IDoNotGetIt

I was invited to church recently by a good friend who was getting baptized. Although, it was more of a sad event from my perspective as opposed to it being a quite joyful experience for him, I figured it would be interesting just to get to go to church again. It has been a while, after all.

I ended up being disappointed with the whole experience. It was a new church and very non-traditional. The first thing I noticed upon entering the fellowship hall was that they had rows of individual chairs rather than the traditional pews and the stage was – well it was a stage – like a rock band with rock band equipment set up on it. There was no podium. This room basically looked like a concert hall with a dark open ceiling and big stage lights hanging down.

Service began with the baptism which took about 15 or 20 minutes for several folks then led straight in to a Christian rock band playing some of the most non-inspirational, mediocre Christian rock songs I’ve ever heard. Instead of hymnals, they have projectors on each side of the auditorium projecting the lyrics on the wall. I just kept thinking that I really wish they had a choir and organ.

Finally the band stopped playing and the preacher got up. It took me a while to figure out if it was the preacher because he was wearing the same t-shirt as everyone else at the church. He didn’t give a traditional sermon, just kind of sat down on a stool and talked conversational style to us. I kept my ears open for anything unique that I could blog about but he didn’t give me much to go on. It seems to me that modern Christians are trying to be as vague as they possibly can so as to lure in more gullible folks without alienating those who might think a little about what they are being told. And there is no question about it, they want children! They are well aware that they need those young impressionable minds to peddle their crap. This church was, in my opinion, absolutely targeted at young adults and children.

He did call up a couple with 2 young children to do some kind of dedication to them; I guess it was a way to officially welcome them into the church or something. He gave them each a bible. Then he said that God has a purpose for them, as he does with everyone. This is one idea that I’ve never been able to get a believer to expound upon without getting upset and giving up. I mean, if God has a plan and he has this plan for everyone, does that mean that anyone who does bad things is going against God’s plan? And if you can go against God’s plan then what is the point of his plan in the first place? Does he have to keep changing it to account for those who fuck it up?

Something else he said struck me as odd. He said that God is the giver of every GOOD gift. I wonder if that means, to him, that God is not also the giver of any bad gifts like an infant dying in an automobile accident.

He also said something that made me giggle. He said that Jesus gave us a gift that is simple enough that a child can receive it. I thought to myself that it was simple enough that only a child’s mind could think it was real to begin with. Then he went on to babble about how Jesus paid the highest price. Really, what price did he pay? He gave up a few years on earth to go to heaven and reign as a God. Ouch, the poor guy, I hope therapy helped. And honestly, if he wanted to, couldn’t he come back to earth any time he wanted? It only takes the slightest bit of critical thinking to show what a load of crap this story is.

They also gave communion which I declined to participate in. My friend (not the one getting baptized) almost made me cry laughing when everyone, in unison, drank the “kool-aid.” He looked at me and said “Jim Jones;” it was a struggle for me to keep from laughing out loud.

This article Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light, According to One Experiment suggests that neutrinos travel faster than light. If this turned out to be true, it would redefine physics as we know it. Einsteins Theory of Relativity would be disproved with this one new fact, for instance. To say that this would be an amazing discovery is an understatement.

This quote is a wonderful demonstration of the difference between religous dogmatism and science.

“I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.“

Suppose someone said “Hey we found proof that Jesus was just a man and actually not the son of God.” How many Christians would say “Oh wow, that’s amazing, I hope it’s true?”

Science is not dogmatic. It is constantly being updated as we discover new facts. Although it is unlikely that this will turn out to be true, the fact that it excites scientists rather than instil abject fear is a testament to its lack of dogmatism.

These questions are so simple that anyone with half a brain should be able to answer them. I’ve seen much better lists before that were technical enough to require expert knowledge of biology to answer. These are just lame.

1. How Did Nothing Turn Into Something?
   Answer: It didn’t
2. How Did Life Come From Non-Life?
   Answer: The building blocks of life all the way down to atoms are not alive. Life is hard to define even today. The first forms of life would have been simple self-replicating amino acids. Once that existed, evolution took over and after billions of years we have the rich diversity of life that we see every day. Experiments have shown that in the proper environment the proteins will automatically self-assemble. I think it’s also important to note that the study of the origin of life is not part of the Theory of Evolution.
   
3. How Did Millions of Life Forms Evolve With Absolutely No Evidence of Major Change?
   Answer: There is overwhelming evidence of major change. You’d have to be willfully ignorant to not know this. Creationist love to lie and claim that there are no transitional fossils but there are tons and tons of them.
4. How Can A Watch Come Into Existence Without A Watchmaker?
   Answer: A watch, being a man made machine, cannot come into existence without a watchmaker. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with evolution.
5. How Did Thought Come From Non-Thought?
   Answer: This question makes no sense. Thoughts are a result of chemical and electric processes in our brain. Thoughts come from the brain.

I just read this article on foxnews.com. Texas Teen Basketball Player Dies During Tourney

Here is a quote from that article.

“Robert was a great, great human being,” Escobar told The Monitor. “I’m very, very sad. The Lord asked for an angel to come to Him today. He took care of his body. He ate all the right things. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Then don’t explain it! Most likely it was caused by an undiagnosed preexisting condition but this repulsive person admits that he doesn’t know what he is talking about immediately following his idiotic explanation for why it happened.

Read this and tell me what is wrong with it: “I do not have an explanation for what caused this event, so let me offer this explanation for what caused this event” As far as reasoning goes, it’s a logical fallacy called Argument from Ignorance. When put that way, isn’t it clearly nonsense?

It never fails, if you want a taste of stupid just go to Ray Comfort, he has an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I decided to take a peek at his blog today to see what kind of lies he is telling and not surprisingly he has some related to the earthquake in Japan.

“But atheism says that there is a good reason for the 8.9 earthquake killer quake and the horrific Tsunami that followed. It is nature making improvements. Everything is getting better. People being crushed to death or drowned in a Tsunami is just part of the work of nature.”

It is unbelievable how religious nuts have the ability to project their own stupid beliefs onto others so they can dismiss it and completely miss the irony of doing so. Assuming that there is an “atheist movement” that can collectively “say” anything, it certainly would not say anything in the preceding paragraph. As a matter of fact, replace nature with God and it sounds exactly like what a Christian might say. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard “It’s all part of God’s plan” in reference to the earthquake.

His point, however, is merely to get to talk about a subject that he knows absolutely nothing about – despite having it explained ad nauseam – but which he loves to talk about as if he has a deep understanding of the subject. It’s a common misconception that ignorant people (willfully in this guys case) have about evolution. Neither evolution nor nature have a goal of making anything better in the sense that he is using the word better. If I were to describe evolution as the process of making living organisms better – and I wouldn’t, but for the sake of argument if I did – better would not necessarily mean smarter, stronger, tougher, longer life, etc. (i.e. the things that we humans think would be better). Evolution simply makes the changes necessary to make a population more likely to survive, it may be the case that a smaller, weaker and dumber version of humans have a better chance of surviving in a million years on Earth and if that is the case, that is what will evolve. “Better” to evolution is not necessarily what we would consider better.

At any rate, rest assured that the earthquake in Japan has nothing to do with evolution. Earthquakes are an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of living on a planet that is itself quite alive and active. Atheists, like most decent people, are horrified by the effects that the earthquake and tsunami have had in Japan.

Ray would know this if he weren’t the stupidest person I’ve ever witnessed. That isn’t hyperbole either. Discounting people who are literally mentally handicapped in some manner, I’ve never heard of anyone so incredibly willfully ignorant, he is un-teachable. His mind is a solid block of “God did it” that can’t be reasoned with.

I’m paraphrasing this so I don’t have to post the whole paragraph. This is from a one star review of Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World on Amazon. The commenter was trying to make the point that Sagan puts forth invalid comparisons and gives this as an example.

“The story about Mary appearing in Lourdes, France is based solely on faith, whereas the tabloid headline about NASA hearing voices in space is based on nothing.”

It’s just so damn sad that he doesn’t realize that faith is the same as nothing!

The first lie I intend to expose is definitely a favorite.  Theist who try to live by rules and information from a book that is millennia old are, inevitably, going to run into conflicts as our understanding grows beyond what the men who wrote said book knew.  However, many religious folks have taken the approach of “if you can’t beat them, join them” or more accurately, make them join you.  They have decided that since they can’t beat science, they should just try to make science look like it is just any old ideology, no better than the one that they are trying to propagate.

This lie takes on many forms but goes something like this: “Science is just a religion” or “Science requires just as much (or more) faith as my religion”.

This is just another way in which people dilute the meaning of words so that they become meaningless.  I’ve talked to people who tried to use this argument on me before and my question to them is always “can you define faith”.  My definition of faith is pretty simple, accepting a claim as true without evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence.  This is also the definition of faith that EVERY Christian I have ever had the displeasure of talking to uses by the end of their argument when they have lost on every other front.  The dreaded “Well, you’ve just got to have faith”, i.e. “I don’t have a good reason, I just want to believe it”.  Yes, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve used it myself many times when I was a Christian.  But every time I’ve had this particular argument with a Christian, they define faith differently.  They have to in order to make science fit the definition of faith because in reality, science is the antithesis of faith.

Lets compare and contrast science and religion a little bit.

Some religious person makes a claim about God. A religious leader is consulted (i.e. the Pope or some other church leader).  The church leader declares the claim as true or false and everyone is expected to accept unquestioningly this ruling.

Vs.

Some scientist makes a claim about some aspect of the observable universe.  This claim is expected, by the scientific community, to be laid out with evidence and the procedures used to evaluate the evidence.  Other scientist review and replicate the experiment and results.  If the experiments are replicable and a through review by the scientific community confirms the findings, the claim becomes accepted science.  But that is not the end.  Later, new information may require revisiting the original claim to make modifications.  It never becomes unquestionable.

Science is not a faith and science is not a religion.  Science is the method that we use to understand the reality that we exist in.  Even religious people use it in every other aspect of their life.  It isn’t simply faith that lets you know that you still have to stop when the light is red or that the sun will rise in the morning.  That is science.  Religious people don’t use faith to decide whether or not to loan money to a stranger.  They use credit reports.  That is science.  In every other aspect of life, even religious people will differ to science over faith.  That alone should be enough to tell you that there must be something to this science stuff, maybe it has more to offer me than faith.  But that is only true if you prefer reality to fantasy.

Lately, I’ve been getting aggravated a lot at the constant lying coming from religious observers. I know some would object to using the term “lying” to describe the untruths they are telling because many may not know that they are untrue but I’ve decided that at some point they must be held accountable.  Kooks like Ray Comfort have been told time and time again that the things they say are not true but they just ignore this and continue to spread their lies.

I believe that they, often know that they are lying but sincerely believe that it is ok to lie to protect their ideology.

Tomorrow, I will begin a series of post pointing out a few of these lies.  These are just a few of the lies that you will commonly hear from religious adherents whose ideology conflicts with reality and so they say reality must be wrong.  I’m just going to cover the big ones, not the ones that deal with details.  Things like carbon dating being inaccurate or that a flash flood could have carved the grand canyon, etc.  There are too many of those.

Arguments from authority are certainly one of the favorite fallacies used by the “faithful”.  So not that it REALLY matters what Einstein thought on the subject but since he is often quoted out of context by religious liars to try to make him seem more “godly” than he actually was, I want to present the following quote from a letter he wrote not long before his death. 

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

I was approached by a Christian proselytizer this weekend.  I was at a car show and saw him coming toward me with his hand full of pamphlets.  I thought to myself, if this man ask me about Jesus, I’m not going to just take his paper and move on. 

So I didn’t, and I’m so glad I didn’t  because he offered me the most rock solid evidence that Jesus was not only a real person but that he is a god as well.  Are you ready for this proof?  Hold on to your britches folks.  He, excitedly, reached in his pocket and pulled out… [drum roll]… a dollar bill. 

That’s right, he is so deluded that he thinks the year printed on that dollar bill proves that Jesus existed and was a god.  I didn’t need to talk to him for many more seconds to realize that he was a nutty as they come so I told him to move on and tell his lies to someone else.