IDoNotGetIt

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 was just reading an article about Elizabeth Smart’s testimony.

”God would never tell someone to kidnap a young girl from her family’s home in the middle of the night, from her bed that she shared with her sister, from her sister’s side, and continue to rape her and sexually abuse her. … I know he was not called of God because God would never do something like that.”

My first thought was “that woman needs to read the bible”.   He’s done much worse.  I remember this one time where he got really mad and KILLED EVERYONE ON THE PLANET EXCEPT ONE FAMILY.  Sorry but that one instance alone is worse than what happened to Mrs. Smart.  And really, that story is “low hanging fruit”.

It always amazes me how believers can make statements like that.  I guarantee I could get her to say “God is beyond our understanding” within 10 minutes of a conversation about God.  It seems to me that hypocrisy is a prerequisite to being a Christian.  Everyone knows what God wants when it is convenient and then he is unknowable when that is convenient.

I found this little page on the web.  It’s the Christian Research Institute’s (CRI) take on God vs Atheism.  The subtitle is “Is Atheism Logical?” and I suppose they are trying to answer this question.  Let me start with the irony alert, the site has a trademark slogan at the top of their page, “…because Truth matters”. Not surprisingly, they have no interest in truth – capital T or otherwise.

GOD VS. ATHEISM- Introduction
They start with an attempt to define atheism and they fail.

“Atheism is the world view that denies the existence of God. More specifically, traditional atheism argues that there never was and never will be a God. But is this position logical?”

Atheism is not a world view, it is a response to one question, “Do you believe in one or more god?” An answer in the affirmative means you are a theist otherwise you are an atheist. An atheist may believe that “there never was and never will be a God” but that is not a requirement for them being an atheist.
GOD VS. ATHEISM- Suppositions

“Atheism positively affirms that there is no God.”

So they have set the stage to argue against a straw-man atheist.  The next part of their argument is true, this claim would require evidence and to prove “absolutely” would require omniscience.  However, we do not, typically, require “absolute” proof to make affirmative statements. If I leave my house and lock the door before going, I am not being unreasonable to make the statement that “my door is locked at home”. After all it is possible that someone has broken into my house and unlocked my door or any other number of possibilities as to why my door may no longer be locked as I left it. We make affirmative statements all the time without omniscience. How about “Santa is not real”? Are you being unreasonable to make that claim without omniscience? Certainly not, in reality, in Science, we don’t make statements of absolute certainty. Every claim is subject to change with the introduction of new evidence. The statement quoted above is not a logical fallacy and is not dogmatic as they claim, because without evidence in favor of the extraordinary claim that there is a god, the reasonable conclusion is that there isn’t one.  Also, it’s not dogmatic because that claim is subject to change in the event that convincing evidence is provided to the contrary.

GOD VS. ATHEISM- The Failings of Atheism
The straw-man continues to be picked apart here. As I’ve stated, atheism isn’t a world view, if there were no theist, there would be no need for the word atheist. So while it is true that atheism can’t adequately explain the existence of the world, it isn’t true that the existence of the world can’t be explained without injecting the supernatural. Science is the method we use to study reality (including the existence of the world) and it does a fine job, we have no better method to study and know about objective truth than science. So if you replace “atheist world view” in this part of their argument with “science” what you get is lies. Science does provide us with explanations and will continue to allow us to refine our knowledge about the universe.

GOD VS. ATHEISM- The Claims of Christ
Here they just devolve into preaching but I still want to address their claims.

“…let them consider the claims of Jesus Christ. He claimed to be none other than God in human flesh (John 1:1). This astounding claim was supported, however, by His matchless personal character, His fulfillment of predictive prophecy, His incredible influence on human history — and most importantly, the historical fact of His resurrection from the dead.”

The claim that one is “God”, in any form is an astounding claim indeed. So the evidence would have to be pretty astounding to back that claim up. So what astounding evidence does he provide here?

1. His matchless personal character – I would argue that Jesus’ personal character wasn’t matchless. As described in the bible, Jesus was no better a person than most people. He lied, he got angry and behaved in a petty manner, mistreated his mother, etc. There are many examples. Sorry, this point does not amount to evidence of divinity.
2. His fulfillment of predictive prophecy – Some examples need to be provided here. I can find no examples of predictive prophecy made by Jesus (or anyone else for that matter). This also does not amount to evidence of divinity.
3. His incredible influence on human history – Many people have had an incredible influence on human history, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Muhammad. Is this evidence for the divinity of all these people as well?
4. The historical fact of His resurrection from the dead – There is no meaningful way to call this a fact. There is no evidence for it, there is no contemporary evidence that it ever occurred.

All of this adds up to nothing, no evidence what-so-ever that Jesus was a “God” in any form.

And that’s the “CRI Perspective”. I think Hank Hanegraaff needs to do a lot more research.

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 love The Atheist Experience TV Show.  It is a weekly local cable show in Austin, TX.  I’ve seen (or listened to) every episode.  The show may be taking a 3 month hiatus due to construction and upgrades on the studio that it is broadcast from but they are going to try to continue to do live shows from a home studio.  We’ll  just have to see how that goes, I hope it works.

At any rate, the point of this post is to say that I thought it was getting a little stale lately.  As their popularity has grown and more people from outside Austin started watching them via the internet, there were just too many “I just wanted to say I love your show and tell you a personal anecdote of mine” types of calls.  The best calls are the ones where a theist calls to point out where they believe the show’s host is wrong or to give their reasons for their own beliefs.

This past episode (#607) was the best episode I can remember.  It had lots of calls from theists who, although desperately wrong, seemed to have a decent grasp on reality.  In other words not the kind of crazy that calls in every now and then and ask questions like “why don’t we die when the sun goes down?”  These calls are funny but that’s about it.  You can’t have a serious conversation with them.

I’m including the video for anyone interested in watching it.  I may post about some of the things that are brought up by the callers but really, Matt is such a master at handling these people that I’m not sure I could bring anything new to the table.

I had a run in last night in the parking lot at Darlington raceway. Unfortunately, I was running late; it was already after 19:00 and the race would be starting by 19:30. And I still had a long walk just to get to the track.

This guy approached me, and he surprised me too because I was looking back at my friend, so I almost reached out to grab the pamphlet he was reaching out to me. But then I noticed the red cross and heard him speak, "do you need Jesus" or something to that effect. I immediately retracted my hand and said "I’m not interested". He looked more than a little surprised, he looked mad and asked "you’re not interested in Jesus?". I said "nope" as I walked away and heard him say "Jesus loves you". I wish I would have had time to talk to him, I wanted to turn around and say "well he can tell me that himself if it’s so". I mean honestly, who outside of elementary school sends their friends out to tell someone that they love them.

When I got to the main road I got a hint about why he seemed so upset when I said I wasn’t interested.  There was another one of them on the road catching people.  As I was walking by I heard a group of guys that he was forcing his propaganda on making snide comments and such.  These guys are presumptuous ass-holes to do this kind of proselytizing but I don’t have any interest in being rude to them.  Like I said, I wish I had been in less of a hurry, I’d have enjoyed having a discussion about it with him.  But I wonder how many people taunted them, however many did I’d be willing to bet a weeks pay that they went home feeling every bit as self-righteous and persecuted as when they started.

I love the way people around here just can’t imagine that everyone around them isn’t Christian.

We had a looong devotional in our department meeting this morning. The good news is that we don’t need to worry about anything because Jebus has everything under control. So just sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

I wish Christians would follow their own idiotic advice.

Nope, I can’t take it.  After 13 minutes of this movie, it has been one stupid argument after another.  It’s an all-star cast of bad arguments and absolutely no Startling Proofs.  That’s a totally misleading title. 

Some of the jewels so far: entropy, tornado in junk yard, delicate balance in nature proves design.

I downloaded this video called “Startling Proofs: Does God Really Exist” off Bittorrent.  I thought I could make a blog post out of tearing it apart.  However, after just the first 4 minutes of the hour long movie, I’ve already got more than one blog post’s worth of material.

They start off with the watchmaker argument but here are some of the quotes that follow their presentation of the watchmaker argument.

From the wonderfully simple mind of Dave Hunt International Author, Berean Call Ministries

There are a lot of evidences’ for the existence of god.  The bible talks about the universe, for example.  I think that you would have to be, in my opinion, an idiot to think that this universe happened by chance, that life and intelligence sprang from dead empty space.  It just couldn’t happen.”

So there are a lot of evidence’s for the existence of god but you’re not going to provide any… thanks a lot.  but I totally agree with this tool that you’d have to be an idiot to think that life and intelligence sprang from dead empty space.  It couldn’t happen and I don’t know of anyone besides Christian strawmen who believe that.

After he finishes showing his ignorance, they lead right into another brilliant fella who tells us all about cause and effect.  This is Dr. Don Patton – Professor, Practical Geologist (better listen to him, he’s got a PhD.

I think most people understand the concept of cause and effect.  You see something happen, you immediately look… ‘Why did it happen’, ‘what’s the cause’.  That’s how science functions; we can’t function without the concept of cause and effect.  And when we look at the effect, the amazing design and the tremendous effects, we must have a tremendous cause, logically, in order to account for it.”

Looking at an effect and saying “ooh, this is big, it must have a huge cause, cool God did it”.  No, that’s not how science works.  What is the tremendous cause for a nuclear blast?  Neutrons, which have a mass of 1.67492729×10−27 kg.

Moving right on to the next asshat, Peter Lalonde – This Week in Bible Prophecy.

The idea that something even as simple as a pencil could have simply happened by chance, well, it’s unbelievable.”

Once again, you’re absolutely correct.  Pencils have no way to replicate and therefore no way to come into existence without our bringing them into existence.  Since this is obvious to anyone with a brain, the only reason to bring it up is to imply that non-creationist believe otherwise.  No one believes that life sprang from nothing.  That isn’t what evolution describes.  And we don’t know what caused the universe to come into existence.  We are still looking and in the mean time, the correct answer to the question “What caused the universe?” is “we don’t know yet” and not “god did it”.

Now let me see if I can stand watching some more of this insane movie.  I still can’t believe that all came from the first 4 minutes!