IDoNotGetIt

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!

In my last post, I mentioned the theist propensity to make up things and present them as truth.  I suggested that they probably don’t realize that they are lying but perhaps they do and just don’t care.  Today I got involved in a discussion that began with “absolute truth” but, as conversations with theist’s invariably do, rapidly jumped from one subject to another without actually coming to any meaningful consensus.  However, I did want to talk about this part of the absolute truth discussion that, honestly, the more I think about it the scarier it seems.

Not surprisingly, “white lies” were introduced as an example of something that is mostly wrong but not (in my opinion) necessarily wrong.  One of the theist stated that lying is always wrong, there is no such thing as a “white lie”.  Lying is wrong regardless of the intent.  But he admitted (as any reasonable person would) that he does it.  I said to him that that makes him a pretty corrupt person and he said “sure it does”.  He admitted that he was corrupt and began the patented Jesus saves crap.  It’s no wonder these people are so corrupt, they believe all will be well after they die.

I must have been a bad Christian because I never, consciously, did things like that.  When I started to actually think about what I was doing and believing, I rejected that crap.  I could never be that kind of hypocrite.  I don’t think it is wrong to tell a lie if it will abate hurt feelings or is for the greater good.  And being that my belief is perfectly inline with general human behavior, I consider that to be objective evidence that my belief is based on fact and therefore, correct.  My beliefs are inline with reality.  His premise that lies are always wrong is antithetical to reality.  An adult person who was 100% truthful would be intolerable to pretty much anyone else.  If it were true that is is always good to tell the truth, you’d expect the opposite.  Everyone should live this person.  And if it would actually make people feel worse to be perpetually truthful, what is the rational for saying that it is “good”?

Recently, an Illinois court struck down a law that mandated a moment of silence in schools.  Well what we need now is a “fair and balanced” point of view.  Obviously, Fox, being the, self appointed, source of fair and balanced news will have a reasoned and informed discussion about the case.  If you believe that, I’ve got some cheap land to sell ya.  Here are Glenn Beck’s pious opening remarks with my comments in red.

90 percent of us believe that there is a God, 90 percent, yet we seem to be pushed around by 10 percent.  And I don’t care, you don’t believe in God, you want to worship a broom (You worship a 2000 year dead pacifist, at least a broom is real), I could really care less (It’s “couldn’t care less” you fucking moron).  Now there’s some people who want to remove God from America entirely (someone’s got a knack for hyperbole) and uh, you know right here in this country that is one nation under God (WTF?  That is our national motto; our national flower is a Rose, what’s your point).  You can’t even now use the word “prayer” in school because it makes the children cry (Prove this statement, I’d love to see a reasonable person get from “don’t try to force people to pray” to “you can never say the word prayer in school”).  Some people want to force their non-belief down our throats (Here’s where I get mad. That makes no sense, I can’t force non-belief down your throat, nor would I like to try if I knew how. If I don’t allow you to cause some perceived harm to me, I have not, effectively, caused harm to you.), I ain’t forcing it down your throat (YES you are trying to just that.), don’t force your non-belief, I don’t care what you believe in, (You are such an idiot, force my non-belief – no matter what I believe in?  Make up your mind, is it a belief or non-belief) just leave God alone please (If your God is so pathetic, that he needs you to take up for him, perhaps you should reconsider worshiping him).

Let me ask you this; are the children of atheist, so fragile that the idea of prayer could actually warp their minds? (No, but that isn’t the point. If an atheist wants his children exposed to religion, he will go to church. School is a place to learn about reality.)

Quickly, let me get in the opening statements of his guest James Dobson.  I love how he just lies through his teeth.

The decision that was handed down this week was not even about prayer.   It was about a moment of silence without any mention of prayer.

Here are the first few words of the law that was struck down, “Sec. 5.  Student prayer.”  Ahhh, this lying just makes me so mad I could scream!

Why do these people have to lie so much?  I object to this law for multiple reasons, not only is it a veiled attempt to mandate prayer in public schools, but it is a totally unnecessary law.  We don’t need laws to give us freedoms.  We have freedoms until laws take them away.  So if students are free to “individually initiate, non-disruptive prayer”, what is the point of this law.  The point is clear, this law takes away a students freedom to not pray.  It is an attempt to “force it down your throat” (you know that thing that Beck would never do).  This law is written such that, it unquestionably favors religion and clearly crosses the line between church and state.

These theist are so adept at lying that they don’t even realize that they are doing it, this law pretends to protect the peoples rights when it is actually taking them away.  THIS IS WHY ATHEIST HAVE TO BE OUTSPOKEN.  It’s not to force anything down anyone’s throats.  We have to fight these not-so-subtle attempts to mandate religion and force it down our throats.  We just want everyone to be free to worship or not worship at their leisure.

Are the children of theist so fragile that the idea of praying must be mandated lest their minds be warped?

If you’re super bored, here is the whole thing.

So far, we’ve got:

1. Realization that the bible is 100% man made crap.
2. Realization that I can’t force myself to believe something that I know isn’t true.
3. Realization that Heaven/Hell are merely emotional terrorism designed to entice/scare me.
4. Realization that rationalization is a critical ingredient for sustaining faith.

I heard someone say yesterday that no theist has ever been turned by hearing contradictions in the bible and my first thought was “I was.”  But then I thought about these series of post and remembered that is was actually much more complicated than that.

Rather than having one realization or “thing” be the “most important” factor in my loss of faith, I had a change in attitude.  Although, I have always cared about whether or not my beliefs are true, I realized that, that attitude was so important that nothing was above it.  I began to care about whether or not the things I thought I knew where, in fact, justified.  In short, “faith” had to go.  Relieving oneself of unfounded beliefs is the first step of a journey that is filled with amazing wonders that make religious experiences look tame in comparison.

Sometimes I still feel like a fool for being so credulous for so long.  How could I let a fear of the boogieman scare me into believing something so silly for 20+ years?  Freedom from this kind of fear is what you become immune to when you start to care.  And that is all it takes, don’t just care about what you believe in, care about whether or not the things you believe in are true.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism. – Thomas Jefferson

Oh, this is awesome, just to make sure I got the American Freethought link correct before moving on from this post (but after writing the whole thing), I visited their blog and read a few past post that I had missed.  Well on Jan. 31, they linked to this video on YouTube.  So if you want to see a pretty girl explain this on a video rather than read my long post, follow the link instead. 

I had an argument that I had to just give up on, about atheism/agnosticism with two guys I work with.  I thought about posting about it but decided that it was boring so I didn’t.  But today, I was listening to the American Freethought podcast in which they were interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson.  In the interview, he told a story about how he attempted to change his own Wiki article, to say that he was agnostic rather than atheist.  This reawakened my desire to talk about this so I’m going to post about it after all.

Here is my problem with this.  If I ask you, “Do you believe x?”  There are two acceptable answers to that question and one meta-answer.  First the meta-answer.  If I haven’t explained x sufficiently, you may not understand the question.  In other words, you aren’t answering the question because you don’t understand it.  But assuming you understand the question, your answer is either yes or no.  I got a conversation going about this at work today and had another of my coworkers trying to say that there was a third answer which is “I don’t care” but that isn’t an answer to the question.  It is refusing to answer the question.  To illustrate this point I ask him the above question literally just to remove the emotional response that “God” creates, and then illustrated to him that his default position on the concept “x” is disbelief.

Now back to the atheist/agnostic thing.  Every creature that is capable of higher reasoning and holding a belief is either theist or not theist (aka atheist).  In other words, they either have some belief in a higher power/god/intelligent designer/supreme being/etc. or they don’t.  If there is some adult out there who has never heard of a god or conceived of one themselves, they are by default, atheist because they do not have this belief.  So if I ask you are you a theist/atheist, a valid answer to the question is not neither, I’m agnostic.  If you don’t want to answer the question, just say so; don’t try to make your non-answer sound like an answer.

This leads me to another extremely annoying thing about people using the term agnosticism as if it means “I don’t care”.  Apathy and agnosticism are not equivalent.  I don’t care and I don’t know are two entirely different things!

I don’t have a problem with Tyson editing his page to remove atheist or to add agnosticism.  I just wish people wouldn’t imply that agnostic is some third option to the belief question.  It is dishonest.  They are two different questions.  It seems that some people would like to believe that belief and knowledge always go hand in hand but that isn’t necessarily true.  As any theist is quick to point out, belief (in god) isn’t possible without faith (faith=no evidence=no knowledge).

So to summarize:

• theist – has an affirmative belief in god (or a god equivalent)
• atheist – does not have an affirmative belief in god

If you’re wondering how that title relates to this particular subject matter, I’d better explain.  While I was trying to think of a title, one of my favorite childhood stories came to mind.  When I was a kid, like many kids, I went to a summer camp.  On the final day of camp, they had an award ceremony where they gave out ribbons and trophies for the assorted competitions that we had during the week.  On one of these occasions, one of the camp counselors (a very pretty lady in my 14 year old opinion), called up my little brother who would have been around 10 at the time.  When she called him, she was kidding him and said “Robin Morris?  Are you any kin to those other two Morris boys?”  His reply was “Heck no, they’re my brothers.”  I guess it’s the opposite (thinking two things that are the same are different) from what what I’m discussing but I like the title and wanted to use it anyway.

Miracles (God is the absent father)

A plane crashed in freezing water the other day, everyone survived.  Every news article I’ve read about it mentioned “miracle” at least once.  What is a miracle?  The word is use cavalierly these days.  Judging by its usage, it just means something highly improbable.  However, when I point this out to a theist, they categorically deny that and say that it means God’s direct intervention.

The miracles I was thinking about were quite different.  In the bible, God speaks directly to people, causes seemingly magical transformations of water into wine, parts seas to let people cross, and much much more.  God was all over the place, telling people who to attack, what to do with the spoils, who to take prisoner, who to kill, how to kill them, what to do with their foreskin (not kidding).  What happened to this God?  You would be a fool to not believe in God if you lived in the Old Testament.  He was obvious to them.  Today he the opposite of obvious.  Today, if we want vehicles to fly, we have to invent technology to make it happen.  If we want to keep people alive when the technology fails to keep the plane in the air, we have to extensively train the pilots who will be flying them to handle specific emergency situations.  What happened to this God?  Today, we have discovered genetics and have used science to come to an understanding of how species have evolved over the eons.  The more we learned about how things work, the more absent God became.  Today, God is totally irrelevant, and not surprisingly, he is totally gone also.  No more miracles because they aren’t necessary.  How sad is it that God went from parting a sea to helping our favorite sports team win their game?

The lack of miracles today when they were a dime-a-dozen in the old testament was a huge problem.  It is just more evidence of the true source of the bible, man.

Heaven

Heaven was described to me as a place where we can have what ever we want.  Well get to see long dead relatives and friends and live forever without ever being unhappy.  The first time I questioned this was when I started to realize that there were people that I didn’t like.  I thought, what would happen if both of us went to heaven, would we magically get along there?  Or what if there was a girl that I liked but she didn’t like me.  Surely if we both went to heaven and I wanted to spend time with her but she didn’t want to spend time with me, that would be a conflict.  How would this work?  Additionally, how about the people that I loved and who didn’t go to heaven?  How could I possibly be happy knowing that someone I care about was being tortured in Hell?  Querying adults about this returned answers like, “you won’t remember those people,” “you’ll be so overwhelmed by Gods presents that you won’t care about that,” and of course the gift that keeps on giving “God doesn’t expect us to know all of this now, we’ll understand it when we die.”

What an awesome con job religion is.  How often can you get millions of people to buy your product when you are promising to give it to them after they are dead?  I hated that response more than anything, anytime I had a decent question, that seemed to be the stock answer, “you’ll find out when you die.”  But lets look at the other responses, they are, essentially, the same.  So assuming that I go to this Heaven, how will I be happy knowing that many people I care about are being tortured?  Will my memory of them be erased?  Will I just not care?  That person, in heaven, would not be me.  Part of who I am is the people I care about.  If I suddenly didn’t care about them or was unaware of them altogether, that would change me fundamentally.  I would not be the same person I am with the knowledge of them.  But alas, we’ve got the good ‘ol standby, you’re not meant to understand it now.  Hogwash!

One person even explained to me that my ideas about heaven were wrong.  He said Heaven was just being in the presents of God.  I thought, it’s no wonder they don’t teach that to the masses.  It sounds boring.  An eternity sitting at God’s feet telling him how great he is.  I can hardly stand the wait.

Pascal’s Wager

Oh yes.  Not an argument goes by without hearing it.  When I was a child, I was told that there was a specific god with specific properties and who was responsible for certain events, like creating the universe and more importantly this god was the records keeper for the actions of every living person on this planet and would decide upon their death whether they went to Heaven or Hell.  You get the picture, basic Christianity.  Obviously, I was not interested in being tortured forever so when it was explained to me that all I needed to do was accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, blah blah.  I thought, no problem.  Not to mention the great comfort it gave me to be able to pray for help with what ever problems I was having.  Oh sure, I still had to take the initiative to actually solve these problems but surely it was my prayers to God that enabled me to take that initiative in the first place, right?

I remember early in my teens when I began to question these beliefs.  I didn’t think too deeply about it and, unfortunately, didn’t have access to the internet (it didn’t exist yet).  Sure I could have gone to the library and checked out a few books but that would have been a lot of work and on second thought, what if I stop believing in God and I’m wrong?  My immature mind didn’t see the inherent logical fallacy in that question.  So rather than investigating this god thing more and risk going to Hell as a punishment, I just got more religious.  When I started driving, I went to church by myself sometimes.  I got saved twice because I wasn’t sure the first person did it right.  My uncle AJ told me that when he got saved he started crying and could barely control his emotions.  I didn’t respond this way when I was saved so I got saved again but was rather disappointed that it had the same result.  I chalked it up to different people just react differently, plus supposedly, he was a pretty bad character before he turned to Jesus.  My worst crimes were probably lying… oh wait, surely there was plenty of lust too, I was a teenager after all.  So perhaps the reaction to being saved was stronger if you were going from really bad to being a good person versus just normal bad to good.

Then I went to college.  In my first semester, I took a class on logic.  I loved it, it was probably the most interesting class I took throughout my entire college career.  The next semester I took an intro philosophy class.  There were many discussions in that class about whether or not god exists.  The professor was the same one who taught the logic class and he was excellent at keeping his own beliefs ambiguous.  I made an A on my final paper on why I believe God does exist.  The a year or so later I started a new job.  I became friends with the first atheist I’d ever met in my life (as far as I knew).  We had many arguments about theism.  None of these arguments convinced me that I was wrong but they did get me thinking.  Additionally, the internet had been invented which gave me a more accessible resource for researching the subject.

So it wasn’t long before I realized that there was not enough evidence to conclude that any god I had ever heard defined actually existed.  Thus began the final stage of my trek to reason, I became a deist.  After all, what if I say there is no god and I’m wrong.  It took a while but I remember vividly coming to the conclusion that I was an atheist.  Here was my reasoning.  Suppose there is a god, I’ve already accepted that the god of the bible probably doesn’t exist.  But even if he does, he created a universe that we can explore and learn about, what sense does it make to believe that he would design everything such that we couldn’t tell that it had been designed.  And then insist that we believe that it was designed against all evidence to the contrary.  And do this insistence via an old book that has problems of its own.  And punish those who refuse to believe the silly old book even though it is totally unbelievable.  I refuse to believe that any being would do that.  Further I believe any being who would do such a thing is inherently evil.  Most importantly though, I accepted that I really didn’t believe and hadn’t for some time.  I was just pretending.  I honestly, couldn’t believe these stories.  I’m not gullible enough, sorry.  It is not possible for me to force myself to believe this stuff.  So with this realization, I was officially an atheist.

I get asked, often, to explain why I don’t believe in god.  I’ve posted about this before but I want to revisit the subject.  I think this will take a few post to cover thoroughly because there isn’t a reason.  There are many.  Yesterday, I was asked to just articulate the main reason.  So I started thinking, “what is the main reason?”  I can’t decide, I don’t think there is one, I think all of the reasons are the main reasons.  So today’s post will focus on one of them, this one is no more or less important than any of the other reasons I’ll cover in future post.

The Bible

As I began to think about it, the fact that different people could read the bible and get different understandings from it severely weakened it as a source of valid information.  Not only were there many different interpretations of the same text, some of those interpretations were diametrically opposed to one another.  In addition to the ambiguity of the bible, there are many factual errors.  My earliest memory of questioning the bible was concerning dinosaurs.  I used to stay with my uncle AJ in the summer and he was very religious.  I was probably 9 or so when I asked him to reconcile what the bible said about Adam and Eve with what I had learned in school about dinosaurs existing millions of years before humans.  His reply… “God doesn’t want us to understand everything now, he’ll explain it when we get to heaven.”  I let it go with that explanation but it definitely didn’t sit well with me.

Before I read any of the bible I was told that God was perfect.  He was omnipotent, omnipresent, well suffice it to say he was omni-everything.  And I asked myself, how could a being who knows everything not articulate his thoughts in writing such that they couldn’t be misinterpreted by anyone.  The answer, in my mind, was that he could.  The fact that the bible isn’t clear about anything, pretty much makes it useless as a tool.  Even the parts that don’t have multiple interpretations, can be dismissed as allegory or something else.

So with the bible eliminated from the pool of evidence, I must have found myself lost in an amoral abyss right?  No, I knew that everyone always said that the bible was the source of morals but when I started to look into it, I really couldn’t find the evidence to back up these claims.  People who have never seen the bible before still have codes of law that are nearly identical to our most fundamental laws (i.e. murder, thievery, etc.)

At this point, I decided that the bible was terrible evidence for anything.  It is, demonstrably, false at best and intentionally misleading usually and immoral at worst.  I now refuse to accept it as an authority on pretty much anything other than as a demonstration of how reprehensible people used to be (on a regular basis, I’m aware that people can still be pretty awful).

I want to make it clear that I don’t consider the failure of the bible, to be “proof” that there is no god.  I only consider it to be insufficient evidence that there is one.  However, I do point out to those who consider it to be the word of god and whom believe that god is omni-everything, that they are flat out wrong.  Perfect could not produce anything as idiotic and asinine as the bible.  So either the god they believe in is not perfect or it had nothing to do with that ancient book of tripe.

I love Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast.  He is also one of the many awesome contributors to the skepticblog.  Following is a paragraph from one if his blog postings that I thought was noteworthy.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

Good evidence is composed of good evidence, there is no doubt about that.  This came up in a discussion I was having with a coworker the other day.  He was telling me why he was a ‘believer’.

When he was young, one night he prayed for an angel to help him.  He then went to sleep on his waterbed.  When he awoke the next morning, he discovered an angel pin in his bed.  As if the pin itself wasn’t proof enough, the fact that it didn’t puncture his bed during the night further strengthened his belief that this was a miracle.

In his mind, this “miracle” is evidence that:

1. There is a god.
2. God listens to prayers.
3. God answers prayers.

My interpretation is quite different and has nothing to do with the fact that god is apparently an ass because even I know that my friend wasn’t asking for a pin.

My reaction to this anecdote was simply that it didn’t prove anything and that there were much more likely, mundane explanations for this “miracle” than that god did it.  Since I don’t believe that he is outright lying to me, here were some of my possible theories.  Memories suck.  Some aspects of this memory may be based on fact but others may have been invented by his brain over the years.  It’s possible that he found this pin in his bed one morning and was amazed that it didn’t puncture his bed while he was sleeping and thought that god must have protected his bed.  It wouldn’t take much for his brain to manufacture the rest of the story over years of telling and retelling.  Or perhaps he prayed out loud (he swears that he never did this but I believe it is possible that he did occasionally and just forgot) and his mother overheard his prayer and decided to give god a helping hand.  He says that he asked his mother about the pin and she said she knew nothing about it but if she did put it there, of course that is what she would say.

Of course, I’m not saying that either of these is actually what happened, what I am saying is that these are two rational, possible explanations that don’t require any supernatural beings.  My final thoughts to him were, do you really think that god heard you pray, went shopping at Wal-Mart to pick up an angel pin and took that to your house and placed it in your bed?  And really, give me a break, he was not asking god for a pin when he prayed for an angel to help him!  This evidence is not even a huge stack of cowpies, it’s just one cowpie.  And that is all the consideration it is worth.