWKINS: …I think especially in America, there has been a tendency for God to rule the roost in a way that, I think, people are rightly getting fed up with. And when a group of books come along and challenge that, people warm to it….
MAHER: Okay, that’s fair. One or the other. Now, you write in your book, “If this book works as I intend, readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” How is that going for you, the rate of conversion? [laughter] Do you have people come up to you and say, “You know, I used to be a believer, and I read your book, and now I’m not”?
DAWKINS: …people who maybe were sort of vaguely sitting on the fence, and who didn’t feel very strongly about it one way or the other…they realize that they’ve been atheists all along; they just didn’t know it.

Indeed, pop-culture in particular loves anything that rocks the boat, shocks the establishment, rages against the machine, etc. Prof. Richard Dawkins is certainly not ashamed of proselytizing for his worldview as he intended “The God Delusion” to convert people to atheism. Bill Maher encouraged his thusly, “hopefully, someday, it’ll be by the bed in every hotel in America.” Previously, Prof. Richard Dawkins had expressed similar hopes for Sam Harris’ book “The End of Faith,” stating that it “is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land.”[1]

It is difficult to believe that such a poorly researched and reasoned book should be considered powerful enough to convert anyone to atheism. And indeed, as admitted above, Prof. Richard Dawkins’ biased sample shows that it had an impact mainly amongst the fence sitters. They “didn’t feel very strongly about it one way or the other” so why not opt for utter lack of accountability (to name one possible motivator)?

I refer to biased sample due Ben Stein’s interview with Prof. Richard Dawkins in the movie “Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed.” Prof. Richard Dawkins asserts that people feel liberated and relieved when they realize that God does not exist. Mr. Stein asks him how he knows that, he is after all speaking with an empirical scientist. Prof. Richard Dawkins responds that he receives letters from people to that effect. To which Mr. Stein states that there are some 8 billion people in the world and asks, “How many letters do you get?” Obviously, the sorts of letters that Prof. Richard Dawkins receives to that effect are of a very particular sort having been written by people who were motivated to contact him in order to either thank him, or buddy up to him, or congratulate him, etc.

The High Rating:
1-----------2-----------3-----------4-----------5-----------6-----------7

MAHER: …in the book, you establish a scale of one-to-seven, of atheism…one, being someone who is utterly certain there is a god, and seven being someone who is utterly certain there is not…But, you yourself say you’re only a six. Can you tell us why?
DAWKINS: I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.” I can’t say, “I know there is no god.” I can’t say, “I know there are no pink unicorns.” [laughter] So, a six, maybe 6.9 is reasonable. [laughter]

This, again, is reminiscent of “Expelled” when Prof. Richard Dawkins set the probability of God’s existence to 1%. Although, upon being asked “How do you know?” he, of course, admitted that he did not know (see the end of my essay here). Now, he is establishing his atheism at 6.9 out of 7. His reasoning is valid enough but, as we shall see (and as I have shown here) Prof. Richard Dawkins may pay what I will refer to as “lip service” to the scientifically and logically mindful 1% probability of God’s existence while arguing, writing, and drawing conclusion as if he was 100% certain that God did not exist.



Personal Incredulity:

MAHER: Right. And, one reason I think yourself and so many others are beginning to speak out against organized religion is…because it’s ridiculous! [laughter] It’s just ridiculous! [applause] There’s a talking snake in the Garden of Eden! And people fly up to Heaven bodily! It’s just ridiculous! [laughter] So, my question is, how do you explain bright people – and there are many – come on, we have to admit this – I talked to your friend, the scientist, Francis Collins, discovered the Human Genome – how does a man go to a lab all day, and then at home, go home and believe in the talking snake? How do you explain that phenomenon?
DAWKINS: Well, Francis Collins didn’t discover the Human Genome. He was the head of the worldwide operation that discovered it. So he was an administrator. He’s a very good scientist, too. But, don’t – don’t say he was the one who discovered the Human Genome. It was a team effort, and he was the administrator who organized it.
MAHER: [overlapping] Okay, but he’s a bright guy.
DAWKINS: Well, yeah, I guess he’s a bright guy. [laughter]…Francis Collins is a much brighter guy than Tony Blair. [laughter] I give him that. [applause] But, when you meet a scientist who claims to be religious, if you say, “Do you really believe in the talking snake,” most of them will say, “No.” Most of them will be religious in a much more nebulous sense than that…but I don’t think you’ll find he believes in the talking snake.
MAHER: I interviewed him and he absolutely does. [laughter]
DAWKINS:He does?!...Well, look, in that case, he goes right down in my estimation. He’s not a bright guy! [laughter] [applause]

This exchange discredits itself on at least two fronts: it is what Prof. Richard Dawkins would call an argument from personal incredulity, and it betrays a lack of Biblical knowledge. The argument from personal incredulity is plain to see, “it’s ridiculous! [laughter] It’s just ridiculous! [applause]…It’s just ridiculous! [laughter]…He’s not a bright guy! [laughter] [applause].” Stating that it is “ridiculous” takes the place of an argument and sends the audience into fits of laughter and applause, no wonder that when Christopher Hitchens appeared on Bill Maher’s show he, as they say in common parlance, flipped off the audience stating, “Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything.” If you have ever had the displeasure of watching Bill Maher’s show you know this to be accurate as trained seals demonstrate more discernment as to what they will clap about—but I digress.

Note also the criteria by which Dr. Collins is judged: sure he was the head of the worldwide operation that discovered the Human Genome but if he believes in a talking snake then he is not a bright guy ([laughter] [applause]). But what if Dr. Collins stated that he believed that life on earth originated when lightning struck a swamp? Or that nothing caused nothing to explode for no reason and made everything for no purpose. Or that there are subatomic particles. Or that 96% of the universe is invisible dark matter. Etc. Well, then he would be a brilliant, enlightened, rational, intellectual, scientifically astute, erudite, respectable guy.

The Vociferous Viper:
Now to the talking snake. Certainly some believe that there was a talking snake but there is no real need to do so. And it would not be due to picking and choosing or embarrassment at the modern and logically fallacious denial of miracles. It is generally understood that the “snake”/”serpent” in the garden was lucifer who came to be known as “that ancient serpent” (Revelation 12:9): “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezekiel28:12), he is told. lucifer, the luminescent one, was referred to as a snake/serpent due to his craftiness and due the root word meaning of “practice divination” or “enchantment”/“enchanter.” This enchanter was told “On your belly you shall go” (Gen 3:14), being brought down from his lofty state (see Ezekiel 28:12-19 and Isaiah 14:11-19).

Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). This being was also told “you shall eat dust” (Genesis 3:14), playing off of Adam being made from dust, “Adam” meaning dustman/earthling. Thus, we see that with a slight understanding of literary devises and greater contexts the story is actually presenting a complex tapestry and has nothing to do with either a negatively inclined “literal” reading like Prof. Richard Dawkins’ and Bill Maher’s and also one that does not call for us to pick, choose or reinterpret—we simply take it as it is intended.

Please note that the preceding was irrelevant because if you say, “The Bible does not necessarily imply a talking snake but it was satan in the Garden.” The response will be, “Satan?!? That’s just ridiculous! [laughter].” Then you continue, “Well, in any case, in the Garden…” “The Garden of Eden?!? That’s just ridiculous! [laughter].” So you say, “Alrighty then, so, God was in the Garden with them and…” “God?!? That’s just ridiculous! [laughter],” et al, etc., ad infinitum (speaking of ridiculous, see my thought on Bill Maher’s upcoming movie “Religulous” here).

The Deathbed Fallacy:

MAHER: And, do you think there’s any chance that when the final hour comes for you, when you’re on your death bed, you might have a second thought and…suddenly get cold feet?
DAWKINS: I tell you what. When I’m on my death bed, I’m going to have a tape recorder switched on, because time and again, people like me are the victims of malicious stories after they’re dead, people saying they had a death-bed conversion when they didn’t. There’s a story that even Darwin had a death-bed conversion, which is a complete lie, but it’s widely believed by – by creationists. And it happens again and again and again. So, I’m going to have witnesses, and I’m going to have a tape recorder switched on. [laughter] [applause] It’s not going to happen.

Prof. Richard Dawkins is premising his comments upon the deathbed fallacy: whether we look forward to laying in our deathbeds and only then repent or, as in this case, to besmirch God one final time, there is no deathbed guarantee for anyone. We may be alive and kicking one moment and nothing but an ex-bio-organism the next.

Ultimately, this statement goes to show, more than anything else, that Prof. Richard Dawkins is absolutely committed to a worldview. He is therefore absolute certainty that the future will hold no discoveries of the supernatural variety, neither scientific nor personal discoveries.


[1] Richard Dawkins, in the comments section of Sam Harris’ article The Politics of Ignorance

Continue reading Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher: The Dynamic Duo of Demonstrably Deleterious Delusion, Part 2...

“Freethought” Camp of Childhood Indoctrination

Please note that this post was moved to Atheism is Dead where it was posted on June 13, 2009 AD
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Bill Maher’s New Atheist Bandwagon

Please note that this post has been moved to Atheism is Dead and posted at this link.





Continue reading Bill Maher’s New Atheist Bandwagon...