Creation Ministries International on Atheists

I’m subscribed to Creation Ministries International’s newsletter, because I like to subject myself to some idiocy in my life. Without a dose of insanity every now and then, I don’t have anything to compare myself to. Last week In their newsletter they had an article titled ‘What All Atheists have to Believe’, being an undeniable atheist myself, I figured I should have a look at what they’re saying about me.

They start with a hypothetical example of a gradual de-conversion of a Christian. Then they say that “every instance of the journey from professing Christian to apostasy must include certain intellectual steps (unless the apostate just shuts down his/her thinking!). Their use of the word apostate really shows their position; they seem to treat non-Christians as an enemy. They then give three example of the ‘steps’ one must go through.

1. Belief that God’s Word (The Bible) cannot be trusted as plainly written
2. Belief in millions of years of time having occurred in the past
3. Belief in biological evolution of some sort.

Unfortunately for them, none of these are pre-requisites for being an atheist. All that is actually required is to not believe in gods. An actual understanding of the bible in my opinion leads one down the path to unbelief. It is simply that they are adamant on reading it literally, which is quite frankly, stupid. What does ‘believing’ in millions of years have to do with being an atheist? Most theists ‘believe’ in millions of years, billions in fact, because it is an established scientific fact. The same with their third point, it has nothing to do with atheist, in fact the atheistic religion Raelianism doesn’t believe in evolution, because they believe our life was created by aliens. On top of that, most 'sophisticated' and educated Christians also accept the scientific fact of evolution.

They stress the point that the bible as plainly written actively teaches against the concept of an old earth. I am fine with that fact, if you read the bible literally it does seem to advocate that. It’s their problem if they want to deny reality in favour of their mis-reading of ancient religious texts.

There are many aspects of this article that I find plain amusing, one of them is that they criticise other Christians who are embarrassed by them.

“It’s as if they think, in our modern scientific age, a belief in a plain reading of Genesis 1-11 (young earth, dinosaurs and man co-existing, a global flood, a talking serpent) is just too fantastic to believe, and so us biblical creationists insisting that the Bible is describing these things as reality brings shame on the gospel and impedes our witness to non-believers.”

It’s almost too funny; they are making my case for me! Their justification for believing these childish things; is that the rest of the Bible is just as ridiculous! They cite talking donkeys, raising the dead and virgin births as evidence that the Bible is meant to be taken literally. They cite P.Z. Myers (but they do not provide a link to him, so I will not link to them) saying that Francis Collins is a clown for being a theistic evolutionist, and use that as a mouthpiece for saying they will still be considered intellectually backward if they believed in evolution. They seem so close to getting it, but so far away... The reason Francis Collins is a clown, is because he wants to inject God into biology. He isn’t content on studying biology simply as science, but wants there to be a spot for his god too. He’s actually a great scientist, no one denies that.

Perhaps the most humorous part of the entire article is the last section, where they claim that people are not Christian/apostates don't believe because of sin or emotional hurt. Please, give me a break. No one in my church did anything to hurt me in any way; I left the religion for purely intellectual reasons. The religion just didn’t add up, in particular, creationism didn’t add up. They say that creationism is “one of the best immunizers against the atheistic worldview”. Bullshit. Creationism was one of the things that caused me to question my faith in the first place, because anyone with an inquisitive mind who isn’t a gullible idiot will see through the facade that is creationism. Keep deluding yourselves because you’re only hastening your demise.

Edit: This wasn't from their newsletter last week, I started writing this post several months ago, and had to stop reading the article because it was too stupid, I just picked it up again today and finished it.

Philosophy of Futility

The other night I found myself having a discussion at a party, and after a while it became rather philosophical, and I found myself having to defend a position that I thought should have been obvious to anyone who had spent some time thinking about the matter. The idea was that the truth is true regardless of whether anyone believes it or not. My friends were arguing against this position by saying that this was just my belief, or my perception of reality. However this doesn't even scratch the argument I was making, as I freely admit that my perception could be completely erroneous, yet whatever is real, exists whether I perceive it or believe in it or not.

I got them to agree that if something exists, its existence is not dependent on any mind perceiving it or not, but they wouldn't agree that existence necessarily exists, which I found rather confusing. According to them the fact that existence exists is merely my belief. They also seemed to disagree quite adamantly with the idea of truth that is independent of minds. To me, truth is true regardless of whether it is believed/accepted or not, and this is self-evident. It soon came to the point where I was essentially arguing against a self-refuting circular argument. My friends were essentially arguing from some kind of relativist, solipsist, nihilist, post-modernist position. I did not quite understand exactly what they were trying to argue for, but the message that I was getting from them was that: all perception is false, truth is relative, we can't know the truth and there is no absolute truth.

This position I find to be self-refuting, as it is predicated on a truth claim that says either that we can't know the truth or there is no truth, and an absolute truth statement that says that truth is relative. It's circular and illogical because it attempts to avoid criticism by appealing to its own dogma, which wasn't shown to be true in the first place.

I cannot take a position seriously if it inevitably defines its own demise by asserting self-refuting premises. Any view of reality must presume by default that existence exists, reality is real and truth is true, and belief or perception have no bearing on them. As Johannes Kepler famously said "Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question". In this situation it is not so much miracles and scientific explanation, but rather once epistemological nihilism is admitted, every single belief, explanation and idea is out of the question, including epistemological nihilism itself.

Not only do I find these ideas to be false in the highest degree, it seems to be a rather depressing and dangerous idea to hold. Once truth in all forms is rejected, everything is futile. From this viewpoint, all inquiry is misguided and useless, life has no meaning inherently, and any meaning you ascribe to it is merely illusory and false. The reason I say that it is a dangerous view is that society simply would not function if it were a widely held belief. It is a philosophy of futility.

Feedback and criticism are welcome.

Fuck The Catholic Church

Okay it has just gone way too far. Once again, a catholic priest has been arrested for being part of a pedophile sex ring. The irony of the situation, is that this particular priest Father Riccardo Seppia was in the archdiocese of one of the advisers to the Pope on the ongoing pedophile scandals. He was apparently trying to get a Moroccan drug dealer to get him young boys to molest. He allegedly said “I do not want 16-​year-​old boys but younger. Fourteen-​year-​olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues,”

People have been making jokes about the Catholic church and it's pedophilic behaviour as long as I can remember, the first one I heard was probably when I was around 6 years old. Nearly 16 years on from then and the allegations are as true as ever. Jokes about it just do not suffice any more, words simply cannot express the contempt and disgust that the Vatican deserves. Here are two songs that appropriately highlight how vile this despicable organisation is.

'By The Way We're Fucking Your Kids' by AHughman08
What he says at the start of the video shows exactly what is wrong with the Catholic Church, they are so deluded by their own self-righteousness, that in their apology for raping children, they compare their critics to Nazi's and then say you'll burn in hell if you disagree with them. To the Vatican: Fuck you.


'The Pope Song' by Tim Minchin
This song contains more 'fuck's than any other song I've ever heard, and every single one is deserved. The last few lines of the song explain why:

"If this mother fucking stupid fucking song offended you
With its filthy fucking language and its fucking disrespect
If it made you feel angry go ahead and write a letter
But if you find me more offensive than the fucking possibility
The pope protected priests when they were getting fucking fiddly
Then listen to me mother fucker this here is a fact
You are just as morally misguided as that mother fucking
Power hungry, self-aggrandised, bigot in the stupid fucking hat"

The Ultimate Cop-Out

When most outlandish claims are made, there is a reasonable method of discerning whether or not they are true. In the case of people making claims to knowledge that they should not have access to, these claims are easily testable and always found wanting. Dowsers, Psychics, ESP-ers, and so forth, have been subjected to double blind tests and failed miserably. This is not the case for people who claim to speak to the god of the Bible however.

When one claims that they talk to Yahweh, we cannot test this claim because of what I like to call the ‘Cop-out’ clause of the Bible. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Luke 4:12). We aren’t allowed to ask this god to verify his existence by manifesting, or by consistently answering prayers, providing believers with accurate foreknowledge of events that no one else could have predicted.

On top of being forbidden to ask for verification of existence, belief without evidence is also praised. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). It seems awfully convenient as a belief system to require that it be taken on faith and not questioned. Doubt is tolerated, but frowned upon, evidence and observation are maligned. I simply cannot accept these positions. Blind faith is a terribly ironic gift to give to the creator of human intelligence.

Draw Mohammed Day and the Rapture

It just so happened that these two events coincided. Well, they were a day apart, and technically in this part of the world draw Mo day was yesterday, but I was busy last night. Here's my submission for it in video form.



Regarding the rapture, so far nothing has happened today as expected. It has been drawn to my attention that in the Family Radio cult's literature mentions Nineveh several times. So their escape plan for why the rapture didn't happen will probably be to say that due to their work promoting the rapture, Yahweh decided not to start the end times.

Peace.

The Trinity is Absurd

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the Christian doctrine of the trinity is utterly ridiculous. Not only do I find the idea to be unfeasible and nonsensical, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t even necessary for the Christian religion to exist.

These two criticisms are extremely intertwined; I’ll try to differentiate them though. The first relates primarily to the absurdity of it. What is the trinity? How can one god be three persons/people? Does Yahweh have multiple personality disorder? These questions raise interesting concerns, which are never answered by theologians, the only answers we ever receive are statements of overwhelming inanity like “God is mysterious” or incredibly weak analogies. Most of the analogies that are used by Christians actually better demonstrate other non-Trinitarian doctrines that were deemed heretical.

Does Christianity even require the trinity? In my opinion, no it doesn’t. I am not a biblical scholar, but it seems that deriving the doctrine of the trinity from the Biblical texts requires some mental and theological gymnastics. Besides the polytheistic/Henotheistic/Monolatrist vibes one gets from many Old Testament passages, the rest is extremely monotheistic, and there are no hints that Yahweh is actually three entities. The doctrine of the trinity isn’t even implicitly taught in the New Testament, but rather seems to be a poorly constructed doctrine based on a few scattered verses mentioning the spirit of God, various passages from John and Paul’s writings that allude to the supposed divinity of Jesus, and some of the polytheistic references from the Old Testament. The only time they are all mentioned at once as far as I know is in the prescription of the Rite of Baptism, which I suspect may even be a later interpolation.

As many will be aware, some early sects of the Christian cult were not even Trinitarian, and the primary reason that most denominations today are, is because this was the position of the various Catholic councils that deemed other views heretical. Some examples of other views are the Modal view of God, where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were just different ‘modes’ of God, or expressions. In this view, the deity was still very much singular. Other views included ones where Jesus was either not human, or not divine such as Arianism (Do not confuse this with Aryanism).

What does the trinity even bring to the religion? Nothing. What doctrines are illuminated by God being split into three personalities? Why would an infinite deity require being composed of 3 parts? It is questions like these remaining almost entirely unanswered that makes me more certain that the religion is of purely human origin. Doctrines were invented whimsically to try to explain ideas, but instead they only serve to confuse. Apparently the god of the Bible is the author of the confusion, because the god of the bible is mankind.

The Huffington Post Celebrates Indoctrination

I thought I'd take a look at what was happening around the world in religion, and I found an interesting (read: nauseating) article on the Huffington Post entitled: "The Importance Of Teaching Religion Well". The article starts out explaining how most people who quit religion, do so before they turn 24. According to this journalist, this means that they have been dealt an injustice —an inadequate religious education — and that their new-found lack of belief is the result of a poor understanding of religious practice and belief. She thinks that this appalling statistic of ~16% of Americans who have disassociated themselves from religion could be fixed by providing children with more effective religious education programmes.

Hold it right there, before you go all evangelical on me with your Qur'an quotes, I have to straighten something out. I take huge offense to your suggestion that people leave faith because they lack understanding of it. In my case, and in the case of most other comrades in heresy, it was quite the opposite, we decided to opt out because of our understanding. Understanding the humble human origins, and in some cases, the pretentious human origins spurred us into rethinking our commitment.

Before I continue, I'd like to warn you that you may wish to fetch a bucket, or have a toilet bowl handy, this may induce severe vomiting. (Omissions were purely for length)

"When I was in the second grade at our mosque's Religious Education Center ... I thought I saw God. ... Our teacher told us that if we closed our eyes and prayed ... we would be able to see and talk to God. She said we should try it right then and there. So we, as a class, being as obedient as we were in our innocent youth (that would change later), closed our eyes and prayed.


... So with my eyes closed, I conjured up an image of an old man in my mind's eye. He had a long white beard and wise eyes, and he held a staff ... He smiled at me kindly.


When we all opened our eyes, I made sure my hand was the first one to be in the air. When my teacher called on me, I proudly declared,  "I saw God! He has glasses!" My teacher observed me. I waited for her to dispute me, call me ridiculous and explain that it was just a metaphor. But she didn't. She smiled at me kindly.  "Excellent!" she said.  "See? It just takes faith."

It saddens me greatly that someone who could otherwise be considered to be educated, has continued her whole life under the pretence that her childhood imaginary friend is actually real. Not only that, but she is advocating that we make a better effort to indoctrinate children to prevent them from learning how to aptly use their mental faculties. We should not be teaching children to have faith in things, but rather teaching them how to reason, and make up their own minds. That's not to say we should prevent them from playing 'make-believe', but to allow the fantasies of children to take such a deep root in their psyche that they still play make-believe in their 30's is atrocious.

I should know better than to expect stellar articles from the Huffington Post (though to their credit, they sometimes do, although rarely), but this trashy excuse for journalism has pushed you almost as low as Fox News on the credibility scale.

Ghosts

The belief in ghosts appears to me as one of the most incorrigible displays of vapid ignorance around. Ghosts aren't an integral part of Christianity, yet so many pseudo-Christians seem to have a belief in them that is impervious to reason. When I was a theist, even as a child I scoffed at people who said they had seen ghosts. In fact I still scoff at them. When it comes down to it, they aren't part of very many established belief systems, but somehow, like an injector virus, ghost-belief attaches itself to another system, injects its self-replicating baloney, and the host shortly begins proselytising the gospel of ghost. The mental disease of ghost-belief is promulgated by modern pop-culture, by various ghost-hunting TV programs and morally reprehensible psychics.

Friday Fundies: Baffling Ignorance

I tried posting last night, but the Blogger.com homepage was down for maintenance.

Here's a quote I found from the fstdt.com archive. It demonstrates quite well the mindset of the fundamentalist or true believer, who thinks they are right, and doesn't know why. This flawed thinking is also demonstrated in many atheists too, I will freely admit. Those people, though they may be atheists, they are not rationalists or skeptics. My atheism is a result of my skepticism.
Anyway, here's the quote. Enjoy!

Quote# 4243

How is it plausible that languages are evolved??????? it's not possible - evolution does not exist, the Bible says so. Can you prove what you are saying??? I don't think so because you're saying 'i'm right and you're wrong'. Science does not prove me wrong infact the majority of scientists don't believe in evolution.

Source

Writing a Book

A few days ago I decided that I would start writing a book. I'm not certain that I'll finish it in the near future, perhaps not even for a couple years. I'll keep working away at it though.

I haven't decided yet what it's going to be about specifically, but it relates to the existence of gods and the supernatural. I've written about 1/3 of a chapter so far, and that has been about the insignificance of humanities place within the cosmos, within time and within the animal kingdom. My goal for this chapter was to lay down why I think the religious ideas that we were made in the image of a god and that the cultural idea that mankind is the pinnacle of the animal kingdom are outright false.

I have no intentions of stopping blogging though so don't worry. In fact, I'll probably do a lot of posts on the ideas that I'm working on expanding in the book.

Supernaturally Incoherent

The Atheist does not say “There is no God,” but he says, “I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation”
—Charles Bradlaugh

In my opinion the contention in this quote not only applies to the concept of gods but also to the supernatural in general. The supernatural is defined somewhat spuriously, often described as ‘not natural’ or ‘beyond nature’ or something equally inane. These definitions are not useful at all, for nothing has been said about what it is. You cannot define the colour red as ‘not blue or green’. I have seen some others try to define the supernatural as ‘more natural than nature’, I guess you could draw a comparison to Superman (ignoring that he’s an alien). These attempts at defining the supernatural only raise questions and answer none.

For the first definitions I mentioned, the supernatural, and thus gods (if they are defined as supernatural beings) are ultimately beyond our perception, as all evidence points towards the fact that we’re simply natural beings. All our physiological processes including thought are contained within the physical realm. So we cannot observe the supernatural, then where does that leave us?
It could be suggested that we could detect the supernatural through its interaction with the natural; this too however brings up many more questions. As soon as an effect is observed within the natural world, it is of course a natural occurrence by definition. We would observe something real happening, and search for an explanation within our reality. To assert that this event would be beyond nature is absurd, and goes against all reason. This brings to mind another quote.

“Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question”
—Johannes Kepler

A closely related scenario is the manifestation of something supernatural. Let’s say that Yahweh appears and tells the whole earth simultaneously that it’s time for Judgment Day. Yahweh would be in the natural world, and everything that he did would be natural, so we could say definitively that a god would exist, but we wouldn’t know anything about it unless we could perform experiments on it. We could not however say that it was supernatural, because it is happening within the natural world. If the definition of a god is contingent on it being a supernatural being, we wouldn't even be able to say that one existed in this scenario.

Within science, all good hypotheses have things in common, one of those is falsifiability. A prediction is made, and depending on whether observation confirms or falsifies the theory/hypothesis gains or loses credibility. For example Einstein’s Theories of Relativity could potentially be falsified by one single observation, by observing two objects in otherwise empty space stay separated and by observing something being accelerated to the speed of light. A commonly cited possible falsification of evolution is finding ‘fossil bunnies in the Cambrian’. The God(s) hypothesis has no such feature. Any possible supernatural being is just as likely as any other possible supernatural being, as we have no evidence for or against their existence and they are unfalsifiable. Yahweh, Brahma, Baal, Marduk and Ra are just as plausible as each other. If a theist understands why they reject all of these other gods and beings, then they should understand quite well why I also reject their god.

I propose then that supernatural is not only an incoherent concept, but it is utterly useless. If discussion of the supernatural is limited to incoherent philosophical drivel, mere speculation, how can we ever hope to know anything about it? There is a famous (and famously misunderstood) quote from Einstein, which says religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame. I want to take that quote and rephrase it in the context of reason and evidence.

“Evidence without reason is meaningless, and reason without evidence is mere speculation”
—KJ Moodie

I don’t intend to denigrate pure reason, as some great ideas have been conceived purely through mental processes, but when it comes to matters of fact, without any evidence you have no certainty and have very little with which to convince others. Aristotle used pure reason to arrive at his conclusions about the physical world, and he was wrong, very wrong in fact. The combination of reason and evidence is a very potent one, we call it science.

So, supernaturalists, until you come up with some way of understanding the supernatural outside of imagination, you haven’t said anything meaningful. Any talk of gods, super-nature and anything beyond nature is incoherent, and irrelevant to reality. If you can figure out a way of discovering gods or the supernatural, I’ll be the first person to raise my brow and see what you’ve developed, until then have fun playing in the sand pit.

I'm Not Angry I swear!

Doomsday in Two Weeks

You may remember my post a while ago about the doomsday cult that believes that May 21st 2011 is Judgement day. It just so happens that date is only two weeks away now. Have you made any mocking celebration plans yet? If not here are my suggestions

1) On the Friday before Judgement Day, get drunk enough so that you'll have an atrocious hangover on the day that you're supposed to be judged.
2) Keep drinking and partying on Judgement Day to celebrate your sanity.
because
3) You can sleep in and recover on Sunday.

If anyone has any other suggestions for what to do on Judgement Day I'd love to hear them.

Just a Different Philosopy?

A friend of mine posted an interesting link on facebook to a study that was done on some potential medical uses for cannabis, and we started up a discussion about it. It was all going well until someone wrote this.

"There's one called Sativex which is legal here... but as any herbalist will tell you, there's a huge difference between the whole plant or a herbal tincture, and an isolated compound from it produced by a pharmaceutical company."

I responded by saying that there is a difference because the isolated compound is the one that actually performs the required function. In the case of this cancer study, it was the THC that inhibited the Epidermis Growth Factor, the other compounds are simply not required for the task and could perhaps even be counter productive.

The aforementioned person then jumped into a conspiratorial barrel of quackery with this statement.

"Then we might as well condemn all herbs to the rubbish bin, discount millions of years of evolution, throw out all knowledge about nutrition, agree that no plant can have any impact on human health, and survive entirely on synthetic chemicals men in white coats agree are *required for the task*, right? Just sayin' :P "

Now I do not know this person, so I don't want to make any judgements about them, but the attitude that I get from this is extremely anti-science. If you want to bash science based medicine, and take herbal remedies instead, go for it, I won't stop you, but what will you do if/when you get so ill, and none of your alternative medicine seems to do the trick? Don't go grovelling to a real doctor, because as you have clearly shown us, you have a deep seated contempt for those evil "men in white coats". FSM forbid, if you need an organ transplant, or any other kind of surgery, it would be awfully painful without those horrible synthetic chemicals that we call anaesthetics.

Needless to say, I responded to their nonsense, trying my best to hold onto my sanity. I was graced by a reply that really disappointed me. They replied by saying: "Think we're just coming from totally different philosophies on health and herbs KJ. But each to their own."
Yes, we have different philosophies, mine is based on evidence and reason. When evidence and reason show my position to be false, I change it. Your philosophy seems to be irrational ranting and delusional belief based, sorry to break it to you, but alternative medicine is baloney.

This whole ordeal reminded me of a song I discovered via. Pharyngula a while ago, if you're of the skeptical mindset, and don't mind a bit of country music, I urge you to check out this video

Just Stop It Already!

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Theists, who continually misrepresent the position of the overwhelming majority of 'New Atheists'. What I'm referring to is when the belief that "there is no god" is imposed on us, or is attacked as a straw-man of atheism. I have lost count of the number of times that I've had to categorically state to Theists that I do not hold that position, nor do I know of any atheists who will admit they do if you press them.

The position that I and many others hold, is that we do not believe in any gods, which is vastly different to believing that no gods exist. I will try to explain this distinction, as it seems like Theists simply cannot fathom it.

The first important concept to grasp that should help to understand the distinction, is that one of the positions makes an assumption of knowledge, and the other does not, if you guessed that the 'there are no gods' position was the one that assumed knowledge, congratulations, you have already passed the first test.

The second important concept to grasp relates to agnosticism. The position held by most atheists, could be described accurately as 'Agnostic Atheism'. This translates to the view that "I have no knowledge of the existence of any gods, therefore I do not believe in any". This is in stark contrast to what I would call antitheism (the 'there are no gods position'), which assumes to have knowledge that no gods exist.

If you had no trouble understanding the distinction between my atheism, and antitheism congratulations, you passed both tests, and should never make this error again.

Creationists and Lactose Intolerance

I was jokingly referred to a CMI article about lactose intolerance by a friend so I obligingly went to have a look at it. What I saw there just blew my mind. I had to read many lines several times saying to myself “WHAAAAAAAAAT?????” They would jump from accusing 'evolutionists' of equivocating selection and evolution while simultaneously parading their own blatant ignorance of the topic. A notable example of this is their idiotic assertion that if lactose intolerance was the original state (a misguided term to begin with evolutionary speaking) then being able to drink milk disproves evolution. It’s just so mind-numbingly stupid that I cannot fathom how they can function as human beings.

On top of that inanity, they go on to proudly state that lactose intolerance lines up perfectly with biblical creationism and not evolution. They say that the ability to drink milk as an adult is a negative mutation and correlates with ‘the Fall’. I've dealt with the issue of the fall before with parasitic organisms, and I can’t help but face-palm when I hear that argument.

Where it gets really awful is where they quote someone saying that this forced a change in thinking as if that was a bad thing, and claim that evolution had to make an about face. This shows so clearly that they simply just do not know what the fuck they’re talking about and they certainly do not understand how science works. We change our minds about things all the time, because we make predictions all the time, and when the observations do not match up exactly with the prediction, we adjust the theory to accommodate this new fact. This is a strength of the scientific method, not a weakness. We develop falsifiable theories that make predictions, completely the opposite of what creationists do. They make unfalsifiable claims or false claims that have no predictive value, or make predictions that have already been falsified. When the evidence doesn’t align with their doctrine, instead of adjusting that, they have to twist and distort the evidence, as they have done with this issue.