The Atheist Blogger » christian

Some Nate Phelps Stuff

Adrian Hayter — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:21:52 +0000

I’ve just got back from America; the flight was long, and I’ve been awake for most of the past 30 hours. I’m about to try and get some sleep but I thought I’d share with you some interesting sutff on Nate Phelps, the estranged atheist son of fundamentalist “God Hates Fags” pastor Fred Phelps. Nate was “discovered” by a journalist late last year, and was invited to speak at the American Atheists Convention a few weeks ago.

A full transcript of his speech is available online at Atheist Nexus, and Brother Richard has an article written by Nate about his experiences before and after the convention. Brother Richard and Nate have also set up a support group at Atheist Nexus called “Life After Christian Fundamentalism“, aimed at helping people who have escaped from Christian fundamentalism.

Check it out, I’m off to sleep :D

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On Debating Christians

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:46:59 +0000

Just over one week ago, a fellow atheist friend named Dan and I were in the student bar, drinking vodka-laced beverages and reading long pages of notes. In less than an hour, we would be debating two members of the Christian Union; a fundamentalist student society that believes the Bible is accurate, it just needs to read the correct way. The debate was entitled “Is God a Delusion?” , and team atheism had sorted out our lines of attack; Dan would be handling the fine-tuned universe fallacy, as well as the vicious nature of nature itself. I would be talking about the Theory of Evolution, illusions in nature, and our predisposition for seeing patterns that aren’t really there. We had conquered the writing of the speeches, we had even conquered the timing, getting everything into a 5 minute presentation each. The final thing we had to conquer were our nerves, hence the copious amounts of vodka.

This was the first time either of us had done something like this, and it didn’t help that only one other atheist had so far turned up to support us. Luckily, as the debate was about to start, 6 of our secular student group turned up to sit in the front row, which gave us that boost of morale to get us into the spirit. First up was a Christian who was reading Physics, so I expected him to go on about how the universe was such a wonderful place, fine-tuned to perfection. What I didn’t expect was for him to waffle for 4 of his 5 minutes, trying to explain what he considered “God” to be. As the chair banged her gavel to signify 1 minute remaining, my first opponent stumbled and quickly said something about how the presence of evil was proof of God. Whatever he said, I didn’t understand it at all, and I think my stomach gave a huge sigh of relief.

I was up next, and I managed to get my speech within the time limit, covering all the points I wanted to raise. The full transcript of both mine and Dan’s speeches are included below the fold on this blog post if you want to read them in full. Next up was the second Christian, who rejected a few of my reasons for why people believe in the supernatural, saying he didn’t believe for those reasons. This of course is a fallacy, as it can only be true on a personal level, and there are many people who believe in the supernatural for precisely the reasons I stated. His speech concerned Jesus and the power of prayer (which when I last checked was powerless). Not suprisingly, he criticised the scientific “prayer tests” and held them as an inaccurate way to determine whether prayer works (probably because the results determined prayer didn’t). Dan concluded the speeches with an attack of the fine-tuned universe view, quoting David Attenborough on his recent criticism of Christians, and pointed to the destructive force of nature as evidence against a loving caring God.

So then the floor was open to questions, and boy did we get them. I had to explain why Protazoa were still around “even though we evolved from them” as an American girl put, and how fish could develop arms when a mutation is required to create useless stumps first (clue: fish already have stumps…they are called fins). I also explained a rudimentry version of how we think the eye evolved, although on most of these questions I encouraged people to not take what I was saying without question, but to read up on it themselves (the last part of my speech was an appeal for people to start thinking freely). Luckily, my atheist friends asked the Christians a few questions about their beliefs, including a nice one about whether the discovery of multiple universes with different “tuning” would alter their belief in God.

An interesting couple of questions came from some Islamic students, one of whom asked me if I would mind if he came at me with a knife and killed me. I was expecting at least one question like this, and luckily I have a great response to it:

Let me get this straight. You are asking an atheist, someone who doesn’t believe in gods, the afterlife, or any kind of supernatural events, whether he would mind giving up what he believes is his only life? Of course I would mind! I happen to like life, and I’m not suddenly going to throw it all away because it is the one shot I have.

The same group of muslims asked us how we explained the revealed knowledge in the Koran, like the fact that salty water is separate from fresh water, and the Earth is shaped like an Ostrich egg. I didn’t correct his Earth shape hypothesis, because I wanted to attack the root of this question. I aked him plainly if he would read to me the passages of the Koran that said those things. He told me he didn’t have them on him, and so I told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t answer his question. I mentioned that these “revealed truths” are often simply very complex interpretations that are often extracted after the facts are known to science. The same logic can be applied to the Christian claim that the Bible talks about atoms, when all it says is “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

All in all, I guess the theists reckon they won, and the atheists reckon we won. The debate was concluded and no vote was held (we agreed it would be good to just let people leave with their own opinions). A girl did come up and thank us for talking about what we believed, and that she would look into certain things more, and that’s always a good thing. Dan and I decided that we rather like debating, so we’re going to do some more in the future, and perhaps organise an “Ask an atheist” evening in March. Another friend wants to debate with me against the Islamic society, so I’m trying to get in touch with them. Stay tuned for more!

Adrian’s speech transcript

The question in tonight’s debate is whether God is a delusion or not. When I say “God” I am speaking about the whole “God” idea; that there is some kind of intelligent mind behind the universe, who has concerns for how we live our lives.

It is this idea that I believe is a complete delusion, because whilst it all sounds very nice, it is utterly ridiculous. Almost every religion today puts humanity in a special “chosen” position by their God. We have dominion over all the animals, simply because we have free will and are made in his image. This was all very well for people to believe hundreds of years ago, but the arrival of modern science changed this completely.

We began to realise that so called “revealed” truth contradicted the natural world, and the best way to find out what actually constitutes reality is via the scientific method. Slowly but surely, revealed truth was replaced by observed truth, things that you could actually test for validity, and form scientific theories to explain. The acts of gods that supposedly took a matter of days suddenly became natural processes that took millions upon billions of years; and whilst people still held humanity as divinely chosen, 150 years ago, a man named Charles Darwin changed that view forever.

Evolution is a natural process that tells us where we come from, and how. Through the fossil record, we have seen how millions of species died out, and that we are one of the many branches on the so-called “Tree of Life” that made it. So in some respect, we are “special”, as we are the result of a 4 billion year old struggle to survive. However, every single species of animal still alive today is a survivor too, and they are equally as special as we.

People will object to this though, and say that the evidence points to divine intervention by God on some occasions. The town of Lourdes in France is a major tourist attraction for Christians, some of whom believe that the water from a local spring has healing properties. Only 66 declared miracles have happened in the last 150 years, and when you take into consideration that 80,000 pilgrims come to Lourdes each year, that number seems utterly insignificant. None of those “miracles” involved the sudden regrowth of limbs, or any other permanent affliction being cured, and since a medical bureau was established in 1947, the average number of “cures” people have reported per year has dropped repeatedly. As the popular skeptic Michael Shermer would say, you have to count the misses as well as the hits.

The Lourdes fiasco all started with an apparition of the Virgin Mary, who supposedly spoke to a 14 year old peasant girl on 18 separate occasions. Her eyewitness testimony is all we have to go on, but it is interesting to note that neither her sister or friend saw the apparition, even though they were with her. In the opinion of skeptics, she is either delusional or lying, and the closed nature of the Catholic church on this issue makes investigating harder. Apparitions of various forms have been reported ever since, some turn up on pieces of toast, whilst others are more complex.

There is a great video on YouTube of an apparition of Jesus on a wall, although any sane person watching the video will understand that it is formed by the shadows of tree branches. As such, it isn’t detailed, and it really just looks like a man in a white robe. Only when you have religious people claiming it looks like Jesus does your brain interpret the figure as such. This of course is the key to the whole thing. Our brain is wired so that we notice patterns very quickly, and if you lie on the grass on a moderately cloudy day, you will start to see all kinds of objects in the clouds. They aren’t really there of course, and I don’t notice religious groups claiming them as miracles, so I fail to see how a similar illusion that happens to take the form of a man in a robe means that it is Jesus Christ. The fact is, that patterns occur everywhere, and all it takes is a human brain to recognise them.

What I want to argue is called free-thinking, and it involves throwing all dogma out of the door and looking at the world for what it is, not for what we are told it is. Once you understand that there is a natural explanation for everything, the need for dogma and revealed truth promptly vanishes. While I am sure that a belief in the supernatural was probably important for our survival in the past, and it gives people hope even to this day, I look at a universe for which we can explain some things, and utter “I have absolutely no idea” on others, and that makes it even more wonderful to live in. I think it is time for people to accept that there are unknowns, and things that we may never know, but before we delegate them out of this world, we should make sure they are in this world.

Dan’s speech transcript

There’s been a lot of talk these kinds of debates about the beauty and complexity of nature. I get a familiar response from religious people when I tell them I don’t think there’s any evidence for a god, they sort of stick there arms out and gesture at the nearest groups of trees and flowers like its completely obvious they must have been designed. David Attenborough has been in trouble recently. He’s started a new series called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and said he’s had an upsurge in messages from people saying he just hasn’t been acknowledging God’s handiwork enough in his programs. He said:

“They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”

What goes for worms burrowing through eyeballs follows for everything else unfortunately. I really love his nature programs though; the BBC series Planet Earth which he narrated was amazing, attracting something like nine million viewers when it was first shown in this country. It’s gone all around the world since.

The thing which people tend to overlook when they look at pictures of wildlife is the unbelievable brutality of what they’re looking at. Everyone of those animals you see are in almost permanent terror for there lives, frightened of starving, of disease, frightened of getting an injury which is almost always a slow death sentence in the wild, and mostly frightened of just being eaten. Ultimately, all animals which aren’t kept as pets, and stroked, housed and fed their whole lives; die in one of those ways. They get old and weak and can’t get food or get too slow and get torn to pieces by predators. Think of the endless struggle out on the African plains between the zebras and antelope and the packs of wild hyenas and lions; one side can only be safe if the other starves without food, and the other can only survive by chasing down the weaker of the opposition and killing them. The system is psychopathic; it’s impersonal and totally apathetic to the suffering that’s going on. Any creator that built a system like that would have to be out of their mind.

People in favour of there being a God also like to point out the amount of ‘fine tuning’ in the universe. That the laws of things like gravity and thermodynamics have been ‘tuned’ ideally to create a universe full of life. The thing that really strikes me is that all that ‘fine tuning’ has created a universe that is almost completely empty space. You being present in 99.9 recurring percent of the universe will kill you instantly. We exist on one piece of space allotted to us in all that emptiness, in a thin film of life, on a climactic knife-edge, on a speck of dust.

And even there we aren’t safe. This is a world where more than 200,000 people can be swept off the beaches of the Indian Ocean, one day after Christmas. In fact the people of the western hemisphere were still celebrating, still eating mince pies and pulling crackers as the Asian Tsunami struck in 2004. There were families in America just sitting down and saying grace at their Christmas tables, as thousands of towns and villages were annihilated, and millions turned into widows, orphans and refugees. The universe really isn’t sentimental about its timing. But the devil is in the detail with these things, and one that gets me is some of the eyewitness reports. When tsunamis are coming in, the sea naturally draws out along the coast; people reported the small children from the local villages running out onto the miles of open beaches and laughing at all the stranded fish, totally oblivious to what was coming at them at nearly the speed of sound. The reason why things like that don’t drive us mad is because we know it isn’t personal, natural disasters just happen. We accept that the universe wasn’t designed with us in mind. But if there is a God, every bad thing that ever happens to us suddenly becomes something malicious, an all powerful, all knowing God cannot not be responsible for things like tsunamis and earthquakes, plague and the AIDS virus.

So really, to those of you who see God’s handiwork everywhere in nature what I say is, yes, look around you, but really look and be honest with yourself about what your seeing. To understand that there cannot be a God, and certainly not a benevolent one, is like a realisation of the obvious, it’s just so clear.

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Ron Heather – Christian Bigot

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:30:58 +0000

So I’m back from the USA, have shaken off the jet-lag, and ready to delve back into the world of blogging once again. During my absence in America (which I plan to document in another blog post), the BHA successfully launched the range of atheist adverts on buses, trains, and billboards. I have yet to see one of the buses, but I’m bound to be in London one of these days.

One story that caught my attention was how a Christian bus driver, Ron Heather refused to drive his bus because it had an atheist advert on it. His words were:

I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.

…

I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God.

Starkness. Really? So now saying something is more than 50% likely is considered a “stark” proposition? Wow. How stark are Christian adverts that proclaim God does exist then? Having a first reaction of “shock horror” shows that you are someone who has absolutely no understanding of anyone else’s view, and your actions confirm it. Mr Heather, you are a bigot. Thank you for being the reason these adverts need to be shown; the fewer people like you there are, the more healthy society will become. We aren’t asking for dominant views, or for you to succumb to our beliefs. We are asking for equal time to share our opinion.

The real problem I have with this issue though, is that Mr Heather was meant to be providing a service to the community, and he rejected that service in order to feel like he had won some ultimate battle against people who oppose his view. At my first London Atheists Meetup, I met an atheist who was a driver on the London Underground (the subway system). He didn’t mind the number of Christian adverts that are plastered all over the underground network, neither did he refuse to work because of them.

Of course, I think there are probably people behind this entire event. The atheist ads have been on the news for months, and talked about at length by fundamentalist Christians, including Christian Voice. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr Heather was either asked, or planned to “rebel” against the system, simply to get air time on radio and TV.

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Atheist Emoticons

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:26:45 +0000

The popular Christian blog Stuff Christians Like had an article containing some Christian emoticons”. For those who don’t know what emoticons are :O, you missed the internet era :P, please go back 10 or 15 years :D. Ok, so lets see what a few atheist emoticons would look like.

(?) = We’re not sure what created the universe, but it probably wasn’t a god.

*.oO = Having said that, the Big Bang is our best possible explanation at this point.

<<>> = Aliens seeding Earth with life is a neat idea, but it doesn’t explain where the aliens came from.

>>>8 (E) = A meteor colliding with Earth and creating life makes a bit more logical sense.

\…V…W = In any case, the diversity of life is best explained by Evolution.

($#@^!&*) = Despite what you may think, I’m not a nihilist.

oo—[A] = I read atheist blogs regularly.

[:::::]~~[A] = I’m such a hardcore atheist, I even write an atheist blog.

OO—(( RC )) = I read Ray Comforts blog and have an irrational fear of bananas.

(( < X## = All things being equal, the pineapple pwns the banana.

oo—[PZ] ~00~ .:| (/) = I go to Phyrangula for my daily fix of octopi, poll boosting, and occasional cracker desecration.

Any others you think should be added to the list? The floor is open…

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The Manners And Morals Of A Small Child

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:51:31 +0000

The title of this blogpost comes from a popular quote by Robert A Heinlein.

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

I personally think this is shown quite well in Edward Current’s latest video on YouTube entitled “An Atheist Meets God”.

It’s meant to be a comedic look at Christian beliefs I know, but it’s an accurate depiction of Christian beliefs. Perhaps it might show some Christians exactly why we don’t believe in a God who doesn’t have any logic behind it. Better still, the video addresses a few common issues of concern for Christianity, namely the whole premise about having to find Jesus Christ to get to Heaven (so what happens to all the people who have never even heard of the Bible?), and the “creator of the creator” paradox.

Thanks to Pharyngula.

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An Invitation To All Christians

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:00:29 +0000

Nick from the forums wants to have a word…

I would like to invite all Christians to have a responsible and peaceful discussion. Although I don’t think a website devoted to Atheism is on the priority list for any Christian, I just want to have a discussion with you.

I will not be cross and will not use offensive (I never do anyway) or sarcastic remarks.

I was a Christian before but had a change of mind. I would maybe like to share my experiences with you.

If you still think I’m a jerk for being an Atheist, that’s fine with me, but if you would like to live a better life with peace of mind, I urge you to listen just as I will to anything you have to say.

Thank you.
~Nick

If you are a Christian and want to take Nick up on his offer, join the forums and reply to his thread.

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Labels Are Annoying…

Adrian Hayter — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:28:45 +0000

I was born an atheist, just like the rest of humanity. I was christened when I was 1 and became a Christian. When I was 11 I renounced my faith and became “uncertain” in the existence of gods. A little less than a year later I had converted fully to atheism. 9 years down the line, and I was wondering if “sitting on the fence” was a worthy term for agnostics, and when I had researched the original meaning of the term I realized that I’d been an agnostic atheist all along. A few weeks later, through some persuasive arguments from Kieran Bennett, I realize that whilst I’m agnostic about a so-called “unknown” god (i.e. the non-religious “creator” or “deist god”), I am gnostic about every other god humanity has ever believed in. Now I have no idea what I am. Technically speaking I’m mostly a gnostic atheist since I’m only agnostic about one particular god, but since I’m not fully gnostic I can’t label myself that. Furthermore, due to some recent conversations I had come to label myself as an apathetic agnostic atheist, or “one who doesn’t believe in gods, understands he can never be proved right or wrong, and really doesn’t care either way”. Of course this label is borderline ridiculous in common conversation.

Thus I deduce that labels are annoying, yet I can’t label myself “anti-label” since that would be hypocritical. Therefore I’m doing the most obvious thing. I’m reverting back to a single word:

Atheist

If agnosticism comes up in conversation someday I’ll just run for the nearest exit. I’m keeping my label as simple as I possibly can…

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What Made You Deconvert?

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:01:13 +0000

Whether you like the term “deconvert” or prefer “conversion to atheism”, a recent investigative essay by Kieran Bennett has had quite a varied response. In light of this, I thought it might be interesting to run a poll to see how many people attribute their “deconversion” to Kieran’s conclusive factors.

Unlike previous polls, you can select multiple answers since there are probably multiple reasons. I’ve tried to reword a few factors so that ex-Muslims, Jews etc can also answer.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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What Turns Christians Into Atheists?

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:56:38 +0000

Kieran Bennett (an atheist blogger and member of the forums) has analysed 117 Christian deconversion stories, and written a very interesting and informative essay on “What works in deconverting Christians?“.

His investigation found that:

14.89% were dissatisfied with some of the answers given to them by priests or other religious people.
14.89% saw that the religious doctrine wasn’t compatible with science and reality.
12.76% came to the realisation that religious dogma was “internally incoherent” and illogical.
10.63% read the Bible and found that for the Holy Book of Christianity, it didn’t reflect modern day Christianity at all.
8.51% found the corruption and scandals following the church as a persuasive argument against following their doctrine.
8.51% gave up on prayer and religion when they realised that nobody was going to listen, let alone answer to them.
8.5% thought the similarities of Christianity with so many other religions (and yet so different at the same time) the primary factor of their deconversion.

Surprisingly, less people found that an exposure to atheism / philosophy / skepticism was a factor in their deconversion (I guess we’d better try harder). Likewise, only a couple people saw the association of violence with religion and attributed it to their lack of faith.

As for how we can deconvert more people, Bennett hits the nail on the head, and comes to the conclusion that whilst we can push and prod people towards the big ideas (science, logic etc), a successful deconversion is all down to the individual. We can’t force our ideas onto people, only sow the seeds of doubt by asking the right questions.

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Why My Children Will Never Go To A Religious School…

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:38:20 +0000

I attended a lecture a few months back (before I started this blog) entitled “Enemy in the Mirror: Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists and their Crusade against Fundamentalism”. It was nothing special, and the “lecturer” didn’t actually talk about anything to do with the subject. She just went on a random rant about how everyone should respect the church etc.

However, after the lecture there were a lot of questions asked from the audience, a large majority of whom were openly atheist. One such question was from a theist (towards the atheists) who complained that we argue all the time about religion and yet send our children to catholic schools and CofE schools with no problems. The parents in the audience said they do this because the results from those schools are better than those at non-religious schools, and they wanted the best for their kids.

I’ve got no problem with people doing that, they want their kids to do well. However I personally do not trust education systems that rely on religion to get students. The only reason that these students are getting better marks is because of the high levels of discipline those schools have, and the only thing large amounts of discipline does is inhibit creativity. You are taught what to think and how to think, and completely ignore the principles that freethinking was founded on.

The education system in England is a strange one. Public schools have to teach Evolution, and cannot teach I.D (for reasons we discuss in this forum thread). However, private schools (often religious in nature) can teach extra things to the standard curriculum. I know of Catholic schools in London that teach I.D far more than Evolution, and even have students learning that Noah took dinosaurs on the Ark. They are creating the next generation of Young Earth Creationists, and it sickens me to think of what they will be like in the future.

I used to think America had a better deal in education. Secularisation made sure that I.D was kept out of the schools, and that useless things like prayer were also removed in an official nature. Even the fundamentalist Liberty University has to teach Evolution (alongside I.D of course). Today, I’m not sure where I stand. It seems that everywhere Creationists are using loopholes to push their agenda onto innocent minds, in order to corrupt and control them. A couple of states have surrendered currently, but who knows how many it will be in a years time?

A lot of schools should take a good look at English universities. They seem to have a nice balance between education and belief, and I should know. My university is supposedly secular (although the CU would like to ammend that), and in lectures we are given the facts and told to think for ourselves. One of my friends is currently doing a PhD in Crypto Zoology, a course that doesn’t even exist, but to which the university has found adequate for him to form a theisis on.

The future doesn’t rely on religion, it relies on free thinking. I want my children to learn in an environment which will give them the ability to work things out for themselves, and I fear a religious setting will only hinder that and make them slaves to the false doctrine they support.