The Atheist Blogger

So The Atheist Jew reckons he can tag me eh? Fair play, fair play. Here are my answers to the 10 questions:

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Atheism is the philosophical view that there are no gods. Whether you class this view as a belief or disbelief is up to semantics. I personally refer to it as both.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

I was brought up in a Christian family with my father, mother, sister, and grandmother. I went to two Church of England primary schools as a child, although I don’t remember visiting church much at all. One humourous story is that when I was 3 my grandfather died, and I asked my mother why he wasn’t coming back from hospital. She told me “he’s gone up to heaven”. I apparently remarked “Well can’t we just get a really long ladder and visit?”. The first stages of rationalism or a cute response? You decide.

At age 11 I went to a grammar school that is situated outside the tallest cathedral in the country. It was there that I shook free the chains of religion.

Out of the remaining family (my gran died 3 years ago), my mother is still theist and she works at the cathedral in the education centre. My sister could be described as agnostic / apatheist, and my father has only just revealed to me that he is also an atheist / agnostic.

That was a rather long answer wasn’t it.

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Nick from the forums brought up a few interesting questions about the influence of majority opinion when it comes to religion.

Christianity is so mainstream, at least here in America. Ask someone what religion they are, and they will most likely say that they are of the Christian faith.

My question is if someone knew of the religion but knew that no one practiced it, would they still become a Christian?

Do people really believe so strongly in these things or do they just THINK that they do because the majority of the population believes the same?

Is it like a school or club where everyone just wishes to fit in, or are there really honest beliefs in a God and “The Messiah” despite proven sciences supporting something else?

I am willing to bet many Christians would respond to these questions saying “Yes I would still be a Christian.” What if it were shunned upon to be a Christian? Would you still believe in what you do?

Here in America, I think it is somewhat brave to be an Atheist, at least an open one. It is very frowned upon here, mainly because of huge misunderstanding. When you tell someone that you are an Atheist (at least a Christian, which makes up most all of the population) they immediate hold somewhat of a resentment against you, which is unfortunate for me if it ever is a topic for employment.

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Popular atheist biology professor turned blogger PZ Myers has written a response to a question put to him in an email:

How did life evolve from one (I suspect) chromosome to… 64 in horses, or whatever organism you want to pick. How is it possible for a sexually reproducing population of organisms to change chromosome numbers over time?

Firstly: there would have to be some benefit to the replication probability of the organisms which carry the chromosomes. I don’t see how this would work. How is having more chromosomes of any extra benefit to an organism’s replicative success? Yes, perhaps if those chromosomes were full of useful information… but the chances of that happening are non existent and fly in the face of ’small adaptations over time’.

Secondly, the extra chromosomes need to come from somewhere. I’m not sure about this, but I believe chromosome number are not determined by genes, are they? There isn’t a set of genes which determines the number of chromosomes an organism has. So the number is fixed, determined by the sexually reproducing parents. Which leads me to believe that if the number does change, and by chance the organism is still alive and capable of sexual reproduction, that the number will start swinging back and forward, by 1 or 2, every generation, and never stabilising. The chances of this happening are also very very slim.

It’s an important question, and a lot of people (myself included) have wondered about it. I’ve often searched for a answer online but found nothing, so I’m glad PZ has swooped in with an easy to understand (albeit lengthy and descriptive) answer.

If you thought you knew a lot about Evolution, prepare to be amazed…

Basics: How can chromosome numbers change?

After reading Friendly Atheist’s blog post about the “Questions for God” proposed over at Ethical Atheist, I went to go have a read of them. Quite a few of the questions I thought were a bit harsh, and were either presented in a very sarcastic manner, or were extremely stupid. For example:

Do you know how to use email?  Surely you do, right?  Why haven’t you written us yet with all the answers?

and

Why do men and women have the same number of ribs if you stole one from Adam to make Eve?

The first question is just plainly meant as a joke, and the second ignores the biological fact that if a parent loses a limb or bone, the child won’t be affected. In fact, a believer actually pointed this out the the author of the question in their answer.

I think that although the idea of asking questions to God, and allowing his followers to answer is a great idea, because it allows understanding of theist thinking in ways atheists cannot understand. Some of the answers produced are actually quite rational, and only rely on partial support from the supernatural to work. However, whilst the idea itself is good, the Ethical Atheist version of the questions has taken the entire thing as a joke, which lessens the importance of the whole project, and probably accounts for the reason why most of the questions have been unanswered.

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In the comments section to my article “Atheism is not a religion“, a reader named “ed” asked me to answer three questions surrounding atheism:

Who is the quintessential atheist, in your opinion? Who has (if anyone) fully represented Atheism both in beliefs and actions?

Well, as “The Atheist Jew” pointed out already, an atheist is simply someone who has no belief in God. There are no “beliefs” in atheism, and I had already explained how atheism is not a religion since it has no belief system. Yesterday I was watching the “Atheist Experience” show on the internet, and they had a caller who talked for about 10 minutes on the subject of belief, before insulting the hosts and being cut off. He did however, start a discussion on whether it takes the same amount of faith the disbelieve in a God than it does to believe in him. Of course, the atheist hosts answered the question with a well explained “no”. They mentioned believing in “pixies”, and the fact that nobody would seriously argue that you need to take a leap of faith to say you didn’t believe in pixies. The evidence is overwhelming that these creatures only exist in legends and stories, and that no accurate sighting have ever been made or verified. Nobody can know for sure whether God exists of course, and so there is a leap of “faith” in the same way that there is with any scientific theory, but the leap only comes through supporting evidence (or lack thereof). If anything, it requires less of a leap to disbelieve in God than it does to believe, certainly not more.

Now to the whole concept of “acting atheist” which I can’t really wrap my head around. If we have already come to the obvious conclusion that there are no beliefs structures in atheism, and therefore the only thing lumping atheists together in a group is the fact that they say “I don’t believe in God”, how can that define any possible actions? Christians and Muslims pray because their belief system supports it as an action, but the only actions supported by atheism are the ones that come naturally to humans anyway. So to answer the second part of your question rather simply, every single living (and indeed non-living) human “acts” like an atheist. Now, if you are talking about whether atheists should act in a different way then you are covering an entirely different subject, and one I would possibly like to save for an entire blog post. I personally don’t support the way Richard Dawkins is going about waging a war with theists, but that is his decision, not the decision of atheists in general.

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