Accommodating religion...

I read this article by Chris Stedman today where he makes his case that we should embrace the religious more openly and essentially tries to rally "Atheists" to his common cause of religious apologetics.

He writes: "I have major concerns about the ways many vocal atheists go about trying to accomplish this goal through simplistic, unreasonable criticisms of religion".

Simplistic criticisms are fine; the charge that one has to be a Theologian in order to refute the myths at the core of faith is one which needs kicking into touch. All debaters that I have seen on the pious side, from all faiths, highlight this as a weakness of their Atheist counterpart. Douglas Wilson tried something similar with the late Christopher Hitchens, a man subjected to frequent criticism about his theological qualifications; William Lane Craig attempts as a routine when questioned about Richard Dawkins.

It simply does not require years and years of study to refute the theological propositions. You do not need anything more than the ability to read the Bible itself. Bear in mind that this is a book which has been claimed to have been written by the almighty god - surely such a god would have intended such a book to have been accessible by all of mankind.

There are only a few reasons I can think of why you would need someone to read a book to you.

1. You are blind;

2. You cannot read;

3. You are too young to understand sentence construction and the meaning of individual (and most likely complex) words.

But there is another reason why the Bible has been hijacked by Theologians who claim that all of humanity cannot understand it...

Power.

Tell enough people that they can read something but will never understand it unless they defer to an "expert" is simplest way of creating a hierarchy of influence and power. Illiteracy was the root cause of why people initially fell into this trap. Once people became literate a new way needed to be devised to retain this power structure. Theology degrees simply entered the fray to give a cloak of legitimacy. We now see colleges and universities devoted to Biblical studies and if you're not in with that crowd then you are considered ignorant.

We hear it all the time in Atheist circles.. and it is an often used criticism of the more intellectual proponents of the New Atheist movement.

It's what's known as an Ad Verecundiam fallacy; an appeal to authority. It doesn't work because 'authorities' are wrong about a number of things. So we can ignore Stedman's plea about not using simplistic tools to berate religion because it's not needed. Religion is not owed a living by any of us. including the faithful. This sort of accommodation of religion puts Atheists on the back foot immediately where there is no need to concede ground. 

If you can read and write and talk... these are the only tools required to criticise religion. Simple or not, it doesn't matter. It is the claims of the pious that require examination. Do not let people say that you need some sort of specialist knowledge to refute the claims made within the Bible or any other religious book. It's nonsense and a grab for the higher ground in the debate.

Is there a good way for Atheists to become active? Not really. All methods of interaction will work on some level. Whether this is taking the piss or taking part in debates; all are equally valid routes to challenging nonsense and bullshit. We just have to think about the claims that religious people make... and then tackle each case individually. 

More importantly, we do not need to mobilise Atheists at all or become activists. This is because Atheism is simply a position of rejection. We do not have groups mobilising to press home the point that unicorns are imaginary or that fairies are not living at the bottom of the garden (maybe I spoke too soon?)

Sam Harris puts it like this:

If religion is interfering with state politics, your activism comes from being a "Secularist". Even religious people can be secularists, and indeed should be, for if a religion opposite to the one they subscribe to is given prominence in politics you'll have a lot of unhappy people, discrimination and would pave the way to a totalitarian state. We can discuss which states currently exist in this way but there's no need; I would hope we can all think of at least three without going into such detail.

Thus Stedman's article falls apart because it;s based on the Composition fallacy and Fallacy of Moderation that Atheists are a distinct group of people with the same goal, and thus should behave in a coordinated way, and that there is a middle position to be assumed by accommodating religion by "understanding" it in the same way as a theologian would.

Sorry, this is a very odd form of religious apologetics. There is a totalitarian backbone to religion and it demands both service and closed lips; they'll have neither from me and I'm not going to play their game. And I don't particularly care if my own style of criticism is considered unpalatable, controversial etc. I write what I write because I hope that people see the same ridiculous things I do. I don't have a huge audience (just under 2000 a month) but that's enough for me to know I am getting some sort of message out there.

It's quite simple for me; either religion gets it's act together and provides some evidence for its very grandiose claims or it should get out of government, education and philosophy. I do not believe that it belongs in any of those fields of discourse. Religions belong to the annuls of history and nothing more. 

I also noticed an article by Alain de Botton in the Guardian where he wrote:

The second paragraph contradicts the first. He says that there was a warmth and joviality in the celebration of Christmas, the idea that the warmth and fun of the occasion helped him enjoy the occasion more than he thought. He then goes on to say that it should be possible to take some of the religious ideas of family, celebration, warmth etc into the secular realm.

Well that would be all well and good but the celebration of the Winter Solstice preceded the Christian traditions we are now accosted with on a yearly basis. The Winter Solstice itself created many, if not all, of the traditions we associate with "having a good un". It's also interesting that de Booton says that despite adopting Christmas sentimentality in his own household that he has not yet gone so far as to having a tree; almost as if this would force his entrenchment into the Christian faith further. But, again, the tree is another Pagan tradition.

I also cannot ignore his comment that "God may be dead"... almost as if he was ever alive in the first place. This is peculiar talk for a so called "Atheist" but it goes to show that "Atheism" itself is divergent and indiscriminate. However, people like de Booton simply give the Christians too much credence for the season...

Accommodating religion simply continues the façade.

Not without a Hitch

He preferred to be called "Hitch", which brought back memories of his own Father's nickname, but you would be given a cold stare and a harsh rebuke were to you shorten his first name "Christopher".

What seems irrational frustration with the removal of letters from a surname being acceptable but not for a first name is part of what made Hitch an enigma of our time. A person with a resolute belief in propriety but not afraid to step away from convention when the need suited. And thus people were never always certain where they stood with him as demonstrated by his fervent argument in favour of the Iraq War. For a "wet liberal lefty" to have agreed with George Bush's crusade into the Middle East with all of the religious and right wing baggage that accompanied it, it left people like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky incredulous.

But then Hitch wanted nothing more than for people to be continually surprised. He had been doing it all of his life. He was considered, by both friends and enemies, of being a supreme intellect; a person who was articulate, spoke with great force and wit and had a ready accessible library in his head which would send shivers down the spine of his opponents in debate. He could, quite literally, destroy a person with his rancour, concessions and rebuttals.

But he left university with a third class degree. This demonstrates the point perfectly that it's not always "who you know" in the world that gets you somewhere because clearly Hitch was only able to sustain his long career based upon "what he knew". It also demonstrates that a university degree classification demonstrates nothing about a person's potential or ability to apply knowledge and passion to a career.

There is not a lot unique that people can write about Hitch but I hope the above "eulogy" has been something different from the various endorsements that are permeating the blogosphere. All are worthy reads.

What has been interesting is that as soon as Hitch's book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" started trending on Twitter (#godisnotgreat) there were a gluttony of posts from some religious fruitcakes clearly unable to recognise that the trend was not some random phenomena started by some godless heretics but was the vehicle by which people could communicate common sympathy for the death of a person of great significance.

What was surprising, or which should not have been really as the book in question documented the history of religious irrationality, was the violence espoused by the "Religious Twitterati" in response to the hashtag.

Here is a selection rounded up by others...

These comments speak for themselves of course. What was even more surprising, but again should be expected, is the people wishing to profit from the death of Hitch:

These "psychic readings", attached to the Hitch hashtag, contain a level of crassness that is difficult to fathom. But people need to make a living right?

Ok, well the ultimate challenge befalls any psychic who entertains the spirit of Hitch because the level of eloquence needed to prove to any skeptic that they are in Hitch's presence would be incredible. Hitch was one of the most incredible speakers with a breadth of knowledge and a witty repertoire that is not really found anywhere else.

If psychics can truly speak to the dead, and they claim they are speaking to Hitch, they will need to do more than say "I'm sensing the letter "C"" and warble on about how existence is so much better not being in pain blah, blah, blah...

What sort of information could Hitch bring back? Certainly more than telling his family that he loves them very much. I wonder if we will see any attempts to contact Hitch. And if a medium was able to channel his spirit what sort of information would they need to convey to make us believe that he was really in touch? Hitch was one of the most entertaining orators of his generation (and no doubt many others). Unless they were genuinely in touch with his spirit, a medium would need a level of intellect and readily accessible knowledge that I doubt they possess. I might be wrong and the option is there for a significant script to be learned. It's up to the skeptic community to critique this should it ever happen. I'm hoping that someone isn't crass enough to try but judging by the touting for business on the back of the #godisnotgreat hashtag, don't be surprised.

And what about that religious fruitcake Rick Warren who thinks homosexuality is a sin and not a viable lifestyle? He had this to say...

This is the Christian "I told you so". Rick Warren was the guy who invoked Pascal's Wager during a debate with Sam Harris in his closing comments:

"We're both betting. He's betting his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right, he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble."

Rick Warren is basically a guy rolling dice with faith. He doesn't seem to get that he could well be wrong about the god he believes in and that any god who accepted his reasons for believing (which essentially rests on the turn of a card) would be a god of immense stupidity (or naivety). Any god who is omnipotent would know that Warren is taking such a bet and wasn't really into the faith. After all, it's just a bet. A win-win for the theist?

It wouldn't surprise me if the faith fruitcakes end up with some crazy theories about a deathbed conversion; they did it with Darwin, for example, and most recently with Anthony Flew (but in realtime)... if you hear or read about such stories, Hitch has left a memo:

I'm sure if anyone would have been sympathised with for turning to Pascal's Wager, it would have been a person in Hitch's position. Death is something we all face and we do not know how we will react when the time comes. I am with Hitch on this and there will be no recanting from me. Therefore the pious should stop using Pascal's Wager full stop as some sort of argument.

In fact it's intellectually repugnant for any faith head to use Pascal's Wager in anyone's presence but if they do just laugh because they are ascribing a level of stupidity to the deity they are placing on a galactic pedestal.

They commit the ultimate insult to their idea of god, their faith and their own intellect.

Seriously, just laugh.

There are many more comments which I could have included from the brainless to the disgusting. You will find them if you only scan twitter for a brief moment. Share the ones which make you laugh, rip apart the ones which are logically flawed and keep a cool, rational head with the ones which are offering a violent retort to the hashtag. Hitch would do no more, no less were he faced with this situation.

Hitch did not, to my knowledge, use Twitter. He never needed to. However, it is a medium which is immensely useful for spreading ideas. Millions of people use it, millions of people probably follow a god of sorts. These people can see what is being written. It is up to the Atheists and Agnostics to offer not so much an alternative to the violent remarks but a Zeitgeist; we need to show that responding with reason and skeptical rationality is the only way to approach such a situation. This in turn will help others realise we are not evil and cruel but fair and critical of bad ideas.

I'll leave you with this:

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer

EDIT:

This is one of the poignant blogs I was talking about above:

http://hayleyisaghost.co.uk/2011/12/16/god-is-not-great/

Please read it. It's extremely honest and heartfelt.

Collective Worship Morons Out In Force

The hot potato topic right now in the world of theological nonsense is Collective Worship. If you have been following the news here in Britain you will know that:

"Almost two thirds of parents questioned said their child did not attend a form of communal worship at school, such as a Christian assembly. The duty on schools to provide a daily act of Christian worship dates back to 1944 but was strengthened in the 1988 education act."

It seems the furore, if we can even call it that, is the issue of Headteachers breaking the law in not ensuring that their assemblies are of a "broadly Christian character". It's all a red herring of course; it's a simple effect of the incompatibility of the Labour multi-cultural initiative and the CofE school system.

Back in 2004 it was revealed that 60% of school students at Sir John Cass Foundation and Red Coat Church of England secondary school in London's East End came from a Bangladeshi background. How can a law be expected to be enforced against people of a different religion?

More importantly, there seems to be a growing understanding of the irrelevancy of Christian dogma, and religion in general, in which the lawmakers need to take into account in amending the legislation.

I'll accept the very weak argument that exists that the original law was there to take into account the cultural significance of Christianity in Britain. I cannot accept, on any terms, that there continues to be a cultural reason why the law should prevail in its current form or in any form which recognises religion. I have to admit it would be amusing to see an assembly about the moral virtues provided by the Flying Spaghetti Monster though.

And the ridiculous thing is that if religion remained within the scope of the Act then assemblies on Pastafarianism would have to be accounted for.

And so we turn to the morons... as ever with this issue you get the odd nutjob preaching and pouting. I've assembled a few here from the Daily Fail Mail:

Good ole' Brother Anthony (I don't know him) feels that "virtually everyone can agree that the 10 Commandments... form the basis of any civilised society." 

Really? 

Take a look at the 10 Commandments... only 3, perhaps 4, would form the basis of any civilised society (I'll cover this another time). I suspect that Brother Anthony hasn't read them properly. But this ignorance is contagious...

It would be funny to hear a school assembly explaining how the first 3 commandments were designed with Yahweh in mind... this renders the commentators argument at the end that Christian values and the belief in god are not inseparable pretty much redundant. In teaching the Christian values, derived from the 10 commandments, they are effectively telling people their belief in other gods is wrong. I'm surprised other religious figures have not risen up against such inequality... or it might be that this would be like punching yourself in the face considering the proliferation of faith schools in Britain.

This person performs a double strawman in one sentence! Firstly, Sam Harris remarked that "Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma."

And how is "quality of life" and "Atheism" in any way linked in this context? Secular societies improve the quality of a persons life. But a "secular society" is not "Atheist" in this sense; it simply has no position on them at all. They are not even agnostic.

You can't tell that to people like Ed West who calls the National Secular Societies attempts to drive religion out of public life as "Atheist bigotry"... I'll have to dissect that nonsense another time?

Even Christianity Today acknowledges that "Highly secularized Scandinavian countries consistently rank high on international well-being and life-satisfaction indices... The world's great religions speak of caring for the sick, the poor, and the orphaned, and of practicing mercy and goodwill toward fellow humans, yet these traits are often more evident in the world's least religious nations."

British society does not seem to suffer considering the lack of belief in Zeus or Thor; neither should it suffer from the lack of belief in the Christian god. 

When you are in a theological debate like this, you tend to come across Pascals Wager - put simply, it's the "threat" (for want of a better word) that you'll be judged one day so you had better hedge your bets just in case.

It's such an infantile argument, I'll welcome any persons comment challenging me as to its usefulness in any debate. Just know that I have "plasma TV's" and "glorious modern technology" on my side.

This looks innocuous at first glance but I think it's the most incredulous, stupid, inane, tenuous and bullshittty of all comments I have read today.

Bear in mind the topic this person is commenting on - the law being broken by headteachers who refuse collective worship assemblies of a broadly Christian character - and you should see (hopefully) how mind numbingly stupid this person is.

In her words, "your children have a right to learn about god"; just so long as it's the Christian god referred to in the law yeah?

In any case, children do not have a right to learn about god. That's insane. It's like saying that they have a right to learn about Poseidon and Ananke and Pontus and Vishnu and... ad infinitum.

How many other gods do children have a "right to know about" from the recycling and refuse bins of religious history? I imagine if you taught children enough about Horus and Zoroaster, Mithras, Attis and Dionysus-Bacchus they might well leave their lessons thinking that Jesus was somehow a carbon copy of these other myths... and that wouldn't be no good for the CofE would it?

Actually, let's enforce collective worship and change the law so that every religion has to have a snippet read and in equal measures. 

We should have a fully secular society within around 5 - 15 years and a culture more adept at critical thinking.

Religion

I'm an atheist.

I'm supposedly one of the more "evil" and "immoral" persons in society (http://bit.ly/1aYDZ8) as a result of declaring that the holy books written during the Bronze Age might not be the best guide for living a moral life and that the claim to be written by a divine being is laughable.

The term atheist itself can be used in a derogative sense these days which is why prominent "new atheists" like Dr. Sam Harris discard the label by quite rightly pointing out:

"I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion" (http://bit.ly/Z2cGx)

Religion is simply man's first attempt at philosophy. People in the early days carried a fear of earthquakes, volcanoes, lightning storms, horrendous rain, tsunamis etc. These events carried no rational explanation when you are lying in the dirt with a 3 month old lifeless corpse in your arms. Imagine that you are one of an enlightened few in your tribe who was able to move away from an area afflicted by "mother nature" and thus see the expansion of your people in the next few years. Imagine the prosperity gained from a few years with no violent setbacks? How much weight would this person's opinion carry with the rest of the tribe? How much value would people have put upon this person as an authority? What supernatural powers would this person be able to claim?

How many times have we heard of a messiah in these Bronze Age times? We think, particularly in the Western world, that one such Messiah appeared some 2000 years ago in a backward, illiterate, Middle Eastern country and save the entire world (unintentionally missing out all of the countries that were not known to exist at that time like Australia, the Americas, all of the Atlantic and Pacific Islands, Antarctica etc). The Old Testament contained some prophecies about this Messiah and though many came before him Jesus was the most prominent simply because the symbol of the cross was used in battle by Emperor Constantine and, it just so happened, that the battle was won. This "luck" transferred into the adoption of the Christian religion across the Roman Empire and a few hundred years of darkness followed.

I do not need to point out to a Christian the absurdity of their belief system - that a man arose from the dead and you can too if you eat his flesh and drink his blood - but they will frequently explain why your own philosophy is wrong and especially when you don't want them to (http://bit.ly/lq2fKj). Christians should simply look at other religions and how odd their beliefs are. Then they should examine exactly how they reject the belief in gods/theologies which contradict their own. They should apply the power of reason and rationality to decide on what tenets of the faith they reject completely. They should then look at their own theology and work out exactly why someone of the other faith would reject it.

The faithful, it's worth pointing out, are Atheistic towards every other religion except their own. I simply go one god further.

it's ok to be an atheist... everybody is one