The Atheist Handbook

Grant vs. the afterlife - Part 4

2009-11-28T01:27:00.004-05:00

On Nov. 25 in Fonthill's St. Alexander's Church I debated Catholic Brock University professor David Goicoeecha on the existence, nature and meaning of the afterlife. We were very fortunate to have Justin Trottier from the Centre for Inquiry moderating the debate and he did an excellent job. It was a lively event, and fairly well attended. I will post my own recap later, but if you want an overview of the night check out Justin's blog here: http://www.equalismactivism.com/?p=2151 In Part 1, I posted my opening remarks. Part 2 are David's opening remarks. Part 3 is my first rebuttal and what follows is David's rebuttal. I will post a Part 5 which will be my overall view of the night.

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Grant, in responding to your objections against the faith and practise of Catholics concerning the afterlife I will address your following eight points about: 1) evidence 2) only facts mattering 3) vicarious redemption 4) personal responsibility 5) justice 6) mandatory love 7) suffering and 8) philosophical arguments.

You write that “From an evidentiary point of view Jesus stands equally with Thor, with Zeus, and any other god ever believed in.” As I respond to your objections about evidence I will give evidence for eight different kinds of evidence and argue that your argument that only facts matter is very reductionistic. Since evidence is that which makes manifest the truth and motivates us to accept it I will try to give evidence for evidence that is: 1) historical 2) emotional 3) literary 4) psychologically comparative 5) ethically comparative 6) logical 7) exemplary and 8) metaphysical.

1) FROM MERE FACTS TO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE No one claims that Thor or Zeus were historical beings living at a certain time and place but most accept that Jesus, at least as a man, did live and teach at the beginning of our era. To bring out the value of historical evidence I will think with you about the historical Paul as related to the historical Jesus. Paul wrote his letters before the year 65 and these letters are historical evidence for the existence of Paul and Jesus. Saul was a persecutor of Christians because he did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah or the Son of God. But then according to the story about him in The Acts of the Apostles he beheld Stephen smiling lovingly upon those who were stoning him to death. That fact so haunted him that he then heard the voice: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” That evidence from the way Stephen loved his enemies as did Jesus and from the voice of the resurrected Jesus motivated Saul to become Paul who believed in, proclaimed and wrote about the historical Jesus who was killed and who rose from the dead. Grant, do you really mean to deny that Jesus and Paul were historical Persons?

2) FROM MERE FACTS TO EMOTIONAL COGNITION’S EVIDENCE Grant, you write: “Evidence matters. Facts matter. Personal affirmations or appeals to ideas that happen to make us feel better do not.” But is there not an emotional cognition which motivates that Pascal, Hume and Max Scheler explain in convincing fashion? There are the values of beauty, goodness, truth and holiness. The heart has its reasons which the mind knows not for discerning these values. Our passions know their nuances and motivate us to perform our physical, vital, intellectual and spiritual exercises as we seek fuller life, light, logos and love with their health, happiness, wisdom and holiness. Grant, do you mean to deny this emotional cognition whose evidence is our chief motivator?

3) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE TRUTH OF STORIES Grant, you argue that the story of vicarious suffering for the redemption of others is immoral and harmful. Heaping the wrongs of mankind on the God-man is a scapegoating that violates every sense of justice. But, according to the stories of The Good News Stephen imitated Jesus in suffering for his enemies and that was such powerful evidence that it came to play a role in Paul’s thinking who said: “I make up in my suffering what is lacking in the suffering of Christ.” This story of a love that suffers even for the enemy has more truth to it than any simple fact without value. As the great literature of humankind shows there can be more truth in fiction than in fact. I am not saying that this story of suffering for others with love is a fiction. But, Grant, have not Stephen, Paul and many holy saints found joy and brought joy to other by going through their Dark Night out of love with Jesus for others? Would you condemn and belittle the mother who can find joy even in suffering for her child?

4) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE EVIDENCE OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGIES Grant, I agree with you that personal responsibility is very important. But if you study the history of the concept of personhood you will see that it was first worked out to understand the three persons in the one God. For the Greeks the word person or prosopon referred to the mask which an actor wore in the Greek Theatre. In Latin, that was translated into persona or that through which the voice sounds. Tertullian, an early Church father around 150 AD., began to write of the three persons of the Trinity. That was defined at the Council of Nicea in such a way that each person was equal in worth or dignity, each was unique and each was interrelated or interpersonal. With Augustine in De Trinitate and Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy this threefold notion of personhood began to be applied to human persons. In other cultures there is no idea that all humans are persons of equal worth which is the basis of a responsibility of all persons for all persons. The basis for the Canadian approach to health, education and welfare is grounded in this notion that persons like Tommy Douglas expound as rooted in the Christian heritage. If you compare various cultural psychologies you will see the evidence why none is like the Christian in upholding personal rights.

5) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE EVIDENCE OF COMPARATIVE ETHICS Grant, you argue that: “In Catholic thinking everyone is ‘good’ regardless of what they have done and can be purified in purgatory.” Thank you for this statement which directly relates to our question about the afterlife. But let us notice the complexity of what you are saying. In accord with justice people are guilty of any harm they do to self or to another. Evil thoughts, words, and deeds are blameworthy. But God does not make junk and all flesh will exist happily with the God who is the love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout eternity. But between the time we die and the resurrection of the flesh at the end o the world we will in accordance with justice have the opportunity to reconcile with each other in the purificational process of purgatory. All other ethics as you suggest put the primacy upon justice. But Catholic ethics stresses the incarnational love theology as primary and the atonement justice theology as secondary. When you compare the ethical worldview of the various religions and philosophies you are right that all but the Catholic put the emphasis on justice. Holy Mother Church does stress a love for all flesh.

6) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE EVIDENCE OF THE LOGIC OF AGAPEIC LOVE Once Paul beheld Stephen loving those who were killing him he saw the logic of a new ethics. Before Jesus, loving your neighbour meant loving those of your own ethnocentric group. But Paul saw that in Christ’s love there is no longer Jew nor Greek, master nor slave, male nor female for all persons are equally lovable just as are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The new love command frees us from a preferential love and frees us for a new universal love. Grant, is that not the greatest love story ever told? Is not the logic that leads us to love all a valid sort of existential evidence?

7) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE EVIDENCE OF CHRIST’S EXEMPLARY SUFFERING Grant, you recite the litany of how the Catholic Church has only made millions of people suffer with its barbarous inquisitions, crusades, condemnations of scientists, sexual abuse of minors and spreading of HIV in Africa which as you claim “are problems fueled by a theology divorced from suffering.” But, is not the ethics that is rooted in love for all connected with a theology that wants to mitigate suffering as much as possible And when suffering is inevitable does not Jesus give us an example of how to transform the five sorrowful mysteries into the five joyful mysteries through the five glorious mysteries even though they remain sorrowful? Many members of the Body of Christ are guilty of many sins against others and we thank you, Grant, for pointing some of these out. We are thankful, Grant, that a person with such a sensitive conscience as your own can help us Catholics see our barbarity. You, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet and others can help us know better what and what not to think, do and say. Thank you.

8) FROM MERE FACTS TO THE METAPHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS Grant, you mention that the Greek philosophers had no definitive ideas about life after death. However, Plato did write his Phaedo which gives six arguments for the immortality of the soul. He clearly believes that the world soul or life force always existed and that we fell from it to be embodied because of the double burden of forgetfulness and wrongdoing. As we climb the ladder of love and get out of the cave through a proper remembering with literature, science, mathematics and philosophy our extracted soul will be immortal in the world soul once again. Aristotle reasoned metaphysically according to the principle of “action follows being”. You cannot perform vegetative, animal or human actions unless you have a soul or life force proper to those actions. Humans can think about immaterial abstract universal ideas thus they must have an immaterial soul or intellect that cannot be broken into parts or destroyed. The Catholic tradition has greatly appreciated the Greek Philosophers with Augustine being a Platonist, Aquinas being an Aristotelian and the Franciscans following the Stoics. Your Materialists, Grant, are one of the five great schools of Greek philosophy and they have always been taken seriously and with respect but Catholics do not agree with only facts about only material things. That is only one part of the big picture for Catholic wisdom. get to more of your ideas.

Grant vs. the afterlife - Part 3

2009-11-28T01:07:00.005-05:00

On Nov. 25 in Fonthill's St. Alexander's Church I debated Catholic Brock University professor David Goicoeecha on the existence, nature and meaning of the afterlife. We were very fortunate to have Justin Trottier from the Centre for Inquiry moderating the debate and he did an excellent job. It was a lively event, and fairly well attended. I will post my own recap later, but if you want an overview of the night check out Justin's blog here: http://www.equalismactivism.com/?p=2151

In Part 1, I posted my opening remarks. Part 2 are David's opening remarks. The following is my written notes regarding my first rebuttal...although I went well off script in some places in order to make my point and same time:
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Evidence matters. Facts matter. They matter in nearly every important aspect of our lives. They matter in your finances and your job. They matter when it comes to the reliability of the brakes on your car. They certainly matter in our justice system and in how medicine is practiced. Consider, if the recent H1N1 flu vaccine was never tested in a lab, but was say, akin to homeopathy? A meaningless, untested, cure-all that the user has to have faith in?

I point this out because there is a curious thread running through David’s commentary. He talks a great deal about love and hope and, ultimately his preferences. He makes statements of belief based on how they make him feel. What we ought to believe appears to be judged on what makes us feel better.

But not only would I contend he is simply incorrect on many of these points, but they strike me as wish thinking, choosing to believe what is comforting, rather than what is true.

Consider for instance, his quoting the present Pope as the laboratory having “no hope.” The lab has nothing to believe in, he contends. No promise of immortality, or seeing dead loved ones or , ultimately, no talk of gods.

We are told that hope only lies in the last living institution of the ancient Roman Empire and its dogmas and doctrines of the afterlife. Such a view undervalues exactly what the laboratory has done for human kind.

A short overview of the history of science shows that work done in the lab has cured diseases and wiped out small pox and polio. It has created crops that can feed millions that would otherwise go hungry, produced the information age, put a man on the moon, and extended our sight to see the smallest bits of matter to the farthest reaches of space, into the deep past and put us on the doorstep of the origin of the universe itself. Show me a single Catholic belief that has done any of that. For all the Church’s sometimes impressive efforts at social justice, it has never and indeed cannot, match the accomplishments of science to better the human condition and relieve suffering.

Nothing to hope for? Really? Consider for instance David’s claim that the church is what gives humanity as sense of connection. We are, as he puts it, all part of the body of Christ. Of course, the implication here is that without this “body” we lose this connection with other creatures.

This is patently, and demonstrably, untrue. One of the most important conclusions that is drawn from the study of biology is the profound interconnectedness of all living things. Our species, like all others, is here as a result of a long and slow evolutionary process. All life is shaped by it. And we, as a species, are descended from others. We were not placed here specially by some divine hand. Rather we are the same as every other living creature.

What this means is that all the things we used to identify an us from a them – language, culture, clothing, or skin tone – are ultimately meaningless. We can trace our evolutionary lineage back to a point where such distinctions vanish and, as the author Nino Ricci points out, all that is left is a single human species.

Combined with the results of work in astronomy which shows us that, on a cosmic scale, were are not even close to being the focal point of the universe and that if our planet vanished tomorrow the cosmos would keep doing what it is doing just fine. We have no privileged place on this planet or the universe at large. As Carl Sagan so clearly points out in Pale Blue Dot, Earth is the only home we have, be it though a dot in the universal scheme of things, and we are stuck with each other. We are connected, by biology and cosmology to our planet and to ourselves. One need only see the photo of earth taken by NASA space probes that are now beyond our solar system to have this point driven home.

No religion is capable of demonstrating this undeniable fact, for no religion is capable of mustering the evidence to demonstrate its truth.

Consider also the statements made by Ratzinger in the quotes David provides. The pope says things like: “In death a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth. He takes up that place which is truly his by right.”

Really? By what means does Ratzinger claim to know this? His personal view of the bible? Catholic tradition? Personal revelation? All of these are insufficient, and lack the weight of any substantial evidence. And, in case, Ratzinger is unable to show us why we should take his word for any of it, over say the word of a Muslim cleric or the Dali Lama. The metaphysical claims of these religions are mutually exclusive. By what means does David and his pope suggest we know that their claims are true?

There is, of course, the weight of history to be considered before one can even approach a discussion of the afterlife. Historians have long been aware of the historical unreliability of the bible and, like Socrates, we cannot eve be certain Jesus existed as a flesh and blood person.

If he did exist, he wrote nothing himself. His biographers, writing long after the events in question, got elementary pieces of history wrong, including the historical events that are supposed to give some historicity to the birth of Jesus. As Christopher Hitchens explains, “The Gospel according to Luke states that the miraculous birth occurred in a year when the Emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census for the purposes of taxation, and that this happened at a time when Herod reigned in Judaea and Quirinius was governer of Syria. That is the closest to a triangulation of historical dating that any writer even attempts. But Herod died four years "BC" and during his rulership the governor of Syria was not Quirinius. There is no mention of any Augustan census by any Roman historian, but the Jewish chronicler Josephus mentions one that did occur- without the onerous requirement for people to return to their places of birth, and six years after the birth of Jesus is supposed to have taken place.”

The works in the New Testament written closest to the time Jesus is alleged to have live, the work of St. Paul, are not even eye witness accounts and curiously the biographical details of Jesus’ life are of little interest to him. His focus is entirely on the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Whether Jesus was born of a virgin, or raised a dead man, or walked on water – all noteworthy events one would think – are of little concern to St. Paul.

Even pagan writers, at the dawn of the Christian era, found something a little odd about the Biblical story. Well they should have. They had heard it all before. Virgin births, resurrections, miracles, and everlasting life after death were common place stories in a society drenched with a rich mythology stretching back before the stories of Homer. In fact, early church fathers, like Justin Martyr, could not pretend the similarities did not exist. He explicated stated in his famous “first apology” about the Jesus story that “When we say that Jesus Christ was produced without sexual union, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call the sons of Jupiter.”

Thomas Paine, the great enlightenment thinker and father of the American and French revolutions, dismissed the Christian story on the grounds that it was, essentially, a plagiarism . In the “Age of Reason” he wrote:

It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

Harsh words, perhaps, but their direct tone does not undermine their accuracy and lead to accusations that Paine – a deist – was in fact an atheist, a seriously damaging and pejorative term in the 19th century, and indeed in some circles today.

So we have little reason to accept the life of Jesus as played out in the bible as accurate. Why then would we accept claims of an afterlife?

It is also worth noting, before we move on, that David has claimed the catholic church proclaims there is no hell. This is a staggering claim to make, given the contents of Catholic theology and the statements of the present pope, whom David quotes so extensively. Indeed, it is important to note that the Jewish texts, from which Christianity springs, does not have a hell that is a place of torment. It is only from Jesus, the “meek and mild” that we learn of the concept of a place where one is tortured forever for failing to obey and love god properly.

Though an immoral and ridiculous concept, we must note that Christians views of hell are not uniform. The are as many version of hell as there are sects of Christianity. By what evidence do we accept one sects claims over the others? The Catholics can no more demonstrate their version of the afterlife is any more accurate than any Protestant view of it.

But while what hell is or how one gets there might vary from sect to sect, it is nevertheless a binding common feature of all forms of Christianity that is that hell is real and where those who do not meet the conditions of heaven are sent. The present pope, as I already mentioned, could not have made his views clearer on the subject – hell is real, its just not fashionable to talk about it.

Finally, I will make what I hope will put this line of discussion to bed. The recruitment by David, and other Catholics, of Fredrick Nietzsche to their cause. David contends that Nietzsche was some type of follower of Jesus, if not a Christian altogether. This is false. Nietzsche was a strident atheist and the best thing he could say about Jesus was the man lived, if he lived at all, exactly as he preached. This is why Nietzsche declared there was only one Christian, and that guy was executed on the cross. He found Jesus’s morality to be naïve, and thus declared him an idiot and the religion that worships him a blight. As anyone familiar with the body of Nietzsche work knows (quote mining the man is simply to ignore the breathe of his philosophical work) he did not hold up Jesus as the highest example of humanity. Rather he looked to the destruction of religion, the death of god, and the creation of new, life affirming morals and ethics by his “overman”, one that might look to the mythology of Dionysus, not the mythology of Jesus, as inspiration.

Grant vs. the afterlife - Part 2

2009-11-28T00:51:00.007-05:00

On Nov. 25 in Fonthill's St. Alexander's Church I debated Catholic Brock University professor David Goicoeecha on the existence, nature and meaning of the afterlife. We were very fortunate to have Justin Trottier from the Centre for Inquiry moderating the debate and he did an excellent job. It was a lively event, and fairly well attended. I will post my own recap later, but if you want an overview of the night check out Justin's blog here: http://www.equalismactivism.com/?p=2151

In Part 1, I posted my opening remarks. The following are David's opening remarks:

I. INTRODUCTION

Dear Grant,
As we debate Secular Humanism verses Catholicism I will address my written material to you in the form of a letter. I will make the same points here that I will bring out when you and I debate this issue in spoken form in the public forum. According to the Catholic faith the church is the continuation of the Body of Christ. So the great gift of the church was given to us when the God-man stepped down from his omnipotence and became flesh. This is the gift of Incarnational Love that came “That all flesh might see the salvation of God.” (Luke 3:6)

Jesus instituted his church when he said to Peter: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. ” (Matt. 16:18) It was Paul who stressed that the church is the Body of Christ and that we are all members of his body interrelated to each other so that the eye cannot say to the hand I do not need you. It has been said that outside the church there is no salvation. But all who love and do good have baptism of desire so all belong to the church and each person in his or her uniqueness will live forever. This eternal life of every creature is humankind’s highest affirmation. Thus, Grant, as we begin our conversation together I thank you for agreeing to begin with eschatology or the theory and practise of life after death. That Holy Mother Church is God’s greatest gift since creation can be appreciated from many aspects as our debate will show. But that we might all live happily in love forever is I think the best way to begin appreciating the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Her belief in the eternal salvation for each is I will argue humankind’s highest affirmation as Nietzsche showed.

II. BODY
Grant, in order to explain the church’s view about the salvation of all in an eternal joy or love with God who is the love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit I will quote and explain 8 key passages about being saved by the God of Love from His Holiness, Benedict XVI’s book on Eschatology. The Catholic prays for the blessed dead and asks the blessed dead to pray for us. At the end of the Apostle’s Creed we say:
I believe in the Holy Spirit
In the holy Catholic Church
In the communion of saints
In the forgiveness of sins
and in life everlasting. Amen.
Thus the Catholic lives in the shamanic world of living with the spirits of our loved ones who have died. The Catholic sees all the dead as living and loving and overcoming their many hurt relations through purgatory or an intermediate state until the final resurrection at the end of the world.

(1) At the end of part one of his Eschatology Ratzinger writes that hope for all exists only where there is sheer love. He says:
Man with his ambiguous story of acceptance and rejection of grace is an acting subject in God’s saving plan, and it is on this basis that he inhabits time. He is an true subject in his own right, but not as one who would produce the Kingdom of God from his own resources. The “right” in which he is a subject he receives from the “Thou” of God. He possesses genuine subjecthood only because he has become a son. Divinization “emancipation” as a sharer in the Kingdom of God, is not a product but a gift. Sheer love can only be so. It is because entry into the Kingdom comes about through love that the Kingdom is hope. In a laboratory – which is how Ernest Bloch defined the world – there is nothing to hope for. Hope exists only where there is love. Since, in the crucified Christ, love prevailed and death fled vanquished, human hope can truly “spring eternal.” p. 66

And so Grant, we remember Pascal’s wager:
I can live my life as a wager
that there is a God or there is not a God.
If I am an atheist and win I win nothing.
If I am a theist and win I win everything.
If I am a theist and lose I lose nothing.
If I am an atheist and lose I lose everything.
Ratzinger does not say the atheist will lose everything. He says that in so far as the atheist loves and is loved he too will win all. Perhaps some people decided to become atheists because they thought like Pascal and were offended by the idea of a rewarder-punisher God who would exclude some from eternal bliss.
I Grant prefer to be on the God of Love and to live as loving a life as I can and I see prayer as a way of loving and being loved.

(2) Grant, Ratzinger goes on to further clarify the idea of eternal love for all by locating it in scripture and tradition. He writes;
In the light of these insights, it should be evident that the Bible did not turn a particular anthropology into dogma. Rather did it offer the Christology which flows from the resurrection as the one foundation for eschatology truly appropriate to faith. This foundation confers on thought the right and duty to draw on its own potential in order to illuminate the anthropological presuppositions and implications contained in the foundation itself. Starting out from this perception, the patristic age haltingly and the Middle Ages more self confidently used the instruments provided by Greek thinkers so as to grasp the meaning of the statement that we will not be stored up after death in caves and chambers like chattels, but clasped by that person whose love embraces us all. (p. 130)

(3) So Grant, four of the great questions we will be debating are: (1) why is there something rather than nothing? (2) Is there a God? (3) Are we free? and (4) Are we immortal? We are beginning with the last question first because humankind has dealt with death and the spirit world in all of its art since earliest shamanic times. After looking at life after death in scripture and tradition in general Ratzinger focuses on The Resurrection. He argues that given texts like I Cor. 15:20-28 the whole of creation will be saved. He writes:
That the resurrection state is quite different from our present conditions of life is resoundingly affirmed. What, in more actual terms, such anti-spiritualistic pneumatic realism may mean is less immediately obvious. And yet the claim that the whole of God’s creation, in whatever form, will enter upon its definitive salvation at the end of time is so palpable that any reflective systematization of the biblical data must do it justice… The early Western creed does not speak of ‘the resurrection of the dead’ but of the ‘resurrection of the flesh’… Thanks to its Jewish roots, this phrase indicates the salvation of the human creature, or of creation, in its entirety. p. 172.

(4) Continuing on Grant with Holy Mother Church’s teaching of a love for all that will save all Ratzinger relates this to the compassion of the Bodhi Sattva in Mahayana Buddhism. He writes;
The nature of love is always to be “for” someone. Love cannot, then, close itself against others or be without them so long as time, and with it suffering, is real. No one has formulated this insight more finely that Thérèse of Lisieux with here idea of heaven as the showering down of love towards all. But even in ordinary human terms we can say, How could a mother be completely and unreservedly happy so long as one of her children is suffering? And here we can point once again to Buddhism with its idea of the Bodhisattva who refuses to enter Nirvana so long as one human being remains in hell. p. 188

(5) Grant, our love for others has a natural longing for eternity. When we say: “I love you.” there is always in parenthesis after it: “forever”. Thus Ratzinger writes:
The fullness of salvation is not yet realized so long as that salvation is only certain by anticipation in God, falling short of even so much as one person who still suffers… Every human being exists in himself and outside himself: everyone exists simultaneously in other people. What happens in one individual has an effect upon the whole of humanity, and what happens in humanity happens in the individual. p. 190.

Grant, as members of the Body of Christ no man is an island. We are all part of the main. This Body of Christ which is Holy Mother Church will not be content until every creature is lovingly saved for ever in a paradise of growing love for each other. As love matures especially through prayer for all, it believes more and more that our love will be forever.

(6) Grant in the ancient Apostle’s Creed it is said that Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. It may seem that he will condemn some to hell and reward some with heaven. But Ratzinger shows how scripture and tradition teach that all will be judged as good. Ratzinger writes:
In death a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth. He takes up that place which is truly his by right. The masquerade of living with its constant retreat behind posturings and fictions is now over. Man is what he is in truth. Judgment consists in this removal of the mask of death. The judgment is simply the manifestation of the truth. Not that this truth is something impersonal. God is truth; the truth is God; it is personal… Herein lies that redemptive transformation of the idea of judgment which Christian faith brought about. The truth which judges man has set out to save him. It has created a new truth for man. In love it has taken man’s place and, in this vicarious action, has given man a truth of a special kind, the truth of being loved by truth. p. 206

And so Grant, Eschatology is concerned with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. His holiness is here telling us that judgment is so loving that all flesh will be saved. There is no hell. This is what Nietzsche calls humankind’s highest affirmation. The affirmation of a Yes and Amen for the external return of all existence.
(7) Grant, the next big point that Ratzinger makes about the love of Holy Mother Church for all of has has to do with the nature of our personhood. The church teaches that all persons are of equal worth, they are all interpersonal and each is unique. Because all are members of the church whether they know it or not we all depend on each other. As Ratzinger puts it:
We are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love – this is all part of our destiny. The fact that the saints will judge means that encounter with Christ is encounter with his whole body. I come face to face with my own guilt vis-à-vis the suffering members of that body as well as with the forgiving love which the body derives from Christ its head…As Charles Péguy so beautifully put it: “I hope in you for me.”

So Grant, my guilt can hurt many, many others. My sins of commission and omission can bring much suffering to my closest loved ones and even to many members of Holy Mother Church I do not know. Likewise my love and prayer can bless and heal others. Ratzinger goes on to make a second point here. He writes:
Self-substituting love is a central Christian reality, and the doctrine of purgatory states that for such love the limit of death does not exist… II Maccabees 12:42-45 first makes this clear. This original “given” has never been in dispute between East and West. It was the Reformation which called it into question, and that in the face of what were in part objectionable and deformed practices.
Holy Mother Church teaches us to pray for the blessed dead and each little prayer can be a blessing for them. We also can ask them to pray for and thus build up our love in a continuing way with each other.

Grant, as Ratzinger comes to the end of his book on life after death he related a loving eternity for all of us to his concept of soul. He writes:
What gives rise to man’s longing for survival? Not the isolated I, but the experience of love. Love wills eternity for the beloved and therefore for itself. Immortality does not inhere in a human being but rests on a relation…“The soul” is our term for that in us which offers a foothold for this relation. Soul is nothing other than man’s capacity for relatedness with truth, and with love eternal, and in this way, we can get right the real order of priorities: the truth and love that we call “God” give man eternity, and because in the spirit and soul of man matter is integrated, matter attains in him to the fulfilled completeness of the resurrection. p. 259

So Grant, after we die Catholics believe that there will be two stages to our immortality. First, there will be the intermediate state of purgatory when we are all communally being healed from our lack of love. Then, at the end of this world there will be the resurrection of our flesh so that we will all love in glorious form with the Resurrected Christ.

III. CONCLUSION
So Grant, I have used many long quotations from Pope Benedict XVI to show that I am not just making up this greatest love story ever told. Ratzinger even quotes Nietzsche that “All joy will eternity, wills deep, deep eternity” and he continues “that there are some moments that should never pass away” (p. 94). Holy Mother Church is the Body of Christ and every fleshly member, it is believed, will live forever. This is why I argue that the Catholic Church which in its universality includes all flesh is the second greatest gift God has given us since creation.

Last year when I debated Horst Klaus he talked about an humanistic love. I like that. Whenever we love I think it is a moment that should never pass away. This is why I love Holy Mother Church who has given so much to me because she teaches that every loving creature in every loving moment will not only last forever but continue to grow in that love forever.

As I have studied various philosophies and various religions I have not found another that affirms so much. Therefore, I choose to be a Catholic so that I can love all persons even of other faiths forever.

Nov. 25 debate - Grant vs. the afterlife - Part 1

2009-11-28T00:03:00.007-05:00

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
-Bertrand Russell

How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, and tonight I’m going to talk about the manifestations of our fear of death – religious notions of the afterlife – what they mean and what they say about us and what we value.

This is the second in what is a planned series of debates between David and myself. Our first debate, some months ago, discussed religion in a very broad manner. In the future we will lock swords over ideas about the existence of god, why the universe exists, sex and the church and nature of evil. Tonight, we’re examining an idea that lies at the heart of nearly every religion the minds of human beings have created – the afterlife.

When David proposed this particular subject, he suggested an approach that didn’t just examine the idea of life after death, but that it placed in the context of the Catholic Church. This is to say, placed in a broader context of why he is a devote Catholic and why I am not.

If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.
-Bertand Russell

It is, then perhaps worth drawing my line in the sand early: I’m an atheist, which means I don't believe the supernatural claims of religion are true. More importantly I’m also an anti-theist - which is to say that I am rather glad it isn't true. There are atheists who will say they wished they had the faith to believe in a god, or to believe the vision of the world as laid out in holy scriptures where true, but they just cannot believe it. This is decidedly not the case with me. As I say, I am rather glad it isn't true and if it were I am convinced we would all be the poorer for it.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I will address, albeit briefly, the subtitle David put to my talk tonight: Why I am not a Catholic.

Simply put, I am not a Catholic for the same reason I am not a Protestant Christian. Or Buddhist. Or Mulism. Or Jew. Or a Mormon, a Scientologist, a Hindu or Jedist. There is simply no reason whatsoever, once the supernatural claims of religion are held up to the harsh light of scrutiny, to believe any of it. There is not a god we’ve ever dreamed up that has the slightest bit of evidence to support a claim of its existence – never mind the assortment of devils, demi-gods, angels and demons that all these religions would have us believe exist. Heavens, Hells, limbos and reincarnated souls make for great mythological story telling, but they haven’t the slightest basis in fact.

From an evidentiary point of view Jesus stands equally with Thor, with Zeus, and any other god ever believed in. I cannot disprove any of these exist, but then neither can David. He does not believe Thor exists, but cannot demonstrate the thunder god isn’t real. That which can be declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Indeed, what should be clear to everyone tonight is that I have the easiest of jobs this evening. The burden of proof lays squarely upon David’s shoulders to demonstrate to us that his notion of an afterlife exists. Evidence matters. Facts matter. Personal affirmations or appeals to ideas that happen to make us feel better do not, in any way, demonstrate the existence of life after death. Either these things are true or they are not and those who wish to make such grand claims about the nature of the universe carry a heavy burden of proof indeed. As the great scientist Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

House: "Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people."
BigLove: "You're an atheist."
House: "Only on Christmas and Easter. The rest of the time, it doesn't really matter."
Big Love: "Where's the fun in that? A finite, un-mysterious universe—"
House: "It's not about fun! It's about the truth."
-House MD: episode #402

Beyond the fact that religion exists in an evidentiary vacuum, there are other considerations that turn me away from faith. They often contain, at their cores, ideas, orders, edicts and commands that are immoral, unethical, and irrational and can be extraordinarily harmful even when wielded by people who do not mean to inflict suffering upon others. I could go on at length about many religions, but tonight’s subject turns up Christianity and its oldest institution, the Roman Catholic Church, so I will limit my comments accordingly.

This is little more than scapegoating and is in direct violation of every sense of justice we possess. The punishment of someone for the crimes of another is regarded, rightly, by our society as one of the most immoral acts possible. At its most basic formulation, our notion of ethics and morals depends entirely upon personal responsibility. Without it, ethical action would be impossible. Yet this is exactly what the Christian scheme of salvation does – it extinguishes personal responsibility in favor a cruel, vicarious redemption. You can be guilty for nothing, responsible for nothing, were this to be true. In Catholic thinking, everyone is “good” regardless of what they have done and can be purified in purgatory – a kind of supernatural processing station where your crimes are burned away before you get to go to heaven.

What then becomes of justice? Of ethics? Are they not then, where this tale to be true, little more than a sham? It is made all the worse because the ultimate crime that Jesus was condemned to torture and murder for was the disobedience of an entirely fictional man and woman an the equally fictional garden. In other words, a man was executed for a metaphor and according to Catholic teachings – one need only read the official Vatican Catechism (sec. 74 to 78) to see it clearly – everyone is born wicked because of said fiction! It strains credulity to take any of this seriously.

Call me old fashioned if you will, the idea of mandatory, compulsory love has always struck me as a rather sickly one, or even a sinister one, especially when it originates as an injunction from a godhead of whom we are also supposed to be afraid. To be ordered to love someone of whom you have to be in dread is a form of sadomasochism. It’s the essence of Orwell’s Big Brother god. It’s not enough to obey, you have to love the obeisance as well. It’s the seedbed of the totalitarian. Love cannot be exacted.
-Christopher Hitchens

A related Christian idea that is no less pernicious is the concept of mandatory love. You MUST love the Christian god. It is not an option. Catholic teaching makes it very clear that if one rejects the love of this god, one will be damned for eternity for it. The catechism (sec. 218 and 219) make it very clear that if you refuse to love god, torture in perdition awaits you.

Consider: what kind of love is this that is offered with this sort of threat? “Love me or else you will be denied happiness and will suffer.” The demand that one love you, that loving you is mandatory and you will be punished if not done, is not any kind of love at all. Love is either offered freely, without strings, or it is a worthless.

Moreover, the bible makes it clear you are also to fear god. This is a god who, despite Christians saying god is “pure love” and the like, spends most of the Old Testament committing or ordering genocides, the taking of slaves, and the butchering of children. One wonders why Christians persist on saying their god of love is the same god of the Hebrew bible who ordered the massacre of the Canaanites and the Amalekites.

There are many other reasons why I pointedly reject the Catholic Church that I will not go on at length about here. Of its sometimes barbaric past of inquisitions, crusades and exterminations of perceived enemies (including the burning of the 17th century scientist Giordano Bruno, the silencing of Galileo or the Vatican ordered annihilation of the Cathars) I need say little. Modern incidents of the sexual abuse of minors by clergy and subsequent cover ups and the continuing effort to prevent the use of condoms to fight the spread of HIV in Africa where millions are suffering because of the virus, provides all the evidence one requires of the moral and ethic problems of this ancient institution – problems fueled by a theology divorced from human suffering.

What then, in the light of all this, is a non-believer such as myself to make of Christian claims about life and death? Especially when there is no evidence to accept these claims as true?

Heaven was once believed to be “up there” in the sky someplace. Today we can see in the depths of inter galactic space and no heaven has been spotted, leaving apologists to claim that heaven is somewhere outside our universe and thus forever removed from scrutiny. However utterly convenient; Claim you speak a undeniable truth which, it just so happens, cannot be demonstrated to be true in any manner, which in turn is held up as evidence of its truth. One of my favorite philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, had little patience for this sort of talk and in his famous work Leviathan put this way:

“The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that which is not ‘body’ is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.”

As I thought about how to approach tonight’s debate, a line from one of the greatest plays ever penned that has stuck with me since I was a teenager came to mind again and again. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character meditates on death and the hereafter. Hamlet ends up calling death “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn; No traveler returns.”

Hamlet was right. We know that we die and for all intents and purposes we cease to exist. To say anything beyond that is simply wish-thinking and mythological story telling. No one has ever come back from the dead with photos of the afterlife, there is no evidence than one exists. In other words, if somehow we do survive our own deaths, we know absolutely nothing about it.

Hamlet was right. We know that we die and for all intents and purposes we cease to exist. To say anything beyond that is simply wish-thinking and mythological story telling. No one has ever come back from the dead with photos of the afterlife, there is no evidence than one exists. In other words, if somehow we do survive our own deaths, we know absolutely nothing about it.

What then of the Christian’s notions of heaven and hell, and specific Catholic notions like purgatory and, the now recently defunct concept of limbo?

In its basic and most primitive formulation, the Christian afterlife is all about obedience to authority and being rewarded or punished for how well one follows orders. Heaven is a place for those who love god and do what he wants and hell, for those who don’t, is often portrayed a place where one is tortured for all time. There is something appealing in this view, particular the notion of a cosmic, eternal justice. Even if you think you don’t posses that dark a side, I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone of you whose skin doesn’t tingle a little at the thought of a place of torture where Adolf Hitler or Paul Bernardo will spend entirety.

However, it’s not as simple as all that, particularly not once you engage specifically Catholic notions of life after death.

Careful reading of the Bible shows that even the most heinous acts of barbarism is not necessarily sufficient warrant to be sent to hell. Even the most horrible of acts can be forgiven if only one believes properly. Indeed, disbelief is held up as the one really unpardonable sin. In the texts it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that is the one thing that cannot be forgiven. In Catholic teachings, everyone gets to go to heaven so long as they follow the commandment of mandatory love.

What heaven is exactly isn’t entirely clear, at least from a Catholic point of view. Some protestant sects imagine a place that sounds like Oz, with gold paved streets and people running about in perfect, ageless bodies. The Catholic catechism describes only a state of being in which one heaps glory upon god – in other words it sounds like the kind of place where you spend all your time telling the boss what a great guy he is.

It is for this reason that Christopher Hitchens describes heaven as a kind of celestial North Korea, where your only ambition is to worship and praise Dear Leader. All notions of human achievement and moral and ethical responsibility are erased and replaced with what sounds rather like a powerful and pleasing bromide. But it’s a non-existence bereft of anything human.

Given that someone had to be tortured to death for your alleged wrong doings for you to even be there, and that are required to spend entirety worshiping an all powerful authority that cannot be questioned or challenged, heaven sounds like the abode of a vain dictator. It’s described as a place or state of being of ultimate happiness, but like the idea of “love” in this theological context, it would be an empty happiness where it to be true.

Still, as prosaic an existence as that sounds, it might still be preferable to being tortured forever in Hell.

Of course Christian apologists, including Catholics like David, often ignore hell these days, no doubt recognizing the how ugly, petty and unjust the concept is. Still, it is worth noting that in on March 27, 2007 in Rome the present pope made it very clear that he believes Hell is a real place and decried the fact that is not fashionable to say so. "Jesus came to tell us that He wants us all in heaven and that hell - of which so little is said in our time - exists and is eternal for those who close their hearts to His love,” Pope Benedict XVI said.

Hell consists in the eternal damnation of those who die in mortal sin through their own free choice. The principal suffering of hell is eternal separation from God in whom alone we can have the life and happiness for which we were created and for which we long. Christ proclaimed this reality with the words, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire” (Matthew 25:41)…. God, while desiring “all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), nevertheless has created the human person to be free and responsible; and he respects our decisions. Therefore, it is the human person who freely excludes himself from communion with God if at the moment of death he persists in mortal sin and refuses the merciful love of God.
-The Catechism of the Catholic Church

To make the matter plain, let’s review this essential, an absurd notion, of love and what would consign you to hell.

1) You are born sick, with the taint of original sin because of the crime of a man and woman who did not exist committed in a garden that is nothing more than mythology.
2) No matter what you do with your life, no matter the good you might do for your fellow creatures, this taint can only be removed by accepting the “love” and “forgiveness” of god as the Catholic doctrine understands it.
3) Refusal to do so before you die means you shuffle off this mortal coil with your sins intact. As such you are sent to some manner of hell where you are damned for all time.

The (Christian) story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is impossible for us to know, as it is for us to be assured that the book in which the account is related were written by the persons whose names they bear.
-Thomas Paine

So a doctor who is an atheist and anti-theist, who pointedly rejects what Jesus stands for and refuses to love a god, would be sent to hell. The serial killer who repents and loves Jesus gets rewarded. The moral weakness of such a view is obvious.

Even if one gets past all these objections, and can cook up a theology that is devoid of the petty and vulgar vindictiveness of these concepts of heaven and hell, there is still a great objection to answer: by what information, by what knowledge, can David claim his preferred belief accurately reflects what happens after we die?

The fact is that he can no more disprove Valhalla or Hades than he can demonstrate his heaven even exists. And that being so, why expend such energy in worrying about it?

The idea of an afterlife amounts to a waste of our mental energies, save for those ideas that lead directly to the suffering of others. Given that there is a dearth of evidence to even hint at heavens and hells, and the theology irrational to say the least, we can safely dispense with the notion.

What then do we make of death? Perhaps we can take a page from the samurai whose devotion to Zen hinged upon the fact that Zen dwelled heavily upon death. Those who followed Zen Buddhism mediated upon their own death constantly. A samurai was to keep the idea of his own mortality, likely to come in a gruesome manner on the battlefield, on his mind at all times. It might sound a tad grim, but it served to reinforce an idea that death is but a consequence of life. We cannot avoid it and we likely cannot choose the manner in which it comes to us. But we can choose how we face it.

From this point of view, one Epicurus likely would have found some degree of kinship with, death is nothing to us. We die. It’s a fact. But what really matters is not how we die or what we might fancy happens afterwards.

What matters is how we live and the legacy we leave behind.

The Human Eye | Richard Dawkins & Randolph Nesse

2009-11-19T22:24:00.004-05:00

Atheism ain't no faith.

2009-10-26T23:04:00.004-04:00

I am reluctant to use the word atheist to describe my own unshakable disbelief, and that's not because I'm ashamed, afraid, or even embarrassed, but simply because it seems so self-evidently true to me that there is no god, and giving that conviction a special title somehow dignifies what it denies. After all, we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghosts or witches.

Jonathon Miller

There is a movement afoot in some atheist/humanist/whatever you want to call non believing circles that I find, well frankly, quite stupid.

There are more than a few of my fellow non-believers - fellows only because we don't believe in the supernatural, not because we belong to some international organization of atheists - who feel that as a bunch of people who don't subscribe to any religion of any sort we should still be afforded the same recognition as believers in every aspect of life.

Now, in one sense this is a worth while goal in the political arena. Non-believers should and could run for office, and not be discriminated against for the lack of belief in politics or business. Ensuring equally opportunity for everyone, regardless of religion or non-belief, is a core value of secularism.

However, the stupid raises its ugly head when atheists start to claim that our non-belief is the same as, equal too, or otherwise indistinguishable from religious belief, and therefore should have ALL the same exceptions made for us that are made for the believer.

Case in point: a recent episode of the Micheal Coren Show. For those who do not know, Coren is a writer, tv show host, Christian apologist and polemicist. His show, which covers political and religious matters runs from the mind numbingly dull to the truly interesting depending on his guests. Coren himself is a brilliant debater and few of his guests can match the force of his arguments, even when his argument is full of holes. (I've always wanted to test my rhetorical skills against his.) More often than not, I disagree with Coren. But on this particular subject, I was forced to agree.

One of the subjects of this particular program was religious exemptions for university students - basically students have who religious obligations or a festival or whatever can get an exemption from a professor to take an exam at another date and so on. On the panel was one of Canada's leading public non-believers Justin Trottier whose argument exemplified the kind of massive blunder I am talking about.

To be fair to Trottier, he has done a lot - maybe more than anyone in Canada - to raise the public profile of atheists and encourage us to stand up and be counted and not allow the religious to bully us into silence. But on this particular point, I think he was wronger than two left shoes.

He argued that a atheist student might want to attend say, a scientific conference, and that should be given the same exemption as attending a religious service. Coren, who believes in a privileged position of Christianity in society, said this was nonsense because a scientific conference is not at all the as a religious ceremony. Trottier tried to say that for the atheist it would be - but it ain't. It just ain't.

The problem, of course, is that as an atheist, I have no religious belief in anything. "Faith" in most contexts is a dirty word for me because it implies belief without evidence, which in turn results in irrational decision making which as the potential to cause serious harm. The claim that a scientific conference is equal in the eyes of an atheist to a religious service is barking mad. I, and most atheists I know, do not "believe" in science the way that a Christian believes in a god. I don't have faith in science, scientists, or regard their work as immutable and not to be questioned or challenged. Atheists have no holy books, no devotional requirements or sacraments. Nor do we need or want them!!

A Christian or a Jew or Muslim will have some day or another that they consider holy and according to their faith have to do certain things on said day. I probably consider just about all of those reasons to be irrational in the extreme. Doesn't matter. I don't respect the belief, but rather the right of people to believe. Some allowance in a secular society needs to be made for that.

But for science? For a conference? Yah, no. I have no devotional reason to attend a conference. A student could ask for flexibility and might well be deserving of it. But the fact is there is no such thing as a atheist equivalent of a religious service. And to invent one means one is creating a quasi-religion for the irreligious and implying that science ought to be worshiped - which is just daft.

I have argued elsewhere this is the problem with "atheist churches" - groups that ape a church but slap an atheist label on it. An atheist church is like the vegetarian who cannot admit what his canine teeth are for and so makes fake-meat like food stuffs to stand in for the real thing.

One of the true joys of atheism is that it frees you from the inane and archaic ceremonies of thousands of years ago that make no rational sense. Wine into blood may make for decent poetry, but as a physical fact is completely insane. Nothing drives me more crazy than claims by the religious that I have "faith" just like they do, when the fact is I don't. Not even a little.

We don't need, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out more than once, to ape the structure of religion, or gather once a week to remind ourselves of the fundamental irrationality of religious faith. I understand the need for community, but it can be done without trying to claim for atheism equivalents for everything religion is. That is, in its way, as foolish as the believer who looks for atheist parallels to their religious belief and ends up using such thick-skulled canards as "atheists believe everything came from nothing" or "atheists worship Darwin." Because do to that would start to make an institution out of atheism and turn it into what those so many theists want it to be - a religion.

Atheism ain't no faith!

Eddie Izzard - Easter and Christmas

2009-10-17T01:01:00.001-04:00

ProMTH on William Lane Craig - brilliant!

2009-10-14T00:55:00.000-04:00

Collision movie preview - Hitchens vs. Wilson

2009-09-17T20:21:00.003-04:00

Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2_T5h8KK5Q

Part three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBL9OMCfT28

For more info go here: http://www.collisionmovie.com/

Get in the Sack for Sept 6, 2009 - Pope Benny

2009-09-05T20:28:00.005-04:00

Right now I would take homeopaths and I'd put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers and priests. And I'd close the top of the sack with string, and I'd hit them all with sticks...And when someone asks the big questions - I don't know what happens after a I die, or what happens when my loved ones die, or how do I stop myself from dying - the big questions and they give you a nice bullshit answer and you say 'Well, do you have any evidence for that? and they say "There's more to life than evidence". Get in the fucking sack.

-Dara O'Brian

It's almost embarrassing to read the ongoing debate between atheists and theists sometimes these days. The extent of ridiculous hyperbole sometimes makes my brain hurt to the point where my ears nearly bleed. This is especially true of statements may by some theists, particularly those of the fundamentalist Christian variety, about what atheism is and what it means.

Take Eddie Snipes, a writer for the Examiner, whose four-part series of articles on evolution is maybe the staggeringly display of mind numbing stupidity I have read in a while. His description of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution, genetics and atheists is so twisted that when I read it I thought I had slipped into a parallel reality where words had totally different meanings. Consider this gem from this series called "Natural Selection - Atheism Trojan Horse." (oh and please note he hasn't discussed natural selection that remotely reflects science and appears to not have any real clue what the Trojan Horse is or what it is a metaphor of.):

The evolutionary theory was born out of a desire to provide an explanation of the origin of life without a Creator. Since the goal is to distance themselves from God, disproving the argument will never change the mind of an atheist. Their primary goal is to remove God so when one argument fails, an alternative version is formed. Let me also clarify that many call themselves atheists because they have only been exposed to the crafty arguments of atheism and are not aware that the evidence contradicts the doctrines of atheism and agrees with the scriptures.

When I refer to atheism I am assuming that the reader understands that I am referring to those who are in rejection of the truth and will not be persuaded in the face of any evidence. Many will be open to the truth of scripture when they realize that they have been hoodwinked by the one-sided propaganda that is being passed off as reason and free thought.

To point out everything that is wrong with these two paragraphs would take an essay in and of itself. Just discussing how Darwin's studies that resulted in the theory of evolution by natural selection was a justification to prove "atheism" and reject "the truth" could fill an entire university paper. The fact is that, despite what Eddie and others might say, Darwin did not set out to disprove theism any more than astronomers set out to disprove Bigfoot. Darwin, like all good scientists worked within the scientific method that seeks natural explanations for natural phenomenon. And if you think "god did it" works as a scientific explanation, consider how happy would be if that was your doctor's explanation for why contracted a serious illness, gave you a prayer book and sent you on your way. Antibotics are for the heathens!

However painful it would be to read all of Eddie's postings and tear them down here to put him in the sack, there appeared a far worthy subject who makes Eddie's musings on atheism seem like the zenith of intellectual activity by comparison. The present Pope of the Catholic Church.

Now, truthfully, one expects more from a pope than the level of mental knuckle dragging found in some corners of the Examiner. After all, Pope Benedict is a well educated man, leading a church that is well over a thousand years old. But alas, that appears to be much to hope for.

One of the more pitiful theist arguments is what is sometimes called the moral argument for god. I have dealt with this a few times on the Handbook, so I won't get into a full discussion here. But the argument basically says that because there are morals, there must be a god. The low brow version of this argument says "if you don't believe in god, you are an unethical, evil schmuck." Essentially the idea here is that if you reject believe in a god (usually this means a specific god like Jesus.) then you are only left with your pitiful, evil, useless human mind and emotions to sort out what is right and wrong. So corrupt are we as a species that if we did not have a Bible or Koran we would simply run about killing and raping each other at will....and probably would not regard said killing or raping as particularly bad.

As Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens often point out, however, the person who says they would be a wanton killer without the 10 Commandants has revealed more about themselves than the content of a holy book. The fact of the matter is that religion or a belief in a god is not a requirement for moral or ethical action and, indeed, as I have pointed out before, theistic concepts of good and evil in the context of a all power god are, at best muddy.

However, the usual "whats to stop you from raping people if you don't believe in god" got an original, if just as stupid, spin recently thanks to the Pope.

During a recent speech, the Pope declared that environmental damage caused by humans is the fault of - wait for it - ATHEISM!!!!

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where his existence is denied? If the human creature's relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the ‘final authority,’ and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

That's right folks - unless you believe in the Christian god and the Catholic church you are unable to figure out that running about and torching rain forests or making gorrila vests is a bad thing.

The hilarious part of this is that Christian environmentalism - that is environmentalism that uses the Bible as its principle justification - is a relatively new thing and is largely found not in Catholic circles but in emerging evangelical moments in the United States (which has caused an rift within the American evangelical communities). The first line of that paragraph is more reflective of the changing moral zeitgeist than it is of what a sky god apparently wants or the moral failings of non-theists.

For most of the history of the Christian faith, proper treatment of the environment was simply not a question. Well, why would it? It wasn't really a question for anyone was it? The environmental movement, as we have it today, doesn't get going until the 1970s.

So what does the bible say about the environment and how humans should use it? Well, since the bible contains zero scientific information (you know, because its authors knew nothing about science and, in any case, their purpose was to write a book of religion, not science) the answer is not much. However, in the Old Testament were are told god gives humans - or more particularly men - dominion over the Earth. For centuries the usual interpretation of this was not the present day spin the pope is using of environmental stewardship. That is a modern concept driven not by religion but by environmental and political activism. No, the most common view of the bible in this regard, and one that you still find in more right wing circles is that god gave the planet to us and said "Do whatever the hell you want!"

More seriously, the Bible does not really provide any basis for the protection of the environment at all. The texts do not urge us to protect animals from extinction or preserve our water quality. They make it clear that we are here for a good time, not a long time. This planet and everything on it is a mere test, the appetizer before the main course. This entire world will vanish in a bloody Apocalypse in which Jesus will return the earth will burn and a new world will be put in the old one's place. Powerful mythological stuff, but if one takes it seriously protecting the environment would seem daft. I mean, why protect this lot if its all going to be wiped out in war and fire anyway? What's the point? Jesus is on his way back to open up the can on everyone isn't he?

On the other hand, if one understands that human beings are merely one species among countless others, and that despite our powerful technology the worse we can do is destroy ourselves not the planet; and if we realize that our fate, as a species, depends entirely on the survival of our ecosystem, then protecting the environment becomes a critical matter of self preservation. Contrary to what the pope claims from his palace in Rome, a world view without a god makes protecting the environment and the other creatures we share the world with all the more important.

So Pope - get in the damn sack.

The six inches in front of your face....

2009-08-07T02:09:00.002-04:00

A sports movie speech, but nevertheless a reflection of it means to make an effort on human terms, our own terms, and to hold our fates in our own hands without looking to anyone, or anything else.

Plato, gorillas and the morals of the heathen - a response to Shane Meehan

2009-08-02T19:21:00.019-04:00

If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God.
-Thomas Jefferson

Human behavior is a slippery beast. We are at once rational and logical while being irrational and stupid. We're creative and destructive. We can be beautifully and honestly dishonest while being terribly and brutally truthful. Honourable and horrible. Sometimes we are at the mercy of forces that seem beyond our direct control - consider how an emotion like love can cause an otherwise rational man to do things he otherwise would consider ridiculous.

Getting a firm grip on the hows and whys our own behavior is sometimes like trying to grab a handful of quicksilver. Trying to come up with rules that suit every circumstance of human behavior is just as difficult. Life often seems like a perpetual series of trade offs between equally lousy choices. Moral and ethical rules that seem to be iron clad can, under the right circumstances, seem hopelessly out of date or completely useless. If there is such a thing as an absolute it is that there is no such thing as an absolute when it comes to human behavior.

Oh we try to create to rules that answer all situations don't we? Bushido, the Ten Commandments, philosophy, legal codes and the like all try to predict future behaviors, decide which are permissible and which are not and remedy them when required. More primitive efforts to codify morals and ethics, like the texts of the Bible or the laws the Spartans, tend to be hopelessly rigid or naive in a modern context. The reason modern legal codes are so complicated is because we are so complicated and tend to get more complicated and confusing all the time. The moral zeitgeist changes as we change. It has always been this way.

Nevertheless, theists often try to distill human activity down to rather low common denominators that can be easily answered with a couple of simple rules. And in a world where the moral and ethical relevancy of the Bible fades every year, religious conservatives are deeply worried. You see it all the time in the blogosphere, Youtube or television. I've lost track of how many times fundamentalists have bemoaned the state of modern morals.

Beyond those who ape the Jerry Fawell's of the world - wailing and gnashing their hypocritical teeth against feminists, homosexuals, or anyone who don't accept their bronze age view of humanity - there are those theists who simply cannot understand how anyone could act in a moral or ethical manner without their religion. It's a kind of thinking that betrays, it seems to me, an obvious and pathetic narcissism. But it also demonstrates, when examined closely, why theism, particularly of the Abrahamic variety, fails as immutable moral and ethical systems.

A really good example of this naive approach to morals can be found in Shane Meehan, who writes for the Examiner website as the Phoenix Protestant Examiner. In his most recent entry "Can atheists be moral?", he riffs on a common and tired theist attack on atheists - without the Bible, human beings cannot be moral. Atheists do not believe the Bible is the word of the Christian god and, as such, have no means upon which to act morally. Therefore, atheists are incapable of moral action. Lacking any belief in a "objective" morality, atheists believe that anything goes and anything can be justified. Human beings change their mind, therefore there is no "good" without someone telling us what the good is. Meehan uses his version of an argument that usually take the form of: "If you don't believe in god's moral law, why is it wrong for me to murder or rape you?"

I've addressed the this sort of theist approach to morality before, and pointed out how the entire notion of an "objective" morality fails by it's own definitions. I will not repeat my entire argument here, so feel free to read it, but there is one part that is worth repeating here as it addresses the core of what Meehan is arguing:

In the dialogue Euthyphro, Plato poses the question this way: “Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?”
If the first conclusion is true then the entire moral argument for god is rendered inert. It would imply that god orders that which is intrinsically moral – and if that is so then what makes those standards moral has nothing to do with god. He merely recognizes their moral character. Therefore there is no extra-human source of morality, or if there is, it isn’t god.
If the second is true, then morality is not objective at all as the theist defines it. It is an extra human morality, but not objective. The whims of human beings are replaced by the whims of a supernatural agency. Anything and everything god orders is moral by definition. That means that any horrible act can be justified simply by saying “god said so.”
This argument, if accepted, leaves the theist – particularly Abrahamic believers – in particular moral pickle. Take the often cited Christian idea that god is “love.” He is omi-benevolent and does issue orders we recognize as moral such as “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not bear false witness.” Some Christians, for example, will go so far as to say that god would never issue a command that was not moral.
Well, even a glance at the Bible raises some serious questions. University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson in her essay “If God is dead, then everything is permitted?” points out that “if we accept biblical inerrancy, I’ll argue, we must conclude that much of what we take to morally evil is in fact morally permissible and even required.”

Meehan goes off the rails in his opening paragraph in which he says: "Having the benefit of the Bible and the ten commandments as a guide, I struggle [sic] to see where the atheist might get his morality from because it is not externally revealed to him in any way." This is extremely telling. Meehan is suggesting that we, as a species are too damn dumb to figure out for ourselves what is right or wrong, what is ethical or not. Mind you, he is unable to demonstrate the Bible was just written by people like every other book ever written.

(It also begs the question: does he only think some things are moral or immoral because it says so in the Bible? What does he do about those things upon which the text is silent?)

He also is implying here that ethics and morals are impossible without this revelation. A simple examination of human culture shows this is not true. The samurai possessed a highly organized and well defined ethical and moral code. It clearly defined what actions could or could not be taken and why. They organized their entire lives around the code of Bushido - which does not appeal at all to a supreme sky god that dictated it, never mind Jesus. It was a code that developed over time and with experience. Nevermind the ethical and moral philosophies of Greece which did not depend on revelation but human reason.

Which brings us to Meehan's MASSIVE whopper of a mistake when he launches into an attack on humanism and, unknowingly, on utilitarianism (which by his blog he confuses as one in the same thing.) He suggests that humanism/utilitarianism is unworkable because what is constitutes "harm" is subjective. Like emotional harm when a marriage falls apart:

So, how might the humanist view adultery? If we are not breaking the law, we have to examine if it does harm to another. Again, this comes down to perceived emotional harm based on breach of trust. Since the harm done is merely hurt feelings it is difficult to establish as true harm.

Makes you wonder if the boy has lived a sheltered life. Emotional damage and extreme emotional stress is the definition of harm. No thinking atheist would think otherwise. The demise of a relationship is not, in most circumstances, about "hurt feelings" in the trivial manner in which Meehan presents it. In the case of adultery, the emotional harm it causes to the faithful party (assuming there is one) is very real and from a utilitarian perspective would therefore be unethical. However, Meehan tries to imply that the dissolution of a marriage itself is damaging to society at large - "let no man put asunder" and all that. And this is what I was talking about before about rigid and naive ethical rules. The fact is that like many things, human relationships are ugly grey areas. Sometimes, as tragic as it can be, one person simply doesn't want to be with the other and no amount of wishful thinking or religious belief in the divine approval will change that. Saying its fundamentally immoral or unethical for a marriage to break up would leave people trapped in forced or unhappy relationships - which in of itself causes emotional harm.

He heads down a similar garden path when it comes to telling lies. After all, the Bible counsels us to not bear false witness. Meehan treats lies as though they are all equal and that not telling the truth is fundamentally unethical or immoral. He says that a humanist would have no issue with lying to protect one self from getting into trouble because, well, the lie doesn't harm anyone. Except from most humanist ethical thought and utilitarian ethical thought, if the liar had done something to harm another, and then lied about it, the lie is part and parcel of the original action that caused harm....and would be regarded as unethical.

Moreover, honesty is regarded as good because we want to be dealt with honestly by others.

The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone.

In any case, Meehan's "revealed" ethics cannot grapple with even simple problems. Let's borrow from Plato's Republic for a moment and consider a friend who has loaned you a knife. In the time since you borrowed it, your friend has become depressed and it seems as though he wants to kill himself. Clearly returning the knife at this point would not the best idea. He asks if you have the knife and demands it back as it is his property. It would be perfectly ethical at this point to say you do not have it. Yes, it is a lie, but at the same time, you are keeping a dangerous weapon out of the hands of your suicidal friend. The bronze age, black and white morals that Meehan suggests allows for no such subtle thinking. To be consistent he would have to not only say he had the knife, but return it. Thou shalt not covet they nieghbours goods, remember?

Also, he oddly links humanist philosophy (although he does not really understand that humanism has many branches and does not have a single "code" akin to the Ten Commandments that all atheists follow) with the theory of evolution. Humanism, as an ethical philosophy, goes back to thinkers like Epicurus, Thales, Xeonphanes, and others in ancient Greece. Moreover, humanism as a modern political/ethical philosophy emerged in Europe until around 100 years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. While it is true that most atheists see links between humanism philosophy and evolutionary science, humanism as a school of thought did not depend upon or lead to evolution as Meehan suggests.

However, if he did understand evolutionary science at all, he's understand that morality/ethics increasingly appears to be a biological drive similar to language or sex. We know, from observations of our closest genetic relatives like chimps and gorillas (Meehan makes a gross error by suggesting our closest evolutionary relatives are monkeys!), we see social creatures that possess a rudimentary, if very familiar, ethical sense - all without religious texts. Without it, the kind of group cohesion that enables them to survive would be impossible. Indeed, without a such a sense our own species would not have got very far. It may be a sense that originally emerged to foster in-group cooperation and has since become something far more complicated in our case, but there is no denying that it is there - sans a holy scripture.

Which brings me to my final point about Meehan's train wreck of an exploration into ethical philosophy and science - Meehan tries to suggest that adultery would never be considered "bad" by atheists because our closest evolutionary cousins (referring erroneously to monkeys not apes) engage in"rampant, undiscerning pro-creation". They do it, he says, why can't we if it is good from an evolutionary standpoint. Well, I hate to break his bubble (not really) but the mating strategies of most animals - including humans and the great apes - is the opposite of "undiscerning." I'd go on about just how utterly wrong Meehan is when it comes to discussing evolution, but it kinda gets mean. So I will leave it here for now.

It just goes to show what my best friend's mother used to like to say - a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

House MD on atheism

2009-08-01T02:20:00.001-04:00

God's retreat from cosmology

2009-08-01T00:35:00.000-04:00

Get in the frakin' sack - for July 28, 2009

2009-07-28T21:14:00.010-04:00

-Dara O'Brian

In one of his stand up routines, Irish comedian Dara O'Brian uttered the statement above - a brilliant expression for the distaste one has for the popularity of the irrational and the moronic that swims through our culture. In that spirit, I've decided to add a new monthly feature to the Atheist Handbook - Get in the Frakin' Sack. It's not complicated, really. I will just select someone or something that should be worth of being put in O'Brian 's sack and pulped with sticks.

A quick look at the headlines a given week will result in a fine list of sack worthy people out there, but in keeping with the routine in which O'Brian talks about the sack, I decided this month the sack ought to be filled with the news media.

I make this choice for two reasons - first, I work in the news media and if I am going to suggest anyone be put in the sack, I suppose I should go first. And second, the media has been stepping on some many rakes lately that when someone asks what I do for a living I usually choose a profession more popular with the general public. You know, like lawyers, or dentists or mob assassins.

It would take an entire blog to discuss the moronic choices made daily in my profession, but this month has a particular one that just shows how damn dumb the entire news media can be. I present you with exhibit A: bird shit on a car.

Now, you might be saying "Bird crap. Big deal. Who give a crap, if you don't mind the pun." To which I would agree complete. Sadly, far far too many of my professional colleagues think dried avian feces is totally news worthy? Why? Beacuse several totally insane people think that this particular bit of bird crap is a supernatural sign from god. Specifically, they think the shit looks like the Virgin Mary and is therefore a miracle. If I even need to crack a wise ass joke at this point to drive the point home, I think I'll cry.

The coverage of this was, to my endless chagrin, utterly credulous. That people think bird crap represents divine intervention wasn't question at all, particularly on television, with the news hosts afterwards shrugging, giggling and saying "well anything is possible."

Anything is possible? Like I could, I dunno, reach my hands through the screen and strangle the news anchor who says such things? The correct response is to say these people are very probably insane. Or better yet, if someone calls your newsroom saying the bird shit on their car looks like god, you can offer them a phone number to the local mental ward.

Of course, bird droppings are not the only place the divine has made itself known of late. In Ireland, believers think Mary appears in the wood grains in a tree stump. I kind you not. Some of the locals want the stump encased in glass!! And as always, the news media reports it with the same seriousness as it would a terrorist attack or the results of an election. It's as if because this involved religion, journalist lose the ability to ask critical questions. Look, I am not asking for the Watergate investigation here - just the use of one or two brain cells to determine that bird shit is just bird shit. I'm actually surprised the folks over at the Discovery Institute haven't jumped on these stories as evidence of a cosmic designer.

I suppose this all raises another point. If you really believed in an all powerful ruler of the entire universe, wouldn't you expect a little more from him than tree stumps and bird crap? I mean, read the Bible - when god wanted his presence know he did it in style - drowning the entire world, creating burning bushes that talk, parting the seas, or conjuring bears to eat a bunch of mouthy kids. Never mind the time he showed up IN PERSON to mock the hapless Job. The point is, god didn't screw around back in the day. He was an angry, in your face kinda guy.

Today? Well if god exists either he's so far past his prime now he can't see it through the rearview window behind him, or the standards of what impresses people have seriously declined. No more talking burning bushes, or turning poor old ladies into pillars of salt. No, god is down to appearing in cheese toast, bird crap and in the side of a Tim Horton's. I mean, what happened? Wouldn't a believer want a few fire works instead of a stain on their car?

In any case, for all those reporters and editors who covered the "appearance" of god in bird crap and tree stumps — get in the frakin' sack.

Get in the fuckin' sack

2009-07-27T16:09:00.006-04:00

Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you...Right now I would take homeopaths and I'd put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers and priests. And I'd close the top of the sack with string, and I'd hit them all with sticks...And when someone asks the big questions - I don't know what happens after a I die, or what happens when my loved ones die, or how do I stop myself from dying - the big questions and they give you a nice bullshit answer and you say 'Well, do you have any evidence for that? and they say "There's more to life than evidence". Get in the fucking sack.

-Dara O'Brian

2009-06-13T23:07:00.001-04:00

God's problem - my lecture at the Brock University Conference on World Religions

2009-04-24T03:13:00.010-04:00

On April 21, I delivered the open talk at Brock University's annual conference on world religions, with year's theme being "the problem of evil." The following is the full text of my lecture, which was abridged during the actual event due to time constraints.

God’s Problem: When religion fails to answer the question of evil and suffering.

By Grant LaFleche

I may well be the oddest choice to present the opening talk on a conference about world religions.

This is not because I have no interest in the subject. Quite the opposite in fact. But rather because unlike every other speaker you will hear over the next two days, I don't believe in any of it. I'm an atheist, which means I don't believe the supernatural claims of religion are true. But even more than that, I am not just an atheist but also an anti-theist - which is to say that I am rather glad it isn't true. There are atheists who will say they wished they had the faith to believe in a god, or to believe the vision of the world as laid out in holy scriptures where true, but they just cannot believe it. This is decidedly not the case with me. As I say, I am rather glad it isn't true and if it were I am convinced we would all be the poorer for it.

Unlike the my colleagues who will take this stage after me, I will not tell you what a particular god wants. I make no claim to be able to offer some ultimate answer to the meaning of life or the nature of the universe which we inhabit. Like all legends and myths, religions say a great deal not about the nature of the universe, but about human nature. About those who wrote the scriptures and those who believe it.

So I want to begin today by talking about a legend you'll know well, a modern myth, about a saint in the world’s worst slums. A woman, so the story goes, so filled with the light of the divine that she devoted her life to working with the poorest of the poor, the most destitute and wretched of the human condition. She did so gladly and so selflessly that many believe Mother Teresa was a living example of the omni-benevolence of god and evidence of the affirming power of faith.

It’s a nice tale, isn’t it? But legends are tricky things and as Nehur said, “facts are facts and they do not disappear on account of your likes.” And the facts about Mother Teresa’s work in the Calcutta slums tell a different tale than her legend.

As Christopher Hitchens so clearly demonstrates, Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend of poverty. She believed that the more one suffered, the closer one is to Jesus. Her order raised millions, but built no hospital nor improved her own hospices, enacted no programs to put an end to the horrid conditions that lead to many to live such wretched lives. Instead, she gave them a place to die – a place where medical science was shunned, hypodermic needles reused by running them under cold water and people died from treatable illnesses. Her theology, rooted in a very Catholic idea of the “mystery” and utility of suffering, required these poor people remains poor, ignorant and sick.

“I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share with the passion of Christ,” she once told a journalist. “I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” Only one blinded by theology could make so wicked a pronouncement. Only credulity can make one believe it to be true.

How can anyone look into the face of an impoverished, dying person and say what they see is a good thing? It is not that Teresa was intentionally cruel. It is that she was utterly removed from the human condition by her faith’s inability to cope with the reality of human suffering. In some ways, she was a victim of hundreds of years of failure by theological and philosophical authorities to resolve what is sometimes called “the problem of evil.”

It is an old theological problem, one that predates the supposed birth of Jesus, and it asks a simple question: if there is an all powerful, all wise, all loving god that cares for mankind, why is there so much evil in the world? Why are human beings beset with so much suffering? The late novelist Joseph Heller described this enduring contradiction in Catch-22, when his sardonic hero John Yossarian gets into an argument with his lover about being thankful to god:

“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”
“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?”
“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”
“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!”

The problem of evil was perhaps first put by a Greek thinker some 500 years before the birth of Jesus. Although Epicurus’ simple paradox lacks Heller’s singular wit, it remains as powerful and as unanswered today as it did when it was first posed:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

As the philosopher David Hume would note centuries later, “God’s power is infinite. Whatever he wills is executed but neither man nor other animals is happy. Therefore he does not will their happiness. Epicurus’ questions are yet unanswered….”

Attempts to resolve Epicurus’ riddle have occupied theologians since the dawn of the Christian era, and I submit have failed utterly. You will, through the course of this conference likely hear many of them. Free will is the usual fall back position – humans suffer because humans choose to inflict suffering. Great – except it is difficult to connect free will to an earthquake, flood or viral epidemic.

Others will claim original sin is the source of what ails us. Except we know there was no Adam and Eve that spawned the species – as any biologist can tell you, if there is only one mating pair of a mammalian species left, that species will quickly die out as inbred genetic defectives. In any case, condemning an entire species for the alleged crimes of two people is unjust and unloving by definition.

Still others attempt to say that god will eventually take care of evil after a bloody apocalypse in which man kind is judged. Fantastic, except that does nothing for those who have been ravaged by cancers or killed in wars. This also suggests, if true, a certain capriciousness and feckless morality to god. He could have prevented the deaths of six million Jews during the Holocaust, or other atrocities, but says instead “Ah, I’ll get around do something about this eventually.”

To make this point clear, let’s conduct a quick thought experiment. Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in front of you falls over from a heart attack. You are armed with a cell phone can with a call to 911 can save his life. Or you can walk away with the promise that at some point in the future, you’ll make a sizable donation to the Heart and Stroke foundation. The moral choice is obvious.

Others have simply abandoned the standard arguments, throw up their hands and say god MIGHT have a reason for letting horrors visit themselves upon mankind, but we just don’t know. And since we don’t know the mind of god, the problem of evil therefore solved. Well, this line is simply an appeal to ignorance to avoid the central question and a rephrasing of “god works in mysterious ways.” And we know what Yosarrian thought about that.

Some take Epicurus’s riddle to be such a damning argument as to demolish the very notion that an all powerful, all loving god even exists. That may be so, although on it’s own it does not dispense with the notion of any god, merely those purported to be all powerful, all knowing and all loving gods. It’s the fantastic dearth of evidence to back up the supernatural claims made by theistic religions is more than sufficient to dismiss them.

Indeed, it stretches credulity to accept the notion of god as Judaism, Christianity and Islam would have us believe. To borrow from Christopher Hitchens, what these religions are asking us to believe this: We know that as a species, human beings have been on this planet for between 100,000 and 200,000 years. If we use the lower figure and say 100,000 years, what the Abrahamic faiths would have us believe is that for 96,000 years or so the human condition was as Hobbes would describe it: nasty, brutish and short. We are killed by bacteria and viruses we don’t know are there, by weather and natural calamities we have no understanding off. Women routinely die in childbirth and life expectancy is less than 25 years. This is to say nothing of what people do to each other for food or land. Slowly over this period, however, by the sweat and toil of people, rise great civilizations in China, in India and in Greece. After all this, heaven decides it's time to intervene. And it does so consistently to illiterate, stupefied peasants in the middle east, rather than in part of the world where the message could be spread.

Indeed, the idea that god is all loving is undone not merely by critical examination, nor by Epicurus’s razor like paradox, but by the religious texts themselves.

In the Old Testament, for example, God murders often and in great numbers. He orders several ethnic cleansings, including a standing order to wipe out the town of any people who dare suggest to the Hebrews that they follow another god. He orders a father to murder his own son as test of loyalty and even personally commits genocide and ecocide on a global level. My own personal favorite is when god orders up a couple of nasty bears to tear 43 children apart for calling a bald man has no hair. Even if taken as metaphor, these are not stories about love, but about an uncontrollable, petty rage that would make even Zeus blush. Were such a god to actually exist, it would not be a creature to bow down to, but to openly oppose on basic notions of justice and human solidarity.

Even in the New Testament we see the contradiction continue. It is only in the New Testament that we are introduced to the utterly immoral concept of hell, where one can be tortured forever for rejecting god’s “love.” Where “salvation” comes in the form of a bloody human sacrifice that any of us would feel duty bound to stop if we had been there. It is made worse because the crucifixion would rob us of personal responsibility, upon which all ethics must be based, in favor of vicarious redemption. Indeed, I openly reject the “sacrifice” of Jesus. I would want no part of it, were it to be true, because I reject the notion that someone has to die for my alleged crimes.

However, as it seems on the weight of evidence obvious there is no reason to accept these claims about a god – as self contradictory as they are – why should I or any non-believer actually care about the problem of evil? It’s because the inability to reconcile the concept of god with the reality of suffering and evil leads, in far too many cases, to morally and ethically reprehensible behavior.

The most obvious results can be seen in the middle east, where honor killings still result the horrific deaths of innocent people, particularly women, for violations of religious laws. In parts of the Muslim world apostasy remains a capital offense. In Afghanistan, Muslim clerics recently sentenced a young couple to death for eloping contrary to their religious edicts. The growing imposition of the Sharia law in Afghanistan has resulted in a law making martial rape legal. You see the point. Only when one’s views are so utterly removed from the reality of human suffering can one seriously make a claim that a wife must provide sex to her husband upon demand. Some niceties do exist, however, in the minds of gruesome Muslim clerics with little sense of compassion. One claims that a wife can say no - but if she does then her husband has the right to starve her.

But the western world should not be so smug. Recently, the Pope declared that condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse in Africa – a continent where more than 25 million have died from the illness and millions more are infected. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt, thanks to science, that condoms have a significant impact in reducing the spread of this virus, yet the church sees fit to ignore this and reject it as a theological issue – which has a significant impact in Africa where the words of a pope carry significant weight. The church’s position is plainly wicked because it contributes to suffering and death. No amount of declaring it to be a faith issue, and thus beyond reproach, can change that.

Where the secular humanist will examine the issue from a utilitarian perspective with an aim of reliving suffering, the church is irrationally dogmatic and dismissive of evidence.

This was powerfully seen only last month in Brazil during the aftermath of the rape of a 9-year-old girl by her step father. He had apparently been abusing her for three years and she ended up pregnant. With twins. At 9-years-old. Her doctors said she would not survive carrying the babies to term, let alone deliver them. Now, in Brazil, abortion is only legal in rape cases and if the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. This qualified as both and the courts granted permission for the procedure.

The church’s reaction to this? Not concern for the suffering this poor child has endured at the hands of a rapist, nor the suffering she will continue to live with for much of her life, but with the abortion. Because the Vatican has declared it a sin. So they petition the courts to deny the abortion claiming the babies could be delivered via c-section. Never mind these bishops are not medical doctors, and are not considering the mortal danger the child is in.

When that failed, the church excommunicated the girl’s mother, lawyers, and doctors. They saved her life, but they have been drummed out of the church. No big deal for non-believers but catastrophic for those who do. They would have thrown the girl out to, but apparently the Vatican as a rule against excommunicating minors.

By the way, just to add insult to injury here – guess who was NOT excommunicated? The rapist step father– the criminal who set off a chain of suffering with his evil actions. A chain the church, because it fails to grasp the reality of suffering – has helped perpetuate.

Human beings suffer. We cannot avoid it. We commit evil acts. This is not because we are made to suffer to allowed to by a divine hand be it caring or capricious. It is because we live on a planet with a shifting crust and powerful weather systems that orbits a start that bathes the planet in radiation – a star that will eventually burn itself out and take this entire planet with it.

We suffer because we are a product of an unguided evolutionary process that shapes all life on this planet, one that does not work from blueprints, but jury gigs systems from the materials at hand. That life can be benign, like a tree, or lethal, like insects that eat other organisms from the inside out. In our case we continue to carry what Darwin called the lowly stamp of our origins. For all our intelligence and brilliance we are still at the mercy of urges, defects, and instincts. And yes, we suffer because of our choices.

How do we best respond to both those forces, both within our control and beyond it? We do so by recognizing not that suffering is part of a grand plan, but something we can combat. We feed the hungry. We provide proper medical care to the sick. We do not fret and worry about the destination of souls or the hereafter. We help each other in the here and now.

Nor do we treat evil as something divine or that exists with a greater moral justification we just don’t understand. We fight it. We certainly do not follow the words of Jesus who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, counsels us to “not resist and evil person.” This hopelessly naive view would allow the Hitlers and Osama Bin Laden’s of history to burn civilization to the ground. Or to put this another way: the choice not to resist evil is a choice to allow it to flourish. In our own life times, the example of the Rwandan genocide should serve as a powerful reminder of what happens when evil is not resisted. Mountains of bodies and rivers of blood are the logical end result of putting Jesus’ doctrine into practice.

The world is not much helped by the suffering of poor people. To truly face human suffering and deal with it as such we must abandon the confused and contradictory theologies that would distance us from it. Rather we can walk the path of a much greater and humane tradition than what is found in the Bible or the Koran. The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone.

It is not perfect. We will stumble. We will fail. But that is almost the point, that we struggle knowing this to be so. And knowing this is the only life we have, that we will cease to exist when we die as we did not exist before we were born, means we have this one and only chance to make a difference.

Grappling with evil and suffering and lending aid to our fellow creatures is something that we, believer and non-believer alike, should gladly do. But never should we treat suffering as mysterious, unassailable or worse, as something good.

New Canuck atheist blogger!

2009-04-06T18:14:00.002-04:00

Greetings - just a quick note to check out The Canadian Atheist, new to the world of heathen blogging: http://canadianatheist.ca/

On magic water and mumbo jumbo.

2009-04-02T11:45:00.004-04:00

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
-George Santayana

I have often been told I am religious. And that I have a religion. News to me because, as an atheist, I really don't possess anything that can be identified as a religious feeling about anything and I do not subscribe to any particular dogma. Still, this does not stop a certain stripe of theist, usually Christian, from claiming that my atheism is just as much a religion as their faith. Usually I will ask said theist to explain what my religious beliefs actually are, what holy books I believe in, what supernatural gods I might pray to and what priests or clerics I defer to on matters ranging from diet to sex.

The answers are invariably bizarre and betray a basic lack of knowledge about science and philosophy. I suspect that many theists simply cannot conceive of living without religion and so assume that atheists have equivalents to the beliefs they hold so dear. If they have a god, so must I. If they have a bible or a pope, so must I. So instead of the Bible, I am told I have "faith" in Darwin's The Origin of Species. I am often told that I "worship" Darwin, that I have "faith" that "nothing created something," and that I will blindly follow Dawkins or Hitchens or whoever. It's a through the looking glass view of atheism that more often than not just makes me giggle.

Maybe the most oft repeated criticism is that atheism is "militant" and just as irrational as the religion I critique. This too is laughable...well I used to think so anyway. Most atheists I know have little interest in "organized" or institutional atheism. Sort of defeats the purpose frankly. Which is why I have such a dim view of the "atheist churches" that have cropped up around the interwebs. Aside from being a contradiction in terms, the idea that I need a special place to gather once a week to be told what I believe and chat in front of others some mindless creed strikes me about useful and trying to play a DVD using a flash light. It is certainly fun to meet with my fellow heathens to chat about things now and again and humanist and free thinker organizations play a useful role in organizing charitable and community work. I even applauded the atheist bus campaign not because it has any chance of deconverting believers (In find attempts to convert others to be rather vulgar anyway.) but because it helps gives non-believers a public voice. But an atheist church? WTF, man.

Sadly, there has developed a strain of "atheism" that seems to thrive on the ridiculous. Recently, some Brits have decided they want to be "de-baptized" or un-baptized or use that red light thingy from Men in Black to have their baptism erased from their memories. They are even handing out baptism-free certificates. Most of these folks were like me and were baptized as an infant incapable of forming a single thought.

Now I quiet agree that baptizing a baby is barking mad as the babe has no means to decide for itself whether it wants to a join a chruch. But if you grow up and abandon religion, what does it matter? Some gruesome old celibate sprinkled water on your head, muttered a prayer and SHAZAM you were baptized. That is what we are talking about here: a bit of water and some mumbo jumbo, none of which the atheist believes has the slightest significance. It is not as if the Anglican or Catholic churches have some voodoo zombie control power over those who have been baptized. The pope cannot make you dance to his tune just because someone sprinkled some water on your head a baby. You were "un-baptized" the moment you stopped believing in it.

It just doesn't matter. Baptism might mean a whole lot to believers but to those us of who long ago left religion behind it has about as much meaning as the latest marshmallow addition to Lucky Charms (which is such a nasty cereal by the by. Blech!)

All this irrational blah blah blah about reversing baptisms just a waste of energy when one considers the far more important battles to fought.One is tempted, watching hese spastic attempts to erase baptisms to quote William Shatner from that classic Saturday Night Live sketch: "Get a life, will you!"

Pope Benedict and the twlight of the Catholic Church

2009-03-21T00:10:00.007-04:00

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
-Voltaire

Let's just come right out and say it. No beating around the bush. No politically correct hand wringing to protect the delicate sensibilities of those with porcelain constitutions. Let us not fret about the tin plated outrage of those who believe that the word "faith" is a cosmic get out of jail free card that lets them say or do anything.

Pope Benedict, head of the Roman Catholic Church, believed by his followers to be the vicar of Christ who speaks with ultimate authority on all things, is wrong. In fact, "wrong" is not strong enough a term. The man is wicked, deluded and completely out of touch with reality. He apparently has no concept of human suffering and no true desire to put the enormous wealth of his church, which he oversees from his palace in Rome, to work to truly help those in need.

Pope Benedict has nothing relevant to say in the 21st century. Nothing profound. Nothing meaningful or useful. He has shown the that last remnant of the Roman Empire has long since lost whatever vigor it might have had. He guides his lumbering church into a long twilight he refuses to recognize. Where a world with increasingly complex problems needs leadership, Benedict continues to try and fight the Reformation. He is a walking, talking anachronism that appears to have been dropped in the 21st century from the dark ages.

I cannot, nay, I will not be kind about this. There are parts of the world where his word is still the law, where concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty do not yet hold the position they do in the west. Places like Africa. And there the pope has condemned people to a horrible death.

If this all sounds a tad melodramatic, well, consider the facts. In Africa some 22 million people are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. More than 25 million have already died because of the virus. Countless others suffer from the ravaging effects of the virus on their bodies. Poverty and education levels are poor and petty tyrants lord over much of the continent and would rather use what resources they have fighting each other or their own people than invest in proper public health education.

Into this humanitarian disaster comes the pope to pronounce that condoms not only will not help stem the rates of HIV infection, but in fact will exacerbate the problem. Only an uneducated fool, a villain, or an insane person could utter such a thing. Medical science has proven beyond any doubt that condoms play a major role in preventing HIV infections.

One cannot underestimate the impact this will have in a part of the world where the pope's orders are taken very seriously. In fact, the impact of religious meddling into things they know nothing about has already been felt in Africa. In Uganda, home to some of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, once was getting a grip on the problem. It adopted what is called the ABC approach to public sexual health - abstinence, monogamy and condom use. The results were impressive having a massive impact on HIV infections rates. Then Uganda's first lady become a born-again Christian and using the agenda of American evangelicals, brought about the end of the ABC approach in favor the theological driven naivete of "abstinence only". Studies in the United States, a country with greater wealth and much higher education levels, have show abstinence only programs will, at best, delay sexual activity for about a year. Children "educated" in those program are also more likely to engage in unprotected anal sex, not practice safe sex when they to have it and as a result are more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy or STD.

So predictably, when Uganda fell under the sway of evangelical "sex-ed" the results were tragic. HIV infection rates doubled in the first two years of the abinstance only approach, which also actively discourages the use of condoms.

Real people suffer. Real people die. Real people are left trying to pick up the pieces. Not that this appears to really worry the Catholic church, which in recent years has turned its attention to the pressing issues of whether or not limbo actually exists, resurrecting the medieval con-job known as indulgences, and ensuring that everyone knows the only real Christian church happens to be the one Herr Ratzinger presently presently presides over. News to those non-Catholic churches I'm sure.

Meanwhile, despite all the talk about social justice, the church continues to display the kind of behavior that makes one wonder if they grasp meaning the term. Consider the case recently in Brazil where a nine year old was raped by her step father and made pregnant - with TWINS. In Brazil, abortion is illegal without a court order, which is normally issued only if the pregnancy is a threat to the mother's life. In this case it was a no brainer. The child was nine. The doctors determined the pregancy had a pretty good chance of killing her and the court order was issued.

Now the church stamped its feet, apparently unconcerned with the suffering of a pre-teen rape victim, and insisted the child carry the twins to term and deliver by cesarean section. That carrying the babies and birth could kill the child was no never mind to the church who, when their protests failed, excommunicated the girl's mother and her doctors after threatening to move to have them both charged with murder.

Who did the church not excommunicate or otherwise threaten? The rapist stepfather. Why? Because apparently the abortion that saved the girl's life was a more serious crime than raping her in the first place.

Consider that carefully. The victim of a rape, her mother and her doctors all threatened by the church. For the atheist, excommunication is meaningless. For a believer, it is serious business. But, the church has nothing to say or do about the rapist who had been attack that girl since she was six.

This is justice?

The church is simply blind to suffering. This is because, in part, of the Vatican's muddled view of suffering and evil. Like Mother Teresa, who held that suffering was good and the poor, the sick and the dying should just accept their woeful lot in life. Her reputation of her as a friend of the poor is a myth. She was a friend of poverty whose cult of suffering kept people sick and poor rather than help improve the lives of those who needed help. It is only through a complete disregard for what people suffer can someone say, as Mother Teresa did: " I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

So the Pope, who lives in the lap of luxury, can travel to Africa and pronouce that condom use makes the spread of AIDS worse only because his view of the world is hopeless bent, twisted by a theology that had no regard for plight of the poor and suffering and sick. And given the problems of the world today and the need to marshal people to cope with them, the church has become little more than a road block and an enemy of those who suffer the most.

Why I don't call myself an atheist - By Jim Ebsary

2009-02-14T13:03:00.008-05:00

Jim Ebsary thinks that religious ideas are a big problem in our society and should be challenged with reason and logic. He’s a firm supporter of the scientific method and critical thinking, the separation of church and state, and freedom of and from religion. His e mail is jebsary@cogeco.ca

Some material adapted from: Harris, S., The problem with atheism. newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/10/the_problem_with_atheism.html

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Why I don’t call myself an atheist

To me, the lack of evidence for God, and the silliness and suffering that still exists under the blanket of religion, calling myself an "atheist" seems like a logical position. But, why do I call myself a term that was thought up by believers as the enemy of their belief, someone to blame society’s problems on? There are plenty of us that identify ourselves as atheists or agnostics. In a recent poll (2005), about a quarter of us Canucks don’t believe in gods. That’s a really big minority within a country that is overwhelmingly Christian. I also believe there are enough people around who consider themselves spiritual, and don’t accept organized religion, which might be at least sympathetic to the way we feel. However I think we might be making a mistake by identifying ourselves as atheists.

What is atheism anyway? I believe that most people simply misunderstand atheism. To me, I think a pretty good definition is “disbelief in gods”. But when people find out that I’m an ‘atheist’, do they identify me only as a person who doesn’t believe in gods, that I base my life on atheism? Atheism doesn’t run my life, and the term doesn’t define me. I don’t have a post-secondary education, I have a family and good friends, I hold down a job (for now), I’m a productive person in society, and I try to be decent. I just don’t believe in gods, which I usually don’t think is worth mentioning, but I do tend to speak up when I think something is a really bad idea. My humble opinion is that everyone is usually atheistic when it comes to someone else’s beliefs that don’t agree with their own.

I think that "atheist" is a term that shouldn’t exist, just like we don't need a word for someone who rejects fortune-tellers. We don’t call people "non fortune-tellers,” or “a-fortune-tellers." All we need are words like "reason," "evidence," and "bullshit" to put fortune-tellers in their place; it can be the same with religion, or for that matter potential quackery like alternative medicine.

A problem with calling ourselves "atheists" is that every religious person thinks he has The Great Argument against atheism. We've heard these tiresome arguments (and they really are tiresome, because they offer nothing new. But I think it’s important to stay open to these ideas. If someone claims they have irrefutable evidence I will try to listen), and we’re going to keep hearing them as long as we call ourselves atheists. Some are stupid arguments like: atheists can't prove that God doesn't exist; atheism is a belief, just like any other belief; and arrogant arguments like atheists claim to know there is no God. We know the arguments are false, yet every time, we have to defend ourselves. We squander a lot of time doing this.

How many times are we going to defend ourselves against the accusation that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot are the result of atheism? These arguments are not going away. Very articulate and well reasoned people like Sam Harris argued against it in The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation; Richard Dawkins did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher Hitchens did the same in God is Not Great. This bullshit argument will be with us for as long as people call themselves "atheists." Religious people accept this argument, the same way they blindly accept the silliness of Pascal’s Wager. Unfortunately, it also convinces people that are moderate in their beliefs.

Consider the misunderstanding of atheists by the MPP’s when they debated abolishing the Lord’s Prayer at the start of Legislature at Queen’s Park. Now, as a result of this debate, atheists are given a moment of silence after the Lord’s Prayer before Legislature. What is an atheist supposed to do with a moment of silence? And, if we were acting as some kind of group, why were we arbitrarily given something we don’t want or need as some form of appeasement?

At the XXVIII World Religions Conference held at University of Waterloo last fall, I sat through speech after speech by MP’s, MPP’s, Mayors, Chiefs of Police, etc, who congratulated us all on our working together to help understand each other’s faith. The Secular Humanist group which attended this session to represent atheists and agnostics was thanked for their ‘faith’, and they have been thanked for their ‘faith’ every time they attended. We were completely ignored and insulted during these speeches. At the end of the conference, we had to sit quietly or leave the room while others prayed. If Secular Humanists have no faith, why are they participating in a World’s Religions Conference? In my experience, Secular Humanists are falsely labelled and dismissed as cranks that ‘take away’ the right to pray and ‘take away’ religious holidays. Usually you will see religious people spreading this myth, but I’ve read comments by my MPP Peter Kormos repeating the insulting remarks about ‘taking away prayer’ during the silly uproar of abolishment of the Lord’s Prayer at Queen’s Park.

So, if atheism isn’t a thing at all, why are we calling ourselves atheists? Atheism isn’t a belief—and still most people believe it is one and attack it like it is. We atheists might be continuing to assist this myth by letting others call us atheists and by even calling ourselves atheists.

It doesn’t help when we make mistakes ourselves. Recently, I had a difficult time trying to reason with a leader of a Humanist group that it was incorrect to capitalize atheist and atheism. His reply was that everyone else does it, so he was just doing the same. He’s over 75 years old; how long has he been making that mistake, just thoughtlessly copying, never questioning, just accepting? Atheism isn’t a proper noun, and shouldn’t be capitalized. Religious people who criticize atheism often capitalize the word in an attempt to strengthen their arguments that atheism is a belief like Christianity or Hinduism.

What would happen if we, as ‘atheists’ just used words like "reason" and "evidence" and “bullshit,” and not call ourselves anything at all? I believe that there are very few people, even among religious fundamentalists, who will admit to being against reason (Incredibly, in a recent report from Skeptical Inquirer (2008), a conference on parapsychology stated that ideas like e.s.p. and psychokinesis might be true because they share the characteristic of always eluding being proven by the scientific method. How’s that for rational thinking?) Fundamentalists usually believe they have sound reasons for believing in God. I don’t think anyone wants to believe anything on bad evidence. Searching for truth shouldn’t be relegated to an interest or lobby group just to be dismissed as some cranky people.

God, ethics, and humanism - a debate

2009-02-02T01:43:00.004-05:00

On Feb. 3, 2009 I will debate god, Nietzsche, science and ethics with Brock University Professor David Goicoechea at the Pelham Public Library. What follows is the text of my opening remarks, which may be abridged for time.

After the debate I will post David's comments, our rebuttals, an overview of the evening and perhaps a video of the debate.

-Grant LaFleche.
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Religious faith often dies a hard death. It fights with a particular zeal to keep its privileged control over one’s life. It can root itself so deep into the fabric of our beings, defining who we are, how we act and, ultimately what our fate is, that to cast it off can feel like chopping off a limb. When faith does die you are, after all, left the enormous question of “well, what now?”

But as Jawharlal Nehur said, “facts are facts and they do not disappear on account of your likes.” In my own case facts, evidence and logic were the ultimate corrosive for faith. In as much I was did not want to let go of the pleasant poetry of Buddhist cosmology, or long before that, of the simple certainty of Biblical morality, there wasn’t any other choice. Facts are facts. Evidence is evidence. And they matter.

But trekking off into the undiscovered country of a faithless existence is not a bad thing. You can start off feeling a bit like you are playing tennis without a net. But once you grit your teeth and grapple with that essential question – what now? – you enter a world brighter, more meaningful, more fascinating and, yes, sometimes more frightening, than anything you have previously experienced. That journey, in the spirit of Nietzsche – our patron philosopher this evening – is a critical step in becoming truly human.

I mention all of this because when David and I talked about getting together for this debate, he suggested it might be worth while to recount, by way of an introduction, what lead me to atheism and secular humanism. So I will spend the next few minutes, hopefully without boring you, providing a readers digest version of my own journey from believer to non-believer, and then get into the meat of tonight’s rather weighty subjects of ethics, morals, science and the existence of god.

My father was, not to put too fine a point on it, a “just in case” Catholic. He is not a religious man by any stretch and I have never once seen him pick up a Bible. But he is the sort of fellow who, to borrow the phrase from atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett, “believes in belief.” So my brother and I were baptized as Catholics, the faith of my father’s father, in what I often imagine was my father’s metaphysical insurance policy. Should it turn out, when we die, the Catholics were right, we’d be “covered” as it were.

Nevertheless, I was not raised in a particularly religious home. It really wasn’t a subject that came up that often, and from my mother’s point of view, it was really up to us. If we wanted to go to church she’d take us. If not, we didn’t have to go. Needless to say, I spent most Sunday’s eating cereal and watching cartoons.

Catholic school was a different matter entirely. Along with the regular academic course load, there were mandatory meetings with a priest for confession, regular church services and religion class – which really wasn’t a class about religion, but rather about how Catholicism is right and everyone else’s religion is just a bunch of nonsense – including other Christians! (This is a view expressed by the present pope, who in 2007 declared that non-Catholic churches were “wounded” and because they do not accept the authority of his office, cannot really be called churches at all.) In short, I was well indoctrinated in the Catholic faith.

There were, however, several incidents which slowly, but effectively, drove a stake into the heart of my Catholic faith and by my senior year the Church seemed irrelevant to my life and often rather absurd. The idea accepting the words of a pope, whose election I had no say in, as a guide to how to live my life seemed ridiculous, as did the idea of original sin, the assumption of Mary, or taking sex advice from celibate men who had less experience with it than I did.

Like Abraham Lincoln, I came to see the “unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation” – the reasons for which I’ll discuss as the night progresses – and the inability of the religion to square itself with the mountain of scientific facts we have accumulated since the faith was formed.

But as I said faith dies hard, and like my father, I believed belief. It just seemed proper that you had to believe in SOMETHING. I ended up exploring Buddhism, which expressed a far more enlightened ethic and morality. Where the operating principle Christianity was righteousness, which is doing what god commands, Buddhism was about compassion. As Nietzsche correctly points out in the Anti-Christ, Christianity constantly tries to avoid sin, which is impossible, and so therefore is obsessed with redemption and forgiveness, while Buddhism seeks to end suffering. He regarded both as, ultimately, nihilistic nonsense, but regarding Buddhism as something far closer to what he regarded as the way human beings should live.

In any case, Buddhism, like Christianity, cannot avoid a headlong collision with facts and evidence. Just as Christianity cannot demonstrate the existence of its deity, so Buddhism cannot demonstrate the existence of reincarnation, or the cycle of samsara. And if it is as I have said, that facts matter, then they apply as much to Buddhism as to Christianity. And so it was with some considerable regret that I had to embrace intellectual honesty and let it go.

Atheism, it seems to me, is the rational position to take when one measures the faith claims against evidence.

So without belaboring my own history, I will turn to the point and which David and I agreed this debate would start – which is to say we are starting with the substance of another. Some months ago I moderated a debate, which David attended, between local evangelical preacher Peter Youngren and David Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the United States. Mr. Barker outlined six points to explain why he does not believe in god, and it is on these six points that our debate this evening will begin.

David, obviously, is unlikely to agree with Mr. Barker, or at least not nearly as much as I do. There are some points of separation between Mr. Barker and myself, and I hope to make these clear, so that this debate is not with Mr. Barker, but rather between David and myself:

1) No evidence for god. The evidence for god of the Bible is no different than the evidence for Thor, or Zeus or leprechauns.

On this point there is no argument between Mr. Barker and myself. There is no scientific evidence for the god of the Bible. There is no evidence for it that would stand up on a court of law. The existence of such a creature depends, completely and wholly, upon one’s religious convictions.
The fact of the matter is that faith is not evidence of anything other than what a religious person believes. And yet we treat religious faith, which is in the final analysis belief without evidence, as a virtue. And this is particularly true of Christianity.

There is a story in the New Testament where, after Jesus has risen from the dead, his followers gather. They tell one of their own, a skeptic named Thomas that Jesus is back. Thomas is incredulous. “I’m not going to believe something so insane unless Jesus stands before me and I can stick my fingers in his wounds.” Of course, this is the Bible, so Jesus does appear and Thomas gets to stick his fingers into Jesus’s wounds. Thomas, with the evidence of the resurrection standing in front of him, becomes a believer.

But the story doesn’t end there. Thomas receives a rebuke from Jesus. “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

The message is simple. Don’t doubt. Don’t question. Don’t investigate. Simply believe. Have faith. Thomas, according to Jesus, shouldn’t have been asking for evidence. He should have just believed the unbelievable.

I don’t see how this sort of credulity is a virtue. I rather think Thomas had it right. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We protect faith from evidence as a society essentially by saying that it is taboo to question it. This is only in the area of our lives in which we do this. In medicine, law and justice, or even the safety features of your car, you rightly demand to have verifiable evidence. We do not respect quack medical claims and we come down rather hard on car manufacturers whose safety equipment fails. But when it comes to religion, we throw evidence out the window.

2) No coherent definition of god, and what definitions there are tend to be contradictory akin to calling a man a “married-bachelor.”

There lays at the root of the Abrahamic religions an unavoidable paradox. God is often described as being Love. Christians will sometimes call this “agope”, to use the Greek word. And something like the Sermon on the Mount is often considered one of the great statements on ethics. However, this is only part of the story of the god of the Bible. For the theology to hang together, Christians need the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament. Without it, the theology of the sequel text, the New Testament, is rendered inert. Yet it is not too much to say that god in the Old Testament is anything but loving.

He murders often and in great numbers. He orders several ethnic cleansings, including a standing order to wipe out the town of any people who dare suggest to the Hebrews that they follow another god. He orders a father to murder his own son as test of loyalty and even personally commits genocide and ecocide on a global level. Even if taken as metaphor, these are not stories about love, but about an uncontrollable, petty rage that would make even Zeus blush. Were such a god to actually exist, it would not be a creature to bow down to, but to openly oppose on basic notions of justice and human solidarity.

Even in the New Testament we see the contradiction continue. It is only in the New Testament that we are introduced to the utterly immoral concept of hell, where one can be tortured forever for rejecting god’s “love.” Where “salvation” comes in the form of a bloody human sacrifice that any of us would feel duty bound to stop if we had been there. It is made worse because the crucifixion would rob us of personal responsibility, upon which all ethics must be based, in favor of vicarious redemption – it encourages us to dump our wrong deeds upon the head of another. I am hard pressed to find a less moral and less loving doctrine than that.

Indeed, I openly reject the “sacrifice” of Jesus. I would want no part of it, were it to be true, because I reject the notion that someone has to die for my alleged crimes. The very notion of accepting personal responsibility is antithetical to the vicarious atonement offered in Christian theology.

3)No argument for god can be falsified – the ontological, moral, cosmological and teleological arguments are all poor arguments.

Imagine for a moment I told you the entire universe was created and governed by the Cosmic Platypus, and the only way to save our immortal souls was to make making offerings of frog eggs to it. Further, the commandments of the Cosmic Playtpus are laid down in the Texts of the Oracle of the Venomous Mammals. Also the Cosmic Platypus, living in a river outside of time and space, cannot be seen or touched or otherwise detected, but I nevertheless claim the Cosmic Platypus, in his all beaky glory, is as real as the nose on your face.

Now, even though that is a farcical example, the fact is you cannot disprove the existence of the Cosmic Platypus, can you? Really, you cannot anymore than you can disprove Shiva, or Baldur, or Mazda. Show me the evidence they don’t exist. So if I was seriously making the above claim about the Cosmic Platypus, his slappy tail be praised, would it not be reasonable for you to demand evidence?

The arguments for god are the same. At the very best they might point to a deist concept of a distant first cause, and all of them must eventually abandon their own logic to say, in essence, “god did it.” But such a claim cannot be falsified because it does not have any evidence to disprove. Some of these arguments, and we may want to discuss them further tonight, sound impressive. But they must, as all things, give way to facts and evidence.

4) There is no agreement among believers on moral issues.

Again, I agree with Mr. Barker. There is no agreement on moral issues, even among believers of the same faith, quoting from the same book! You can find 10 Catholics and ask them about a moral issue, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers.

What is more worrisome to me, however, when examining issues of ethics and morality is not that believers do not agree with one another – but the harm religious institutions cause by unfounded moral pronouncements.

The Catholic Church has an impressive track record in this regard, and one need only look at the Vatican’s continual and consistent condemnation of the use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV as an example. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt, thanks to science, that condoms have a significant impact in reducing the spread of this virus, yet the church sees fit to ignore this and reject it as a moral issue – which has a significant impact in the developing world where secularism does not have nearly as strong an influence and where the words of a pope carry significant weight. Well, it is a moral issue and the church’s position is plainly wicked because it contributes to suffering and death. No amount of declaring it to be a faith issue, and thus beyond reproach, can change that.

Where the secular humanist will examine the issue from a utilitarian perspective with an aim of reliving suffering, the church is irrationally dogmatic and dismissive of evidence.

The issue for me is not that believers cannot agree on moral issues. That is a common affliction of the human species. The problem arises when human suffering and well being plays second fiddle to dogmatic statements which have no basis in fact.

5)The problem of evil.

This is of course one of the great stumbling blocks of all Christianity, Catholicism included. If god is loving, if god is pure and benign, why is there such a great amount of suffering and evil. This is the question the Greek thinker Epicurus put forward hundreds of years before the supposed birth of Jesus, and it has gone largely unanswered ever since.

Often, suffering is declared to be the result of the hideous doctrine of original sin, in which the entire species is condemned for the supposed transgression of a mythological first man and woman (whose sin it seems to me to have been the acquisition of knowledge, hardly a crime at all. Indeed, the serpent in the story, far from being evil, is really a spiritual relative of Prometheus, bringing fire to mankind to free him from bondage.)

Others will say suffering and evil are mysterious in someway, and a state that brings one closer to god. We saw this in our lifetimes expressed powerfully in the person of Mother Teresa. In popular culture we treat her as a saint beyond criticism for her work with the poor in India. But as Christopher Hitchens so clearly demonstrates, Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend of poverty. She believed that the more one suffered, the closer one is to Jesus. And who suffered more than the poor souls she “tended” to. Her order raised millions, but built no hospital or improved her own hospices, enacted no programs to put an end to the horrid conditions that lead to many to live such wretched lives. Instead, she gave them a place to die – a place where medical science was shunned, hypodermic needles reused by running them under cold water and people died from treatable illnesses. Her theology, rooted in a very Catholic idea of the “mystery” and utility of suffering, required these poor people remains poor, ignorant and sick.

Grappling with evil and suffering and lending aid to our fellow creatures is something that we, believer and non-believer alike, should gladly do. But never should we treat suffering as mysterious, unassailable or worse, as something good.

6) No need for belief in a god. Non Christians give more as a group than Christians.

Here is where I part company, to a degree, with Mr. Barker. He is correct to say that non-Christians “give” more in terms of charity or charitable works than Christians, but this is merely a question of demographics. Most humans on the planet today are not Christians. In a culture like the United States where most people are Christians of one stripe or another, you find believers giving more than non-believers. In countries like Sweden which have very low levels of religious activity, you see more secularists/atheists giving more than believers.

There is little point to tallying up who “gives” more because the statistics simply are not that clear cut. What does matter, however, is that a belief in god is simply unnecessary to do good things. It is not a prerequisite to do good. I was very proud recently to take part in a blood drive with the Niagara Secular Humanist Association. Those of us who took part did not donate our blood because we are ordered to do so by a sky god who holds out the carrot of punishment and reward. It is done because we know people need help and we are in a position to do so.

Indeed, secular humanism walks on the path of a much greater and humane tradition than what is found in the Bible. The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone. It is not perfect. We will stumble. We will fail. But that is almost the point, that we struggle knowing this to be so. And knowing this is the only life we have, that we will cease to exist when we die as we did not exist before we were born, we have this one and only chance to make a difference.

And if god is not necessary to do good, if there are very human reasons to help one another, why bother with the concept of god in the first place?

God Mail - I'm mad as hell and I'm ranting.

2008-12-30T23:03:00.007-05:00

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them and that custom respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests.

-Baron d'Holbach

What IS it with some Christians? They just can't leave you alone. They just can't. At some point, they figure it was their mission in life to run about and try to get as many converts as possible. I actually wonder if these people think there is some kind of heavenly tote board where Jesus keeps track of how many converts each Christians gets. "Oh look, Bob got two more. But Suzie here, hasn't had a single convert this week! She'd better pick up the slack!"

I mean, what would the winner get anyway? If there was any justice in the universe they'd end up with a T-shirt that said "I converted the heathens and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Of course, some of them are pretty open about why they cannot leave the rest of us alone. They say, with that creepy Barney the Dinosaur smile on their faces, things like "You know, if you see a hungry person, and you knew what it was like to go hungry, wouldn't you want to feed them? That is all I am doing." Yeah, well, Jesus-Boy, guess what? I'm not hungry! And even if I was, I ain't buyin' what you're selling!

Naturally, someone of them, when you really get angry after they have been on your metaphysical ass like a cop on donuts, will appologize. "I'm not perfect," they'll say. "We're all sinners you know. I include myself in that too. I'm a sinner too, that's why we need Jesus." Excuse me, but maybe you believe you were born a worthless sinner who has to pay the price for the alleged "sin" of Adam - which amounted to free thinking if you really consider the story - but some of us have a little more self respect than that. Putting aside the story is nothing but a myth for a moment, why does anyone think saying "I'm a sinner too" qualifies as an excuse for being an ass?

Ok, by now you can tell I am rather annoyed, and this post is not really of the same quality of my usual fair here on the handbook. But have you ever had a day where you just have had enough? Today was one of those for me. So you theists with porcelain sensibilities, stop reading now. I've duly warned you, so if you get all offended and weepy after this...well, we're all sinners right?

Anyway, I am more than used to Christians trying to convert me. They've been trying most of my life and at this point nothing much surprises me. I've heard it all. Over the last few weeks, for reasons that escape me, my videos on Youtube, and my blog here, have resulted in a wave of believers all attempting, desperately, to show me how wrong I am and just how much I need this Jesus guy. They tell me atheism is a tool of the Satan. (Hint to Christians: I'm an atheist If I don't believe in a god, why the hell do you think appealing to a devil is going to carry any weight? Think about it.) They tell me how much Jesus loves me. They threaten me with eternal torture in hell. (Another Hint: Again, don't believe in Jesus or a hell so...gah, why do I bother?) Others try the usual arguments from design and arguments from morality. These are easily dispensed with, but I will at least give them props for trying something that doesn't sound insane....because insane is what I often get. Consider this gem from a Youtuber who tries to argue...well, I am not sure what he is trying to argue, truth be told:

In order for something to be faith there must be less evidence. In old times God actually spoke to man, and showedhim great works, the more unpure man became the less God could talk them,makes sense when you thik about pure energy and bad energy. Or like this car radio waves versus traffic sounds that have other radio n waves or honking there horns.

If spirit means constant energy,and whhen you break everyuthing to an atom, and it sees u and it turns invisble and stops blinking,that is remnance of a spiritual thing that made everything,because it leaves behind a constant energy.
Which would mean that is the remnance of Gods energy.
And if God is energy he stays constant and can manipulate other energies,also he can be asexual which is why he can create things,
energy can't be destroyed, like static electricity, can be produced in many things
And if sin= inhereted bad genes, wickedness, and sickness,or bad genes you can pass down.

Makes since why there is sickness

Stuff like this really does make me fear for the future of the species.

Now, before I go on, let's make something clear from the outset. My blog and my videos are open for anyone to comment, even if their comments make it sound as though they allow Mike Tyson to use their brains as a punching bag. By putting my views out there, I open the door, deliberately, to the views of others. This is the way it is, and I encourage it. I even encourage views I don't like particularly. That's really the whole point in writing the essays I do, and make the videos I do. So while someone trying to get me to become a Christian by telling me I am a puppet of the devil is barking mad, in putting my opinons out there, I have to tolerate a certain level of, shall we say, unique opinons. Fortunately, for every screwball who thinks quoting bible versus at me actually works there is often a more thoughtful theist who, while I probably won't agree with them, at least as something interesting to say.

However, there are areas of ones' life where you think the believer with the evangelical itch would be able to restrain themselves. You know, like the mail. My mail. As in, mail I send to other people.

But alas, like the god of the Old Testament, some believers have a very serious impulse control problem.

I sent some Xmas presents to my mother and step father via UPS. (yes, I just wrote Xmas instead of the Jesusmas thing. Why? Because I feel like being a gadfly. nah nah nah.) When the package arrived it had on it a nice, friendly sticker some UPS employee though worthwhile to place on it. It read, in bright friendly letters: GOD LOVES YOU.

Oh really? Does god also realize I don't want him on my goddamn mail? I can only assume that the UPS employee who thought it was totally appropriate to use my mail as a tool to proselytize to the person I was sendingto it is the "just feeding the hungry, we're all sinners so I can do whatever the hell I want" variety. Or maybe it's the "I love you, so I don't want you go to hell, so I am going to do whatever I can to save you." Or maybe he or she is one of those really insipid gotta-convert-the-heathen-types who actually believe if you read the right bible passage to someone at the right time, the clouds will part, a beam of light will fall upon the head of the non-believer and to a chorus of angels singing Hallelujah, the heathen is converted!

Either way, I just don't give a crap. Believe it all you want. I don't really care about that either. But do not, I repeat NOT, put it on my mail. DON'T DO IT.

Look, I am pretty passionate about philosophy, politics, science and atheism (even though I think the term atheism itself is pretty silly...but that is for another, less ranty day.) But you don't see me sticking quotes from Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell on random stranger's mail now you do? I don't inavde your personal space with my philosophical views. You are chosing to read this of your own accord. You can stop reading whenever you bloody well please. In fact, even the most so called "fundamentalist atheist" (Another hint to believers: the phrase fundamentalist atheist is a contradication in terms and makes you sound ridiculous. If you investigate why some Christians call themselves "fundamentalists" you'll understand why.) would not put an atheist sticker saying "Christopher Hitchens loves you" on your mail.

But not this beleiver. Oh no. He thought it was prefect okey dokey to use someone else's mail to try and win a convert. I mean, I use UPS for business as well. I wonder if this slap happy Mensa group brainiac ever paused to think of the possible consquences of doing that. What if I was sending a resume to prospective employeer, who gets my packet and sees in happy letters reading GOD LOVES YOU on it? Somehow, I doubt leaving an impression of being a rabid bible thumper is the best way to impress a possible new boss. Not that our fundy friend in UPS cares. He's saving souls after all right?

Now, I know what you might be thinking. "Jesus, Grant. It's just a fucking sticker. Mellow out dude. Have a cheeto." And maybe you have a point. Then again, why should I tollerate this sort of invasion into my personal and private space? Why should anyone? Because someone, somewhere thinks the words "it's my faith" is some kind of get out jail free card? There is no justification for it, no matter what Mad God Sticker What God Sticks At Midnight thinks. (A obscure Tick reference there for those in the know.) At best it was unproffesional. Fortunately, a very helpful chap at UPS customer service though so too when I called and is doing whatever UPS does when this sort of thing happens.

So now I have to wonder if the god sticker guy will fess up if he caught? You know, bearing false witness and all that jazz? And if he does, what will his excuse be? Somehow I would not be surprised if as a defense, the phrase "we're all sinners you know," passes his lips.

Gah. What IS it with some Christians anyway?

Peer Review - the music video.

2008-12-26T18:10:00.000-05:00