So with some encouragement from a close friend I’m trying to avoid the “angry atheist” presentation I often have. I’m going to work for the very difficult balance of trying to show how illogical and silly it is to maintain these superstitious beliefs, but without being offensive about it.

I’m especially going to focus on the fact that moral structures are not bad, i.e. raising up a family with “family values” is not bad, or having time for thanks, or eating meals together or being respectful to elders. All these things are part of religion, and I am going to try and stress that I am not against them, and that they are not the problem.

Most importantly, I agree with my friend that running around being overtly offensive is NOT the way to influence anyone. The question is how can we balance this with my belief that supernatural beliefs like those taught in mainstream religions are ultimately harmful? How can you do both?

Anyway, here’s an excellent video of Sam Harris, who is one of the most eloquently blunt proponents of the “belief is dangerous” position. The question is: can someone have his approach and be non-offensive at the same time? I hope so. I’m going to shoot for it.

When debating someone who believes in the fundamental components of the Christian narrative, i.e. the choice by man to eat the apple, the fall, original sin, and the subsequent return to God, I choose to focus not on the specifics but rather on the first and most important events. These are the creation of man, and man’s choice to eat of the tree of knowledge.

1. Why did God create man? Why does an omnipotent and omniscient being create us in the first place? Did he want companionship? Was he bored? Was he curious as to the limits of his own powers? None of these explanations fit with an all-knowing and all-powerful being. Something there has to be missing in order to desire to create such a lowly and fragile life form in the first place.

2. Why create man with a desire for anything other than God? Quite simply, if the purpose of man is to love God, then why not create him just to do that, and with no desire to do something else?

3. Even worse than creating man to desire something else (step 2), why create an perfect source of that which he desires (the tree of knowledge) and then create a third actor (Lucifer) to taunt him into making the wrong choice? Is this not the very definition of “set up for failure”?

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die. — Genesis 2:17

The Free Will Gambit

Seeing that this is horribly illogical, all Christians are trained to fall back on the specious argument of free will. The idea is that despite the fact that God put everything in place for man to fail, he also gave man free will. So he had the option to choose correctly, and he should therefore have made the right choice.

This is absurd.

Let’s try another, scaled-down version of this experiment that will prove how silly this concept really is. Sit a two-year-old in a high chair with candy on one side of their tray and spinach on the other side, and stand back with an open hand.

If the baby reaches for the candy, slap the hell out of it.

Ah, but that’s not fair because…..why? Because babies are programmed by evolution to prefer sweet tastes, so it’s unfair to ask them to choose the right one because it’s not as pleasurable?

Ok, here’s a better question: who determines what tastes good and what doesn’t?

Right, God does. And who determined how attractive the tree of knowledge was to man in the garden? Right, God did. And who decides how attractive “loving God instead”, i.e. “spinach” was to man at that very moment in the garden? Right again–God.

So if God controls all the variables, where’s the free will?

Desires > Free Will: The Well Scenario

Free will is subservient to the strength of natural desires. If I just spent three days in a well, with no food or water, when I get rescued I have the choice to a) drink water and eat food, or b) go ride a bike. Are those equal choices for your supposedly “free” will?

Or how about you have the same well scenario, but this time you have two options when you get out: a) consume food and water, or b) go help the homeless at your local shelter. Oh, you’d choose food and water? Selfish. You had the option–help others or indulge your own dark desires. You chose wrong.

It’s the same in the garden. Here’s what God essentially offered:

You can either a) stay with your creator in love an harmony forever, or you can go with Satan and Eve to Earth, where you’ll learn about a billion interesting and naughty things (which I programmed you to find attractive). Oh, but if you choose the one that I designed you to find irresistible (and that I hired Satan to seduce you towards), I’ll punish you…

It’s the choice at the well all over again. God determines the strength of every single one of your desires. Is it your “choice”, as a man, to find platinum blonde women attractive? Is it your “choice” to like the taste of steak or beer?

Or, even better, assuming you’re a heterosexual male, could you decide to be gay right now? Could you exercise your free will and simply choose to like men instead of women? No, not really. So how much of a choice is it, really, when you’re asked whether you want to have sex with an attractive woman or an attractive man? Where is your free will when the directions and strengths of your desires are determined for you?

So I ask again: if God controlled all of the following in the garden…

• The attractiveness of staying with God
• The attractiveness of the tree of knowledge
• The seductiveness of Lucifer
• The gullibility of Eve
• How likely Adam would be to do what Eve had already done

…and we all agree that God did control these things…how did man really make a choice at all?

Simple answer: he didn’t.

Lucky for us the story isn’t true at all. It’s nothing more than one of thousands of these highly similar narratives created by man throughout history. 99% of the world accepts that 99% of the other nearly identical stories are completely untrue, so it’s only a matter of time before we clear up that last 1%.:

Links

[ Fiction Based on Fiction | dmiessler.com ]
[ Free Will: The Necessary Delusion | dmiessler.com ]

Safety first: that’s what I always say.

[ Neocon Double Standards | arktimes.com ]

Image from assassindolphin

No, I’m not about to link to an Onion article. I wish I were. This is, unfortunately, real. This is the hockey Mom who’s disturbingly likely to be one bad medical visit from the White House.

A pastor named Philip Munger has been following Palin for a while now, and has had numerous encounters with her over the years in Alaska. Here’s a clip from a Salon.com article about one such interaction:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.‘

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.‘”

Let’s review:

1. Thinks the earth is less than 7,000 years old, i.e. creationist. Check.
2. Thinks Jesus is coming back in her lifetime. Check.

And now we see the picture. It’s no wonder she wants to play rough with Iran and Russia—she doesn’t give a fuck what they do. If they get pissed off and start a nuclear war, no worries. Jesus will swoop in and save the believers anyway.

I like atheists in charge of the nukes—or at least people with a somewhat secular view of the world. It’s important to think that THIS existence is important when wielding the influence and weapons that can bring it to an end.:

Many of my friends who are still somewhat religious despite being freethinkers see the benefits of rejecting ideologies that are untrue, but they wonder what will fill the void. They wonder what you’re supposed to…believe in once you truly shed all superstition.

How do you go on? What do you base your life on? What gives you meaning? Why even get up in the morning? Because they lack answers to these questions they cling to a nerfed and sanitized version of the faith they were injected with as children.

Image from secularhumanism.org

Well, here’s an alternative. The following principles are the basis of Secular Humanism, a life stance that I find to be extraordinary in its ability to capture how I, and most other freethinkers I know, view the world.

The Principles of Secular Humanism

Here’s the list from secularhumanism.org.

• We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.
• We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
• We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.
• We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.
• We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.
• We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.
• We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
• We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.
• We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.
• We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
• We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.
• We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.
• We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.
• We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.
• We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.
• We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.
• We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.
• We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
• We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.
• We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
• We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

Here’s a shorter list of tenets from Wikipedia’s Secular Humanism article:

• Need to test beliefs – A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
• Reason, evidence, scientific method – A commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
• Fulfillment, growth, creativity – A primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
• Search for truth – A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
• This life – A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
• Ethics – A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
• Building a better world – A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.

Discussion

So, what does this system lack in terms of a replacement for religious belief? It lacks the completely unfounded tenet that we’ll live forever. The idea that somehow, despite no evidence to support it, we will continue on after we die.

As many before me have pointed out, this fantasy does not improve life here on Earth. life is even more beautiful because it’s temporary. It makes beautiful things that much more beautiful, and it makes things like war and hatred that much more unbearable.

So, to all my friends still struggling with beliefs that they are unable to shake despite knowing they’re not true, I ask you to look into this. The odds are that it captures your belief system quite well.:

Links

[ Secular Humanism | wikipedia.org ]
[ Council for Secular Humanism | secularhumanism.org ]

First, go read it.

Now, let’s look at what the extremely well-written piece actually said. I think it said to forget about all that crazy Bible stuff (if it seems wrong to you), and just be nice to each other.

Brilliant.

But why not forget about it all together? The only reason the Bible endures is that most people are too weak and stupid to build their own morality without the leverage of an other-worldly threat. And that’s depressing.

They read the Bible, embrace and evangelize the nice parts, and either ignore the filth or sign it off to an angry God that we cannot challenge with our puny little minds. This piece encourages people to do that, which is why I don’t like it.

It claims, in a light-hearted way, to actually know what God thinks of the Bible. It claims to speak with God’s voice in saying, “I don’t know what I was thinking with all that crazy stuff. Just do the good stuff.”

Which translates to, “If something sounds wrong to you, you have permission from God to ignore it. And if it sounds right to you, it’s the word of God.” In a world with 6 billion people and a metric shit-ton of weapons, this is a bad way to go.

Humans thinking they know the mind of the creator of the universe are dangerous. They might not be dangerous themselves individually, but what they teach is itself harmful. Whenever one group “knows” what God thinks, and another group goes against that thing, you know have justified violence.

Just look around at the most religious parts of the world. The problem is one group’s opinion that they have the REAL inside track, and that the other group is wrong. It’s so utterly obvious, people. Wake the fuck up.:

Image from sketchesofexistence

Let me get this straight. You think the Creator of the Universe cares personally about your life, and that you know, with absolute certainty, what he wants for all of humankind.

I, on the other hand, think that we’re basically alone, not very special, and are just fumbling through our random existence trying to do the best we can.

And I’m the arrogant one?

This seems like some random funny audio clip of a psychopath or con artist. It’s not. It’s the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar religion. Scientology.

Listen to it. It’s Hubbard explaining his fantasy scam in his own words.

And somebody send it to Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Will Smith.

[ Hubbard Acting Like a Lunatic ]

This is for the people who believe in God, and believe in the power of prayer.

The next time you have the urge to pray for someone I want you to try something. I want you to offer something to them. I want you to make a pact with God regarding your life and the life of the person in need.

Say these words:

Take from me, and give to him.

And here’s what I want you to offer:

1. Offer to not get your raise at work this year
2. Offer to have a powerful enemy at work who hurts your reputation
3. Offer a reduction in title and pay
4. Offer to be fired and to struggle financially for six months
5. Offer to grapple with a horrible disease
6. Offer to never truly be respected by those you love
7. Offer to die early and never achieve your goals
8. Offer to never attain happiness in your life

In other words, on a scale equal to your offering, give of yourself something that you desire greatly — something that God has the ability to take from you. Give it in exchange for the thing you’re asking for, on behalf of that person you’re trying to help.

For example:

Take from me the promotion I’ve been working for for two years, in exchange for giving that man a stable job to take care of his family.

But do this with belief. Do this knowing that God will really take it.

I’ve done this a few times myself throughout my life as a believer. And I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I’ve done it even after being an atheist. I offer to the universe, sort of, but a universe that has the ability to make the trade. I have not done it recently because I’ve been too selfish, and too cynical, as of late.

But I do it as a believer, so I don’t offer much. It’s amazing what happens to your willingness to give via prayer when the gift is coming from your own prosperity. I have in the past, but only a few times, offered much of my future success in return for the easing of suffering of someone. I was very moved at the time, and it was an honest offering. As a selfish person I hope it wasn’t accepted, but to this day I wouldn’t revoke it if given the knowledge that it was real.

And that’s my challenge to believers: rise at least to the height of this morally deprived atheist. Put something behind your prayers. Offer something of yourself. It’s too easy to ask that someone receive a hundred bundles of happiness if not a single one is coming out of your own stockpile.

Offer gifts from your own finite supply, and see if you are as generous.: