Jen from BlagHag.com posed a really good question today on her blog:

“If you knew God was real, would you actually worship him?”

It’s an interesting question, though not exactly a fair one. A fair question would be, “Is there anything that could convince you (a) (G)od was real?” I could unequivocally answer that with a “yes, of course.” I’m a skeptic, not a bull-headed cynic. But as for worship this deity? Oh so many equivocations!

The real question is: What version of God are we talking about? Are we talking about Morgan Freeman God from Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty? Because that version of God seems almost worship-able. Though, ironically, that version of God seems like someone who doesn’t really need people to worship him, and would most certainly not send people to eternal torment for the crime of not worshiping him.

The more someone does not demand and require you to love and adore them on threat of pain and punishment, the more worthy they are of being loved and adored.

But if the question must be limited to the Biblical god, the question becomes nearly impossible to answer because the Biblical god itself is impossible. The El/Elohim/Adonai/Yahweh character is so fractured and schizophrenic as to be self-contradictory. He’s presented as being omniscient, and also having human-like limitations of knowledge and upcoming events. Omnipotent, and also woefully impotent. Any incontrovertible proof of the Biblical god’s existence would necessarily have to show God to be only one version of the many that is contained in the Bible.

But, in general and predominately, the god depicted in the Christian Bible is a vile, bloodthirsty, capricious, psychopathic, cruel, deceptive thug. He’s no more worthy of worship than a tyrannical dictator would be. Or a stalking psycho, who demands your love else he’ll kill you, is worthy of love. This is a character that delights in psalms that praise bashing infant skulls against rocks, that subjugates women as property and condones slavery, that commits genocide and orders others to commit genocide for entirely immoral reasons, that lies and deceives.

If God, in any version that adheres in any significant way to the Biblical god, were proven without doubt to exist, I would not worship this evil creature. It wouldn’t be worthy of it any more than Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, or a psycho stalker would be worthy of worship.

And the fact that this Biblical god would, presumedly, have the power and ability to smite me doesn’t make the tyrant worthy. Having created me and having the power to kill me does not inherently make a creature worthy of love and adoration if their ethics and behavior is schizoid and their love is dependent upon threats of torture. They’re worthy of fear and loathing.

If this god was not omniscient, as some Biblical passages (and pure logic) suggests, then, like a subject under Stalin’s USSR or the East German Stasi, I might pretend worship in order to save my skin. Although, I’d like to think I’d have the integrity to refuse. If he is omniscient, well, he’d know I’d think he was an evil thug, wouldn’t he, and there’d be no sense in pretending.

Fortunately, the Biblical god is simply impossible. At least, any creature that contains even half of the qualities as described by the Bible. Might a deist god, an uninvolved and non-personal creator god, exist? Maybe. But the universe looks and acts exactly as it would if this god did only set things in motion and was nothing like the god of scripture. In which case, it wouldn’t seem that kind of god cares about worship anyway.

The Iron Chariots Wiki is a fantastic collection of knowledge, info, facts, resources that serve as a “counter-apologetics.”

According to the site:

Iron Chariots is intended to provide information on apologetics and counter-apologetics. We’ll be collecting common arguments and providing responses, information and resources to help counter the glut of misinformation and poor arguments which masquerade as “evidence” for religious claims.

The complexity of issues surrounding religion ensures that any proper assessment requires us to delve into a number of philosophical, historical and sociological topics…

They got the name for their site from this verse:

“And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron - Judges 1:19″

(Kinda makes you wonder, eh?)

Anyway, I came across this comprehensive analysis of the Sermon on the Mount. As a Christian, like most Christians, I had always thought of it as the greatest example of divine wisdom possible. And, like most Christians, I never really gave it much more thought than that. Since losing my religion, I’ve done more Biblical study than I ever did as a believer, but this part of the NT has escaped my attention up to now.

This Iron Chariots investigation really makes a person question how anyone could really hold the Sermon up as an example of inspired wisdom, much less divine. At least, anyone who’s really read it. The Wiki uncovers a mess of contradictions and bad advice just from a superficial reading — and they don’t stop at just a superficial reading.

This is amusing: Earlier today I posted a short blog called “Getting Your Attention” in which I mention John Loftus’ observation that it looks like only believers are really interested in converting people and not any omnipotent or omniscient deity, and a quip from another on what would convince him God exists… I just discover that Greta Christina, (the writer and blogger who I take my Atheist Meme of the Days from), has a new essay: “6 (Unlikely) Developments That Could Convince This Atheist To Believe in God”

It’s also amusing that in the fantastic article she mentions how when asked what would convince her, she used to cheat and just refer to “The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists“, by Daylight Atheism blogger Ebonmuse — I’m likely to do the same and just point to Greta’s essay.

Spoiler alert: here’s part of her final summary of her list of developments:

Now, some believers will probably argue that my standards set the bar too high. They’ll argue that I’ve created standards of evidence that are obviously not being met: that I’ve created a counter-factual world in which God might exist, but that clearly is not the world we live in.

To which I reply: Yes. That’s my whole freaking point. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that there is not one scrap of good, solid evidence supporting the God hypothesis. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that every piece of evidence anyone has ever shown me in support of the God hypothesis has completely sucked. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that these criteria — criteria that would be completely reasonable for any other hypothesis — are not being met.

As many atheists point out: If God were real, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If God were real, it would be freaking obvious. If God were real, nobody would be an atheist. Nobody would even disagree about religion. The most obvious explanation for God’s existence not being ridiculously self-evident is that God does not exist. As Julia Sweeney says in her brilliant performance piece Letting Go of God, “The world behaves exactly as you expect it would, if there were no Supreme Being, no Supreme Consciousness, and no supernatural.”

I’d been aware of Buddhism as seperable as a philosophy and a religion since I started researching religions as a teen, but at that time it didn’t really matter to me.

Skip forward about fifteen or so years, and during my long deconversion from Christianity I took a long, hard look at Buddhism as a possibility for something I could hang my epistemological hat on. I quickly rejected the religious elements of Buddhism for some of the same reasons I was rejecting all religious ideas (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — which I was not finding), but the philosophical aspects really appealed to me as a foundation of personal ethics and self-improvement.

Part of the “Noble Truths” of Buddhism describe life as suffering. A misconception is that what that phrase implies is that we just accept this “truth” and live with it. Wrong! The goal of Buddhism is to know this, and then overcome it, transcend it. And the root of suffering is want, desire. Because our desire for things creates anxiety, leads us to think and act selfishly, harm ourselves and others, and create suffering. Likewise the loss of things we desire. The desire to hold other stuff lest we lose them, etc.

This all makes perfect sense; who can’t see the wisdom of it? It’s a concept I’ve held onto, and, even once I discarded Buddhism, primed me to accept the truths of Marxist criticisms of capitalist avarice, commodity fetishism, reification, and mystification.

But what aspects of Buddhism that soured me on truly latching onto it as a personal philosophy involved the idea that among the stuff we desire which leads to suffering is relationships. Well, that’s still true. Our love, lusts, attractions, devotions, feelings for other people, including family, do indeed create sufferings from jealousy, angst, strife, anger, lust, sadness, etc. In the aquiring relationships, holding on to them, and losing them. This is all true, too.

But, the true path of following the Buddhist Precepts encourages, if not demands, disattachment from these wants just as much as from material wants. I subsequently easily embraced the idea that the want for stuff is a manufactured “nature” a cultural logic instills in us, and leads to unneccessary suffering; but whether right or wrong, the idea of detachment from love, sex, familial bonds, personal relationships, is anethma to me. It’s the joys and even the pain of this part of being alive that I feel makes life worth living, and makes it wonderful! So, the idea of the desire of emotional, sexual, relationship, personal bonds and connections and experiences may be a cause of suffering, but life would be worse off without them.

To be fair, the majority of the Buddhist Tenets involve and put focus on perfectly admirable and desireable (hey!) goals: don’t kill anything, don’t steal, don’t lie or cheat, seek personal cleanliness and purity in deed, thought, and speech. I whole-heartedly support these Tenets.

Also, Buddhism has a flip-side to the goal of discarding want, like the yin and yang, and that’s to actually embrace all things equally. While one detatches themselves from want, you are to also embrace all. I’ll admit, I’d not totally groked this idea, and this may hold the key to my problems with accepting philosophical Buddhism. But that’s OK, because I’ve since discovered secular humanism, and it’s generally accepted (and non-dogmatic) precepts fit me like a glove!

Whew! Well, all that serves as introduction for my featuring an article: “Killing the Buddha” by Sam Harris. It’s a few years old, but he recently Tweeted about it, I just read it, and it’s great!

While it should absolutely be read in its entirity to appreciate the arguments and observations he makes, here is one of the main thematic threads I think is important:

“[The] spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious encumbrances, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to develop our scientific understanding of human subjectivity.”

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“Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance.”

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“Political correctness simply does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith….
What the world most needs at this moment is a means of convincing human beings to embrace the whole of the species as their moral community. For this we need to develop an utterly nonsectarian way of talking about the full spectrum of human experience and human aspiration.”

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“[...] there is much more for us to understand about how the mind can transform itself from a mere reservoir of greed, hatred, and delusion into an instrument of wisdom and compassion. Students of the Buddha are very well placed to further our understanding on this front, but the religion of Buddhism currently stands in their way.”

image taken from Leaky Penny: http://creativebits.org/creative_agency_logo

Atheists experience transcendent wonder and awe at the magnificence of the universe and the fact that we’re part of it. We just don’t think these experiences have anything to do with God, the soul, or any sort of immaterial entities or forces. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

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One moment, if you will, to allow me to share with you one of the many things that makes my heart speed up with excitement and provides me with a sense of true and sincere awe and wonder that no religious idea, story, or thought has ever quite matched:

(This is a photo of a distant galaxy, edge-on. Click the image to read more about it.)

I’m going to keep this short, because I want to mainly present this potentially interesting documentary in the works: “Skipping Sunday School“:

I’m amused and annoyed by the old and ridiculous canard of Pascal’s Wager used at the end of the clip. Spoken by the guy who throughly didn’t believe that a person could be good without the indoctrination of religion. The truth is, there are countless people throughout the world who are perfectly ethical and moral people without having been indoctrinated into religion. If, without religion people would go wild and be amoral, northern Europe should have self-destructed by now! The Scandinavian are majority atheist/agnostic, and yet they have far lower crime rates and a far better social structure than certainly the U.S.

I used to think myself that, even as an atheist, a religious upbringing was still important for the learning of social rules and guidance. I am now horrified I once thought that. Terribly embarrassed. The morality that religion instill is not a thoughtful, empathic, selfless morality. The basis of religious morality is carrot-and-stick: Do what God (who is so hidden as to be indistinguishable from invisible, so you need this book to know what God wants) and you’ll get rewarded. Don’t do what he wants, and you get eternal torment. What kind of basis for ethics is that?!

No, the ethical guidelines and morality a secular humanist upbringing can provide is, in my opinion, a “truer,” more sincere and responsible ethics.

I’ve wanted a Jeep since I was 17. One of the other guys who was on Boy Scout camp staff with me had one. If I recall, it was a circa 1970s era Army Jeep and it was frakkin cool! I fell in love with it.

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Certainly, my car desires have shifted around. I’ve wanted a nice BMW, even a Lexus, I’ve even toyed with wanting a Dodge Charger. But a Jeep has always been there in the list.

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After a while, after encountering a co-worker’s late model Jeep, I started wanting one as well. As the last few years passed: 2005, then 2006, now 2010, I’ve longed for a nice, black, Jeep Wrangler. Comfortable, modern, sleek. And I still do . . . but it doesn’t feel quite right. There’s something missing.

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The raw, rugged, durable, unexplainable character that your Army Jeep has!

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I’ve done some half-hearted research now and then (half-hearted not in the sense that I half cared, but simply I didn’t put much into it due to lack of any hope), and had mostly decided on a CJ5, preferably mid- to late 50s era Army. And I still would love one.

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But I’ve also found that I think I may actually want a late 60s M151 even more! Excellent compromise between the appearance and gruff ruggedness I want, and mechanical advancement.

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Surprising (to probably everyone who knows me), one of the reasons I want a pre-80s Jeep, is I want to be able to work on it and service it myself. Yes, that’s right, me. I want to get my hand dirty replacing and repairing parts, tweeking and tuning, looking for the right parts. Really getting into the machine in a way I can’t even do with my aging 97 Mercury Tracer.

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I don’t know how I’m going to do it, or when I can make it happen, but one day I will have one. Anyone know of a good deal on an old Jeep with character?

And why is today, just more than half done, and beset by a major setback, such a good day?

I was able to take a 2-hour lunch which allowed me to spend a little time browsing at Barnes and Noble, pick up a paperback, and eat leisurely while reading. That’s it. That right there is a sure-fire way for me to have a great day!

I think part of it comes from back in high school, YEARS ago *pout*, when I worked at the local small town Pizza Hut. I’d get off work late at night, but the local grocery store (this was before Walmart took over) would still be open. In I’d walk and with a bit from my wad of tips money I’d buy a new paperback. There was no Web, no cell phones — I’d have to browse the backs and pick some scifi or fantasy novel that promised excitement and adventure.

Then home to my basement bedroom where I’d read ’til I fell asleep. And, nearly always, I would keep on reading the next day during all my classes, book snuggly wedged against my lap and my desk. I seriously doubt I actually fooled any of my teachers; I guess they didn’t really care. (There’s probably a reason the only AP class I had was English.)

These were halcyon days where I went through probably 3 to 5 books a week, I discovered Steven Brust and his Vlad Taltos series, and had no obligations except to speech-and-debate and to immerse myself in my passion for SF. These were good years! (Aside from, of course, the mind-crushingly angst-ridden sexual frustration, which is also probably a result of my obsession with speech/debate and reading SF.)

So today, taking this very rare time to enjoy a mid-day book-buying break and reading just for pleasure, has washed away, even if for a shirt time, all my current troubles and worries. I’ve decided I absolutely must request a 2-hour lunch once a week.

Life is too short and wonderful to find yourself mired in spirit-crushing worries and drudgeries of life! Find those little things that make you truly happy and embrace them. Celebrate them. Enjoy living!

“Can science provide a morality to change the world?

NO.”

This is from a recent blog post by biologist and outspoken atheist, PZ Myers in the posting: A priest, a scientist, and a Communist discuss morality. It’s a really interesting post about a talk he spoke at (with the aforementioned priest and Communist) on the topic of morality, at the University of Chicago. This position that Myers has, that science is not the provider of a system of morality, is actually a very common approach by most scientists and is probably a surprise to many religious people.

“As I’ve said repeatedly, science doesn’t provide a morality. What it does provide, and what I optimistically and subjectively think will motivate people, is that it provides rigor and a path to the truth of the world.”

I’ve encountered many people (often religious, but not always! Many are people who believe strongly in the supernatural like ghosts and ESP, and/or pseudoscience like homeopathy and vaccine denialism) who are of the opinion that science is just another religion, or at least a philosophy. This utter misunderstanding of what science is is quite frustrating — mainly because they will pound the table with absolute certainty decrying science as being something it’s absolutely not, due to their own complete misunderstanding of science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greta Christina has been putting out these Atheist Memes of the Day that are really good and thoughtful, like this one:

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day, from my Facebook page. Pass this on; or don’t; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

Atheism is not a belief system. It’s a reasonable conclusion based on the available evidence. If atheists see better evidence supporting the God hypothesis, we’ll change our minds. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

and I’ve wanted to repost them for some time, but I have this preference of just clicking “add to Facebook” buttons, or at least copying directly and then posting proper attribution to the source (like I’m doing now).

Unfortunately, all these great memes are useless for the person already an atheist — we already know these things. The people who most could use reading them are the religious, in hopes they can understand us non-theists better. But the problem, for me, is as you may have seen, Greta’s blog is not necessarily safe-for-work, thus a likely source of offense to the religious person checking the site out.

Easy solution: don’t feel obligated to always credit Greta, linking to her site, and just copy the meme as I see fit . . . which she states if perfectly acceptable! So, I guess I’ll start doing that and stop making things annoying and difficult for myself.

So, once I decided that, I thought I’d go back and start copying from the first one. Holymoly there’s a ton of them! That’s not going to work so well. I guess I’ll just start from today and post them as they come. Although, I encourage you to go back and read through some past memes — they’re all really good.

Here’s another past one for the time being:

Atheists have meaning in our lives. In fact, most of us find greater meaning in life without a belief in God — since we’re free to create our meaning for ourselves, instead of having our meaning handed to us by a divine being… or by what other people tell us the divine being says. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

First, a little story:

I’ve been a huge fan of SF author Steven Brust since circa 1988 when Taltos came out. (I didn’t know at the time that was not the first in the “Vlad Taltos” series, but it worked out OK.) After becoming a fan, I discovered Brust was a self-described Trotskyist. Being in my teens, early to mid-20s, I really didn’t have any idea what that was but I knew it was somehow connected to GASP! evil Communism! One part of my brain processed this information something like, “Huh, his writing is kick-ass, he seems really cool…perhaps whatever Trotskyism is it’s either a) inconsequential to who he is, or b) it’s not some all-encompassing evilness as my culture leads me to believe.” The other half of my mind processed more like, “LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING! I SEE NOTHINK! I HEAR NOTHINK! MOVE ALONG, CITIZEN!”

So the cognitive dissonance was dealt with by ardently ignoring it.

Until around 2007 when I started grad school and my first instructor was Dr. William Burling: the most influential professor, and one of the most influential persons, I’d ever met. I had the privilege of being a student of his for three (almost four) fantastic classes. What his greatest influence on me was to introduce me to the idea of questioning culture, society, government, art, everything. Everything is, to a greater or lesser degree, either a product of or a reflector of the socio-economic base of a culture and nearly everything in the culture is in service to those who control the wealth in society. In short, Dr. Burling was a Marxist, and by the fortune of serendipity, happened to come into my life just as I was questioning political structures.

At that time I was moving from Democrat to vague libertarian. It took nearly a year of questioning and study and investigation and debate, but eventually I too became a self-described Marxist. Although I’ve barely scratched the surface still of Marxist theory.

So, at one point as Dr. Burling and I were discussing Marxist theory and SF and fantasy literature, I realized something from the long forgotten recesses of my mind… (See, I kinda stopped reading Mr. Brust’s books by this point–not because I stopped liking them, but I’d pretty much stopped reading for pleasure altogether! I am glad to say I’ve since picked pleasure reading back up and have caught back up with all of Mr. Brust’s “Taltos” books at least.) I recalled that tidbit of info about my favorite fantasy author being a Trotskyist. I asked Dr. Burling, who had introduced me to Stanley Kim Robinson, and China Miéville, and Philip K. Dick, and a Marxist outlook of William Gibson (who, now, I have no idea how you couldn’t read Gibson with a Marxist outlook! My god, the man is postmodern materialist cultural criticism up and down!) if he had read any Steven Brust. He replied, somewhat dismissively that he didn’t have time for any pleasure reading. Then I mentioned Mr. Brust was a Trotskyist and, if I recalled, wrote in a couple of his novels about a peasant uprising in his fantasy world.

Dr. Burling grabbed a pen and asked me what that name was again.

Sadly, Dr. Burling passed away a couple of years later. I never did find out if he started looking into Brust’s writing. Probably not; he was pretty busy, in addition to teaching, editing a book of essays on Kim Stanley Robinson and working with  Miéville on a book of criticism about Marxist SF. *sigh* I still feel acute sense of honor of having been able to know the man and learn from him. He changed my entire way of looking at life and I could have missed it if I’d been a couple of years too late.

Anyway, so now that I’m deep in trying to learn and understand Marxist theory, both as it applies to literature and culture, guess what my favorite Trotskyist fantasy author has started doing? He’s reading and commenting on Karl Marx’s seminal work on socio-economics, Das Kapital.* (Volume 1, I believe, which is the one Marx had worked mostly on before he died, while Engels wrote the other volumes.)

What’s really cool is that just before this he had read through and commented on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of and the manual of modern capitalism). This kicked-ass because not only did I learn something from it (unfortunately I came in rather late), it just goes to show that Brust is interested in exploring all the angles of modern socio-economics and doesn’t just surround himself with material that fits his perceptions or ideologies. That’s certainly a quality to admire and emulate.

I’m looking forward to reading what he has to say about the tome. And I’m very glad that one side of my brain stopped being a pest and started paying attention. Marxism is not evil, Trotskyism is not evil, communism is not evil. These are just ideas, concepts, ways of investigating and ideas are never evil. They may not be good or practical ideas, but one should never dismiss a way of thinking, a way of investigating, because authority has proclaimed it verboten, taboo, out of bounds. Question everything, especially authority. There’s a reason why they are in power, and a means by which they stay in power.

* I think he’s moving his blog over to a new location. I’ll try to update this link if I can when it happens.

Over the couple frigid weeks I’ve seen more than a few comments on the Intertubes mocking “global warming” because of the unusually cold weather. A few on Facebook, some on Twitter, a few blogs, and even a Web comic I follow made a snarky global warming mock.

If the mockery is meant as an ironic joke, I tee-hee right along with it. But I suspect that most, if not maybe all, of the comments I’ve seen have been meant as a sincere dig at the idea of global warming. (Interestingly, nearly every one has been by someone who appears to hold a “conservative” worldview. I have suspicions why, but for this post I’m only going to focus on science, not socio-politics.) And, naturally, when you have a concept called “global warming” and yet you’re in weather that freezes skin within minutes, it’s only natural to play with the apparent contradiction. But I think it’s important to understand why this is not a contradiction at all.

The most important thing to remember, (whether it’s in this case or other topics that involve complex trends, theories, or processes), is to not confuse a data point with the trend. That is: the particular weather in a particular area on a particular day, with the overall average climate for the entire planet over the course of decades. See the huge difference in these two things? The weather for, say, southwest Missouri, or even the entire middle America, for two weeks in 2010 is just one tiny data point in a trend for an entire planet over the course of 100 years. An extremely cold patch of weather does not disprove the concept of “global warming” (which is a subset of “global climate change”) any more than a very hot patch proves global warming! An unusually hot summer is also just a data point in the trend and should not be examined independently when a much larger trend is being investigated.