IDoNotGetIt

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.

A recent argument had me defending assumptions in science.  It’s one of those interesting things how theist will defend their untenable position by attempting to show that your position is also untenable.

Sure science makes assumptions.  We don’t have any eye witnesses from 65 million years ago so when we find dinosaur fossils, we have to make some assumptions about it.  To me, there is a very clear distinction between these assumptions and the assumptions that a Christian must make. 

For instance, we assume that the bones were connected together and covered with muscle and skin.  On the other hand, a Christian assumes that Jesus had the magical power to walk on water.  Those two assumptions are incredibly different.  Every creature on this planet with bones, has muscle and skin covering them.  It is reasonable to assume that creatures in the past would have a similar design.  However, we have never witnessed a human being walk on water.  It’s not possible as far as we know.  So to assume that someone did it is an incredible leap that is unjustified and in no way comparable to the assumptions that science makes.

The point is this, when science makes assumptions, those assumptions are based on what we already know.  Religions like Christianity make assumptions that are completely unfounded and sometimes, even, beyond our ability to verify.

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!

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.