The Atheist Blogger

Today’s article was written by Luis Dias, a blog subscriber.

Christians and other religious people often use the moral argument not only as evidence of a deity, but also as a philosophical weapon against atheism, and the argument, though never made explicit, implicitly goes as follows:

• God is the Creator of Morals
• Atheists deny existence of God, therefore
• The atheists’ utopia is an amoral society

They obviously cite Stalin and Pol Pot’s example to strengthen this idiocy. Further more, they say, without a divine reference, an infinite guardian of values of right and wrong, atheists are left dumbfounded and such a godless society eventually recedes to the stone age, and this is where they even bring the 2nd law of thermodynamics and equate it to the theology of the original sin (!)

Apart from the implicit circular reasoning of it which could be teleported to any kind of silly argument, like for instance:

• God is the Creator of milk
• Atheists deny the existence of God, therefore
• There’s nothing stopping “milk” of degenerating to a poison. (remember the 2nd law!!)
• Milk isn’t poison, therefore God exists, QED.

It’s a very popular fallacy. I’ll generalize it to make the mistake even clearer:

• God is the sole structure of all things
• Atheists deny the existence of God
• Absent the sole structure, the cosmos collapses instantly

This would only be true if, and only if, there wouldn’t be any other structure lying around unknown or just plainly ignored by theists that make sure that things don’t fall apart, but rather, thrive and evolve. In fact, there is nothing but hearsay to prove that God is indeed such structure.

In the fairy tale world, morals would exist apart from humans, eternally defined by God, and humans would only discover (not invent) a few bits about it from now and then because of God’s good will. Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever to the existence of these morals outside of human existence. It’s only perfectly reasonable to affirm that morals are man’s made, just like potatoes, lemons and cows are. The key word to all this is of course Evolution. There’s a reason why Dawkins is constantly evoking Darwin’s work as the most extraordinary idea ever made, and that’s because it works on almost every process that has time to generate new iterations and death to kill the bad ones. This is true in life’s evolution, it’s true on the artificial selection of the animals and vegetables that were evolved to fit our own tastes and biological needs, but it is also true in the ideas that mankind evolved.

Morality is among these ideas. The only ingredients you’ll ever need to generate morals are:

• A somewhat intelligent species
• Time
• Death

Natural Selection does the rest. It probably begins when people realize other people’s death and suffering and are able to understand that it isn’t exactly the kind of thing they desire for themselves. If they see a murder or a theft, they are able to think “what if it was against me?”, and the Golden Rule begins to generate and evolve by itself. People don’t kill because they recognize other’s as equals to them and don’t like the idea of being killed. Same as theft, treating others well, lying, etc. A society that foster these ideas thrives, the ones who don’t end up collapsing on their own.

Usually, people admire how well the world is aligned according to our needs, but the real reason isn’t obvious, due to our limited lifespan, which is that We live upon the shoulders of our ancestors’ hard work and struggle to build the structures of our world, and upon the failures of those seeking destruction, greed, and malice.

Natural Selection isn’t perfect and it won’t always choose the best option. It will choose what survives. No wonder then that irrational beliefs are just as common as the Golden Rule. One common trait is to define a certain “characteristic” of the perpetrator and generalize that people who share these characteristics are certainly just as bad, as in “The murderer killed because he was black, let’s get rid of blacks”. We can all recognize this racism, “This society suffers in the hands of the Jews”, or more subtle examples, as in “That for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”, from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The underlying message is clear, either you people bow down to God or you are eventually bound to become manic psychopaths.

Fortunately though, there is another idea that tries to really discern what’s better and what’s worse faster than Natural Selection or Religion will ever do. It’s called Reason. It dispenses with all the fairy tales and all the myths of our history. It fuels itself out of reality, to observe what is going on, to measure it, to hypothesize, test and conclude. It fuels itself from debate, battle of ideas, and a passion to discover the truth, humility and patience.

As a bonus, I leave you with other very interesting lines from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which I am sure will provoke a healthy discussion ;).

• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”
• “Thus the Greeks of classical times were in moral questions influenced rather by non-religious conceptions such as that of aidos (natural shame) than by fear of the gods; while one great religious system, namely Buddhism, explicitly taught the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God. To these arguments we reply, first: that the savages of today are not primitives, but degenerates. It is the merest superstition to suppose that these degraded races can enlighten us as to what were the beliefs of man in his primitive state. It is among civilized races, where man has developed normally, that we must seek for knowledge as to what is natural to man.”
• “that for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”
• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”

Sorry for the late announcement, but I’ll have to postpone the online discussion of Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon Haunted World” until Tuesday 2nd September. That gives everyone an extra 3 days with the book in case they need to finish the final chapter!

I need to get up early tomorrow as I am attending my dad’s wedding, and so I won’t be online to oversee the book club meeting tonight. I’ll be back in action on the 2nd, and if I get access to a computer before then I will update everyone with information. Hopefully I’ll be able to set up a vote for October’s book on the 1st.

Ray Comfort, who recently changed his blog name to “Atheist Central”, has revealed he is writing a new book. It will have a chapter on atheism, and he wanted to know a few things:

I have a new book coming out soon. There will be a chapter on atheism. Tell me, what do atheists (officially) believe about:

God:

The Bible:

Heaven & Hell:

Sin:

Salvation:

Jesus:

Firstly, unlike Christianity we don’t have a doctrine telling us what to believe, so I can only answer the first of that list definitively. The others are down to personal beliefs, and I shall define my own.

God: All atheists disbelieve in all gods.

The Bible: I think the Bible is simply a book of stories and rules, written by man. It has no divine meaning (see above point about God). It was written to try and explain the unexplainable, but also to control people and make them easier to govern, using the threat of death and hellfire. In a modern society it should not be taken literally at all.

Heaven & Hell: I do not believe in either because I don’t think there is any valid reason why we would have an afterlife. However, I know some atheists who do believe in an “afterlife” of sorts, citing that the conscious mind could go on after death. I don’t think any atheists believe in Heaven & Hell in the Biblical perspective, because it goes against the point about God (again, see above).

Sin: I do not believe there is such a thing as sin, mainly because I do not believe that the Bible is anything other than a load of stories. If there is sin, then there must be moral absolutes, which do not exist because our stance on morality has changed over time. Homosexuality was originally thought of as fine, then the Christians decided it was evil, and now most of us think it is fine again. A continually evolving morality does not have sin, unless the sin were to evolve with it, which makes the entire point of it useless.

Salvation: Seeing as I do not believe in an afterlife, the concept of salvation seems ridiculous and unnecessary to me.

Jesus: Whether Jesus existed or not we may never know. I have mixed opinions on the subject. If he did exist then I think he was probably a very good teacher, who had interesting philosophies. If he claimed to be the Son of God then I would think he was mentally unstable, and probably got a load of followers the same way modern day “messiahs” like Michael Travesser do.

So there you go Ray, I have answered your questions. Feel free to put my answers in your book. My only demands are that I am fully cited (the entire url to my blog post in a footnote or something), and if possible, a free copy of your book when it comes out. You can contact me here.

Freethoughtpedia is meant to be an encyclopedia for free-thought related things, such as atheism. Their article on atheism however, is filled with misconceptions and wrong definitions.

They firstly define atheism as a “lack of belief in a deity” when the universally accepted definition is that of “disbelief in gods” (note the singular vs plural). They use this definition to make the following case:

Likewise a Christian may be a strong atheist towards the Hindu gods.

This is a massive error in a definition. It is true that Christians are strong disbelievers in the Hindu gods, but that does not make them atheists. You cannot be both a Christian and an atheist because Christians are theists, and the two are incompatible. Atheism rejects all gods, not specific ones.

The next misconception is the one that being agnostic means you are “not sure” about the existence of gods. However, they take it to the max with this paragraph.

Furthermore, agnosticism is a type of atheism. Mainstream media and many people will rarely make note of this because many choose to use the term agnostic to describe their lack of belief due to the negative connotations the media associates with the term atheist, but technically agnostics are atheists: You cannot believe in something you are not sure exists!

Agnosticism is not a type of atheism. It does not cover disbelief in the existence of gods, it covers whether or not the existence of gods can be known. For instance, if I were to claim that outside reality (the universe as we know it) there existed a fairy cake, you would have to be agnostic about it. There is no way currently that we can see what is outside reality (or if indeed there is an outside), so you cannot either prove or disprove my statement. The same applies to God. Since God is supposedly unseen and unobservable, we cannot detect it, and so one must remain agnostic about it to be rational.

The second thing that should be noted about this paragraph is that you can believe in something if you aren’t sure it exists. Knowledge implies belief, not the other way around. Knowledge is often considered a subset of belief, mainly because it is the result of rational justified belief. To have knowledge you must first believe it to be true, otherwise it just wouldn’t work. However, you can believe in something without having knowledge of it. This is precisely how science works. If scientists simply gave up believing in their theories because they hadn’t got enough evidence to prove them, then we wouldn’t get anywhere.

Technology works on the same premise. People look at a current system / product and say “I believe I could do better than that”. They then go away, start thinking about how to approach the design / implementation, and eventually come up with a better system / product.

There are some that claim you can be an “agnostic theist“, implying someone believes in gods but recognizes that the knowledge of gods’ existence may or will never be known. While this is technically true, we are unaware of any practical use of such a term, as the generic definition of [deist] seems to fit that bill.

They manage to get a correct definition of agnosticism into their argument against agnostic theism which seems a bit bizarre, not to mention contradictory. There are plenty of people who are agnostic theists, and an argument from ignorance isn’t going to work for an encyclopedia. As for the definition of a deist, it is simply a person who believes that there is a god (or gods) but they have no control over the universe. They simply created it and for whatever reason do not (or cannot) control anything in it. These people are not theists, and whether they are agnostic or gnostic about their beliefs depends on whether they think the evidence for such a god is available.

I think the idea of a freethoughtpedia is great. As long as sources are cited and proper definitions are used. Free-thought means you do not subscribe to any doctrines. Dictionaries do not count as doctrines, neither do any form of research paper. Use them. At the moment, freethoughtpedia looks more like conservapedia than wikipedia, and everyone knows which of those is the more reliable…

I’ve been involved in a few discussions recently over the subject of blasphemy. Not the “I don’t believe in gods” blasphemy, but the kind that people use when they are upset, angry, of even happy. I’ll give a few examples:

• “Thank God!” (usually said when happy and something has gone your way, or when you are relieved)
• “For God’s sake!” (usually said when upset/angry/frustrated)
• “Jesus Christ!” (usually said when angry)
• “Goddammit!” (usually said when angry)
• “God Bless You!” or “Bless You!” (usually said after someone sneezes)

I’m pretty sure I have said all of these at some point during my life, even as an atheist. I do try to cut down on them or substitute in more “atheistic” swears instead. The reason being that I don’t want to go around saying I am an atheist and then start swearing as if I believe in God.

I haven’t got perfect swears yet, but here are my atheist versions of the above.

• “Thank goodness!” or “Thank fuck!” (I see nothing wrong with thanking human goodness, even if it is just a vague concept. Same goes for thanking our method of reproduction/recreation)
• “For fucks sake” or “For FSM’s sake” (the latter I use mainly online since getting it into normal conversation is a bit tricky, what with the amount of syllables and the fact that nobody I seem to say it to knows what an “FSM” is.
• “Jeez” (Not the best alternative swear available I admit)
• “Darn it!” (Darning is a sowing technique, so you get double points for saying it in a situation where you have just poked a needle through your finger)
• As for the last one, I am properly confused. The whole history around the “God Bless You” statement apparently derives from people thinking that sneezing was fatal and that anyone sneezing would die. These days, even though we know that sneezing isn’t fatal, we still have to say something or it appears that we are being impolite. This presents a few problems. Changing it to “Bless You” gets rid of the God element, but the whole immaterial concept of blessing is still in play. It seems obvious that this should too be removed. Unfortunately this leads to some bizarre conversations.

Person: *Aaaaachoooo*

Me: You!

Person: Eh? Me?

Me: Have a nice day! *walks off*

Person: ???

So what do other atheists think of the whole blasphemy thing? What atheist alternatives does everyone else have? Do you use them all the time or do you occasionally slip back into God-mode? Is there a practical response to sneezing that doesn’t relate to superstition?