The Atheist Blogger

Well this is quite an amusing story, so I thought I’d share it with you. Earlier this month, I received a message on Facebook from a girl named Jennie.

I just have to thank you. In ways you may never understand, you helped me to become a Christian.

I used to be very much like yourself. Then, two weeks ago, as a result of reading your blog, I became one of those people you hate. Thank you so much. You are probably at least a little offended by this, but I felt I needed to let you know.

Obviously I was a little confused (and concerned) about her predicament. Confused because she seemed to think I hated Christians, and concerned because she had become one. I asked her to explain, and we sent a few messages to each other. She said I came across as very angry in some of my posts; I said I was only angry at justifiable things (like parents murdering children, or newspapers lying about students). She even prophesied this blog post, saying, “I’m sure you’ll be making fun of me on your blog eventually”. Of course such a prophecy was self-fulfilling, because her final response to me, where she finally explained how I was responsible for her Christianity, was just too funny not to post.

There are way too many things that led to my becoming a Christian, now that I look back. But this is how you contributed to that:

One day, while reading your blog, I just found myself wondering how anybody could spend so much time fighting against something they don’t believe exists. You have so much stuff on there and thinking that the purpose of 99% of it, is to inspire people to be against religion just seemed pointless. Not necessarily *inspire* but that’s the best word I could find for it. I started wondering what the point was. Why waste so much time and energy on criticizing religion? If there really is no God (the backbone of religion) then there would be no need to fight religion so hard. I don’t believe in unicorns, but I don’t create entire blogs dedicated to debunking the belief in them. I just think its silly to believe in them, so I ignore those who do. You, and many other atheists, however, find something in religion that makes you want to fight against it. Many atheists claims its a silly myth, but then why fight silly beliefs so hard? That got me thinking that there was something more to it than a silly myth.

You say that you’re only angry at justifiable things, but around the time I started wondering all this stuff, I saw a bunch of pictures you had of you throwing snowballs at signs about Jesus or something like that. That really confused me. There seemed to be no point whatsoever in that. Again, if its just a silly myth, why don’t you just ignore it? But you seemed unable to ignore it.

I mean, I understand if its just about the violence that religion causes, especially if you think of it as pointless because its all just a silly myth. But if you think about it, there’s just as much violence caused by anti-religious people. So why not just advocate against violence?

So I started digging. Christianity was the only religion that answered both questions. It gives the answer for why you can’t seem to ignore religion, even though you think of it as a silly myth. Also, I found the difference between religious violence and anti-religious violence. Violence in Christianity isn’t condoned by God or the Bible. The people who are using violence for religious reasons are doing it for the wrong reasons. However, without religion, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re killing people or not. It’s actually logical to kill people.

There’s much more to this whole thing, but I really couldn’t explain it all to you. I hope this makes a little sense, but if it doesn’t, please respect my beliefs and views. That’s another thing I had trouble with when it came to atheism: most atheists are incredibly intolerant and rude. But, seeing as how you kept pressing for an answer, I’d hope that you wouldn’t mock the answer I gave you; even if it doesn’t make sense to you.

One simply stares in disbelief how any atheist could actually ask questions like these given the amount of answers that have been repeated by the “New Atheist” movement in the last 10 years or so. Jennie finds my blog (and all other atheist blogs) pointless, since we are arguing against something we don’t even believe in. Like her, I don’t believe in unicorns, and I’m not going to create a blog about my disbelief in unicorns, because 99.9999% of the rest of the population shares my beliefs. There is no point preaching to the crowd. However, if suddenly the majority (or heck, even a large minority) started believing in unicorns, I’m sure there would be blogs talking about the reasons unicorns don’t exist. The point of a blog is both to spread a message, and challenge a viewpoint. Political blogs will challenge the opposition parties, Christian blogs will challenge other religions and atheism, and atheist blogs challenge religion (or just theism, but that’s not important). Jennie’s point is self-refuting if you simply change the word “atheism” to any particular belief, be it religious or political. There are Christian blogs that write reams about evolution, and they do this even though they don’t believe in it. Jennie wants to live in a dream world, where nobody talks about other people’s opinions, and debate doesn’t exist. Such places are anti-democracy, and are terrible places to live.

The second point I want to make about why atheists blog so much against religion is that we do have a belief; we believe that religions are dangerous. It’s a justified belief, because we have the evidence to prove it. Religion is the only reason Madeline Neumann is dead, the only reason why it took so long for Daniel Hauser to get cancer treatment. In Jennie’s dream world, we would not criticize the dangerous actions of the parents, and the children would die. Being nice only gets you so far; at some point you have to start disagreeing with people for society to make the progress it has.

Jennie seems to think that pictures of me throwing snowballs at Jesus posters is disrespectful, and she’s right; it is. I don’t care though, because fundamentalist baptist churches like the one in the picture are constantly disrespectful of everyone who doesn’t share their views. They blame homosexuals for everything under the sun, and use lies and manipulation to convert people. How exactly have they earned my respect? The other reason I took the picture was that I found it funny (as did my friends who I were with), and I thought some people online might have found it funny as well. It’s only a poster. I wasn’t attacking some poor pastor, I was attacking an idea, showing that nothing can be held sacred. To make you feel better, I did pelt quite a number of snowballs at my atheist friends that day (more so than I did at Jesus), so hopefully you feel like my actions were balanced.

Jennie asks “why not just advocate against violence?” instead of against religion that causes violence. I think people should attack the causes of violence, because the fundamentalists seem to think that anything goes if it is done for the will of god. They preach against violence too, but then they attack abortion centers. It is clear that reasoning with these people against violence isn’t going to work; they don’t believe their actions are immoral. If a group of atheists bomb a church, I will decry such an act, and do whatever I can to help the victims. I can advocate against violence and still advocate against religion; I see them as two different issues.

Jennie closes her argument for Christianity with a rather bizarre statement that it is “logical to kill people”. She doesn’t give any explanation of the logic used to deduce such a statement, but I think it probably goes along the lines of “How can you be good without God? You can’t. Therefore God.” Such arguments are of course ridiculous; morality doesn’t come from scripture (thank goodness) but from a combination of instinct and the society we live in. We don’t kill other people because it is harmful to the society in the grand scheme of things. Over time this has developed into the feeling of immorality we have today. There are many instances in the Bible where God orders the massacre of millions of people, so have humans actually outgrown the childish nature of God? I certainly like to think so.

Well, hopefully you haven’t found me too “intolerant” or “rude” Jennie. Hopefully you’ll read my response with an open mind, understand the errors in your judgement, and realise your argument simply makes no good points worthy of your conversion; it was based on misunderstanding and long-refuted claims. Well, one can hope.

The Raytractors dispersed at the beginning of 2009, citing their coming together as a skeptic group as a reason for abandoning the blog. They argued that although they had all met as detractors of Ray, they should focus their efforts on debunking all attacks on science and reason. Whilst this policy is logical, I think Ray does need some special attention for the simple reason that he is one of the most verbose creationists on the net, and almost everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie. So this new segment, the “(Almost) Daily Dose Of Comfort” will be just that. As often as I can (hopefully daily) I will be responding to posts that Ray makes on his blog, expressing a logical detraction of the contents. If he has nothing worth blogging about, I will instead debunk certain claims in his newly released book “You can lead an atheist to evidence, but you can’t make him think”, of which I have a signed copy (he sent it, free of charge).

This first post will cover his recent claims about morality, in which he attacked the concept of atheistic morality. The person whom Ray is responding to says that there is no right or wrong in the natural world, which is perfectly true as far as nature goes. Where I would disagree though is where this person makes a somewhat of a strawman argument, reducing the concepts of “right” and “wrong” to “good ideas” and “bad ideas”. Firstly I think this is untrue, and secondly I think it simply redefines morality. It was this mistake that allowed Ray to ease in his attack, because the word “idea” is so general.

So what I would say then, is that there are things that are “right” and “wrong” in human nature, but they are certainly not set in stone, and they certainly do not come from God. The first thing we must realise is that human beings are very social animals; we live in groups, always have done. We get along better if we work together, and this can be easily demonstrated by the way we have evolved. We haven’t needed to be overly strong to survive or have eyesight that enables us to view 360 degrees, because we live in groups where members are looking after each other. Individually, we could not hope to take on the prey we hunted, but as a group we could do it easily. It was our need on each other to survive that bore our evolutionary morality.

If we start from this platform and scrap all our moral values that we hold, logically we should be able to deduce them from a purely evolutionary standpoint. The constant here is that working together is beneficial for the survival of the group. Murder is therefore automatically classified as “wrong”, and it is obvious why. If the group allowed murder, it would die out very quickly indeed. With the concept of ownership brought in, stealing can also be deduced to be “wrong”. If somebody owns a tool, and another person steals the tool for their own need, the original owner is left tool-less and unable to work, thus negatively affecting the group. An example of something that is morally “right” would be the concept of lending, possibly the simplest charitable act. If a member of the group is in need of a tool and you have one, it would be beneficial to lend your tool to them, as it would further their productivity to the group. As a bonus, the charity you have shown to them would be reciprocal as they would have a reason for helping you out in the future (other than simply advancing the group).

Ray gives us two examples of moral decisions that he reckons can only be solved through absolute moral law:

Do you remember little Jessica Lunsford? She was the nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her home in Homosassa, Florida in the early morning of February 24, 2005. She was raped and later buried alive (clutching her teddy bear) by 47-year-old John Couey who was living nearby. Nothing wrong there. Just a bad idea. I wonder why the judge gave him the death sentence?

The rape and murder of a young girl (or any person for that matter) is morally wrong because it does not do anything to advance our society. In fact it massively impedes upon that goal. Not only is the girl killed (and therefore unable to grow up and contribute to society as would have happened), but the family are upset by the loss of the child and have to go through various stages of mourning. It simply isn’t beneficial in any way to allow people to go around raping or murdering, as all it leads to is pain and suffering.

Six million Jews gassed to death by Nazis. Bad idea, depending on your perspective. There were 200,000 people murdered in the United States in the 1990’s. A lot of bad ideas. Never mind. Nothing wrong done there.

Of course the same stands for the above case. Gassing six million Jews isn’t going to have a good effect on society, and this negative effect is perhaps increased when considering that Jewish people tend to be more intelligent (a result of possible genetic traits and general tradition of high levels of education). Ray’s last jibe is at the concept of “good ideas” and “bad ideas” and how we do not need to prosecute people for having ideas. Well of course now it is Ray who is dishonestly redefining things in order to make his argument sound. Even today we don’t prosecute people for thinking about murdering or raping. We prosecute people for actually carrying out (or actively planning to) murders and rapes. So no Ray, we will never need to prosecute people for having an idea, but that wasn’t the point raised. We prosecute people for commiting acts that society has decided are wrong.

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.”

An interesting collection of articles showing that:

• “Abstinence Only” doesn’t work.
• Christianity corrupts good morals unlike their claim that they created them.
• Too much religion is dangerous.
• Christian divorce rates are much higher than Atheist ones.
• 75% of born again Christians are regular liars.
• People’s lives aren’t transformed by Christianity.

I wrote this paper for an English class defining the term “atheism” and figured it would be appropriate here.

Atheism: Belief in Nature and Humanity

I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

said George H.W. Bush to a reporter in 1998 (O’Hair). Although the veracity of this quote is somewhat in doubt, this quote illustrates the view held by many about atheists and the importance of addressing the issue.  Largely misunderstood, atheists are often happy, joyful people who live fulfilled, moral, humanitarian lives.  Unfortunately however, it seems that few in American society really understand what it means to be atheist.  Some people believe that atheism is actually an anti-religious position, and some would go as far as to say that atheists hate god or even America.  George Smith comments on the situation, noting that

The atheist is pitted against morality itself, and the struggle between belief in a god and godlessness is viewed as a struggle between good and evil.

Others believe that atheism is a misnomer and that atheists should correctly call themselves agnostics.  The truth is that atheism is the absence of a belief in the supernatural or the rejection of the notion of using a deity to explain natural phenomenon.  More specifically, atheism is the belief that all observations ever made by man have a natural cause and will ultimately be explained by scientific principles.  Atheism is not the same as agnosticism and is not an anti-religious persuasion, but rather a belief in humanity and our ability to ultimately understand our universe.  By understanding the real meaning of the terms “atheist” or “atheism,” one is better equipped to engage in meaningful discourse with atheists and to deal with any prejudices one might have toward those of different belief systems.

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