Author: VD

I don’t want to be too hard on Mike, since he is clearly open-minded enough to give The Irrational Atheist a fair shake, at least in theory. And in fairness to him, there’s no shortage of Christians who will have a problem with the very first sentence of the first chapter. But since he wrote that he would welcome any arguments in response to his email, I shall grant him the same respect that I grant to all my critics, which is to say, I will post his argument in its entirety and respond to it with my usual reserve:

You lost my respect on the nineth paragraph of the preface. You showed your Bill O Rilley extreamist colors condeming the organization that helps protect peoples rights under the constitution. Namely the ACLU. Typical of traditional religious extreamist wanting to take away individual rights becouse it may not seem to follow your superstitions.You seem to hold so called historical traditions as automaticly right and should not be questioned or changed just because it may be flawed. Example AD and BC being changed. Maybe it was changed because it was just another Christian thing that made nonchristians think Christians were trying to make the world theirs.

While it pains me to have to repeatedly point this out to adults, people and organizations often say things that simply aren’t true. The ACLU does defend SOME Constitutional rights, however, it actually attacks those Constiutional rights which happen to conflict with its left-wing ideology. When is the last time that the ACLU defended the Constitutional Right to Free Association, for example? Also, I am a libertarian who is no friend of Bill O’Reilly, and I am a far more extreme advocate of individual rights than the ACLU has ever been in its most fevered dreams. It is unwise to leap to conclusions about a book based on the very first thing inside it that upsets your conceptual applecart. Regarding BC/BCE, as someone recently pointed out here, it’s pretty stupid to rename the epoch while still basing it on the supposed time of Jesus Christ’s birth. Of course, all the Year Ones of the various revolutionary calendars haven’t shown much staying power.

I think that was one of the main points of Sam Harris’s book.You seem to miss the main point. All belief in god is based on some ancient tradition and writings that the believer takes on blind faith to be true. The fact that there are many differient beliefs means everyone thinks the other is dead wrong.This seems to lead to war and other unreasonable disputes.Sure many nonreligious beliefs also lead to war and disputes but that just makes two wrongs.

I suggest that Mike read Chapter VII: The End of Sam Harris. Also Chapter V: Sam Tzu and the Art of War and Chapter VI: The War Delusion.

Religious doctrine is near impossible to get someone to comprimise on becouse they interpret thier belief to be the perfect word of god. I cant imagine a more dangerous recipie for disaster. This is why I think the whole theory of a god seems implausable.I think our concience our understanding of history,our open dialog of opinions to be weighed logicaly is our better hope for a peacefull and moral society.

If Mike can’t imagine a more dangerous recipe for disaster, I suggest reading Chapter III: The Case Against Science and Chapter XI: The Robespierre of Atheism.

Sure it will never be perfect becouse evolution didnt make us to be perfect.We only have the reality that has been delt us.Lets not waste time pretending and wishing there is something other than reality and start trying to solve problems based on hard facts and reason not someting somebody said his god said in an ancient book. I think blind devotion to something you cant really know for fact will always make your statistics twist and dance to mean what you want to try to prove the unprovable.You will allways will have a bias that cant be reasoned with.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable, but is more than a little ironic considering what comes next.

I have read all three of the books you are disputing and do agree with thier general ideas, but not all the ideas or details. To be quibling with the details you lose the main arguement! You even conciede this in the begining of the book! Your details look as bias as you say thiers are bias. Its all about the three hundred pound god in the room! If yor argument doesnt address the probabillity of god then your attack means nothing to me. I suspect you are only really trying to create that all important seed of doubt to the believers. We all know thats all they need. Your friends at fox news have perfected the he said she said seed of doubt to an art.

First, I have no friends at Fox News. Second, Mike has clearly forgotten what Dawkins explicitly states is the main argument of The God Delusion, which I refute in painstaking, step-by-step detail in Chapter VIII: Darwin’s Judas, in the process directly addressesing the probability argument which so interests Mike. (I note that “the main argument” of the other two books is not that which he believes it to be.) Third, Mike does a spectacular job proving my point about the fundamental irrationality of atheism. I am not saying the facts and details put forth by the Unholy Trinity are biased, I AM PROVING THEY ARE FACTUALLY INCORRECT. This means that the arguments they have made which are based on those facts are also incorrect. Mike is saying that he doesn’t care about the demonstrable flaws in the atheist arguments, he doesn’t care about the illogic involved, he only cares about the conclusion with which he concurs.

THIS IS NOT REASON, THIS IS INTUITION!

There are rational atheists. There are rational arguments for doubt and even for agnosticism. But as Mike demonstrates, there is no such thing as rational atheism and the sad truth of the matter is that most self-styled “rationalists” are far from “rational empiricists” and would be much more accurately described as “intuitionists”. Of course, this accuracy in labeling would make the fundamental weakness of their intellectual position patently obvious to all and sundry, so they attempt to coopt a title to which they have no right whatsoever.

The moral of the story: read, then critique.

I have zero interest in Hollywood, its products, its digital rights management schemes or its denizens. For those who feel otherwise, this would be your place to lament the late Mr. Ledger. Or, for that matter, the late Fred Thompson campaign.

Socrates Elegy admits what we’ve already concluded is obvious:

Mr. Day has accused me of being stupid, uneducated and not well-read. I do not deny that. But, on the other hand, I do not need to be smart, educated, and well-read to know that 2+2=4.

Very true. The problem is that the existence or non-existence of God != simple addition. If it were, then the discussion would not have continued for lo, these many centuries, nor would Messrs. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens feel the need to write so many books about it. Nevertheless, I suddenly feel a deep sense of compassion – well, okay, a mild twinge of it – for SE, since it’s quite clear from the comments on Dr. Helen’s blog regarding her post on The Irrational Atheist that his maleducation is not his fault.

It seems SE has a professor named William, who wrote: “Vox Day’s essay is full of assumptions based on conceit, hubris and absurdity. You can watch his reasoning being taken down by one of my students on his blog. Rather amusing, really. Clearly not being one to examine the facts before leaping to a conclusion, Professor William rivals Sam Harris for an ability to combine certainty with logical incoherence. By way of example, consider William’s statement: “Good science never upholds tenets of ‘absolute certainty,’ but religious sure does, with out any supporting evidence.”

But even if “good science never upholds tenets of ‘absolute certainty'”, this says nothing about the point Professor William was supposed to be addressing, which is whether atheists rely on science with asolute certainty or not. Second, it’s abundantly clear that Professor William doesn’t understand what the term “evidence” means, as there is a great deal of legally admissible evidence for many religions. Perhaps he means “scientific evidence”, but that is far from the only kind of evidence, in fact, it is considered inherently weaker than many forms of evidence and for good reason due to its ever-mutating nature.

As everyone here knows, I did not stop calling myself a “forensic atheologist” due to Professor William’s student. I didn’t stop calling myself a “Japanese scientist because of SE either, in fact, I delight in my status as both a forensic atheologist and a Japanese scientist, such as it is. I have modified the sub-title accordingly, now that the book is available and the book cover is on display here.

What was truly amusing, however, was the way that Professor William first said that I am “lacking the intellectual integrity to stand up to an amateur critical thinker.” Then, when David pointed out to him that I did, in fact, possess the intellectual integrity to stand up to the aforementioned young man, Professor William promptly reversed himself in order to claim he found it amusing “that Vox Day would devote an entire lengthy post defending himself from the critique of my student.”

Of course, I wasn’t “defending myself”, I was mocking a nonsensical and incompetent attempt to judge a new 320-page book on the basis of a four-year old, 750-word op/ed column. And yet one can’t really blame SE, his actions were the natural result of receiving an “education” from an incompetent, hypocritical and intellectually dishonest professoriat.

Some conservatives will mourn the departure of the Tennessee Toad from the presidential race. I won’t, partly because I’m not a conservative, but mostly because Fred Thompson was as much a poser and a fraud as most of the rest of the field. I haven’t forgotten Sean Hannity covering for his slip-of-the-tongue that revealed his pro-abortion position – he’s not merely a Federalist on the issue, which is acceptable, but an opponent of STATE bans, which is not – nor did it escape my attention that he wasn’t much better on free speech than McCensorship himself.

That being said, his laid-back character would certainly have made for a better president than most of the remaining activists; if he wasn’t going to fight the leftward push, neither was he going to ban smoking like Huckabee, guns like Giuliani or single-handedly attempt to turn back the clock to 1950 in Detroit like Romney. Fred always looked better out of the race than in it, so don’t be surprised if more people eventually regret his departure than ever supported him when he was in it.

PZ complains that Christopher Hitchens can’t expect fair moderation:

t takes some confidence to charge into this: Hitchens will be debating Jay Richards (of the Discovery Institute), with Ben Stein as “moderator”, in an event sponsored by the Stanford IDEA club. The creationists are stacking the deck against him rather thoroughly.

You know, I don’t recall ever seeing PZ complain about a debate featuring a Democratic politician versus a Republican politician with the likes of Chris Matthews or Wolf Blitzer mediating….

As for the Hitchens-Richards debate, ye cats, I think I’d pay to avoid witnessing that debacle. I don’t know who Richards is and Hitchens knows less about evolution than PZ thinks your average creationist does. Of course, anyone who’s read god is Not Great is aware that Hitchens isn’t one to let his complete ignorance of the subject matter to slow him down in the slightest.

It’s increasingly understood that they’re far more inclined to marital infidelity than the average woman:

Over a five-month period, I talked to almost 100 middle-class professionals, both male and female, who confessed to being unfaithful. What was remarkable was that not one of the women said they felt guilty. And those who believed they might get emotionally involved tried to work out hard-headed strategies of dealing with it.

Women are always attracted to the top dog. This doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to do anything about it, but throw a woman into an office environment and she’s going to have an entirely natural desire to mate with the modern equivalent of the tribe leader, or his likely successors. Combine that with the necessary narcissism of a woman who puts her children and household behind her work priorities as well as the all-too-common female ethic of personal happiness uber alles and you have the perfect storm for marital infidelity.

A professional procurer knows who his customers are: He meets each applicant personally and over a drink or two finds out his or her needs and desires. He then provides three carefully chosen individuals at a time for them to chose from. His clients are wide-ranging. “I have all sorts of high-ranking professionals come to me and, recently, far more women. Many of my female clients are psychotherapists. I haven’t a clue why.

The unpredictable emotions of situational love and gamma male gigolos aside, I can’t think of a single rational reason why a man should intentionally elect to marry a woman who decides to seriously pursue a career. Wife and mother is a full-time occupation and a far more important one to society and the human race than 99 percent of what passes for the so-called careers of the full-time professional woman. No one of either sex can have it all, and a decision to become a professional woman is a very clear public statement of where a woman’s priorities are. (Hint: not you, not the children, not the family.)

There will always be exceptions, of course, and there’s certainly no shortage of non-career women who don’t wish to work but do so in order to support their families, but the fact that researchers are concluding that professional women’s marriages are inordinately likely to end in infidelity and divorce should come as no surprise, it is simply the logical probability.

I and most of my married male friends – highly educated and successful men to a man – have stayed away from career women. Unsurprisingly, there is not a single incident of divorce, separation or even infidelity in that social circle of which I am aware except the one guy who married a professional peer and found himself divorced within five years. I have four good female friends who are equally well-educated – the two with elite B-school MBAs have both been home with the kids for years, the two with the careers are both unmarried and childless.

This advice may sound terribly clinical, I know, but in truth it’s just the rational conclusion of applying logic and probability to the empirical data that’s available.

Mr. Farah is going to be interviewing me about The Irrational Atheist for WND, and like all editors, he’s happy to offload the actual work on others. He has some specific questions for me already, but since he knows that “the people who read your blog probably have a few questions too”, he’s willing to ask some of them on behalf of the readership for publication on WND.

So, fire away in the comments, Mr. Farah will pick a few of them and I’ll answer those. They should be straightforward questions about something specific and directly related to the book, he’s not going to be selecting any statements in the guise of convoluted questions or questions about tangential issues.

Speaking of WND, you can now buy The Irrational Atheist there from the WND store. Mr. Farah, who was one of the first to read the book, even put in a nice word for it himself there.

Somebody’s in for a little surprise:

This is from the Amazon blurb. I am quaking in my boots at the prospect of all my rationally conceived arguments being unravelled by the power of Day’s rigorously documented arguments.
– Mr Embiggen on richarddawkins.net

All of YOUR rationally conceived arguments, Mr Embiggen? And here I thought I was criticizing the arguments of Richard Dawkins and four other gentlemen whilst writing The Irrational Atheist. This leaves us with three reasonable possibilities:

1. Mr Embiggen is a pseudonym for either Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett. (I don’t think Michel Onfray speaks English; in any case, Onfray’s sentence structure is rather Romantic and recognizable even in translation.) Given Mr Embiggen’s demonstrated ability to commit logical incoherence in a single sentence, it could only be Sam Harris.

2. Contrary to their oft-expressed opinion, atheists do not think rationally for themselves, but merely echo the arguments of various authorities selected on an emotional, irrational basis.

3. Despite the astronomical odds against such a massive improbability taking place, Mr Embiggen happens to have independently reasoned his way to precisely the same rational conclusions regarding life, the universes and everything separately reached by Richard Dawkins. Because you know, if there are a billion arguments and a billion billion people, then – check this out – there are BILLION people making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS.

Damn, but they make it easy, don’t they?

Farmeruminations reviews The Irrational Atheist:

I have read several works of Christian apologetics, The Case for Christ by Lee Stobel, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Gisler, Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, and others. This book is nothing like those. This book is an attack on atheism/Godlessness using reason, logic and facts, the very things that the UnHoly Trinity claim to love. The results are not pretty. Harris in particular, but all three are made to appear as ignorant fools. This should be no surprise to the Believer, since we already know that, ”the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

I’ve heard Christian friends and leaders say that it’s not possible to use reason, logic and facts to show the existence of God. While this may be true, Vox does an absolute masterful job of using those three things to eviscerate the arguments of D, H and H….

A few disclaimers. Vox writes with a slash and burn style. A take no prisoners, blow them up and leave a smoking hole mentality. Some in the Christian community are going to be offended by this approach. I would remind them that our Lord said some rather harsh things to say to some of His critics. You don’t call someone a “generation of vipers”, “whited sepulchres”, and “fools” without having your targets tend to react unfavorably to these terms. Vox does not treat D, H and H with kid gloves. It’s an in your face, put up or shut up, throw down.

Just so you know that I’m not only inclined to post the favorable bits, here’s some criticism we can only assume comes from the Divine Puppet Master Himself via the Responsible Puppet:

I must say I’m a bit torn on this one. But the tear doesn’t go down the middle of the page; the Good piece is bigger than the Bad. And the Bad I think will come as no surprise to Vox and regular Puppet or Vox readers. So let’s start with the Bad and get it over with, shall we?

They are three.

1. As I have been involved in creative endeavors of late, I am learning something that perhaps most artists/authors/developers already know – Art requires sacrifice. Except for the extremely talented, artists need to choose one good over another in their creative process. So for example, a painter who wants to go for a more impressionistic piece sacrifices realism. A movie director who is going for a stark feel will hesitate to show the beauty inherent in their subject matter. A poet will choose a rhyming word over the word that makes more coherent sense. This is the way it must be. You can’t do everything. I understand this.

Okay, here goes: I disagree with a significant sacrifice that Vox made while writing this book – In some sections, he chose style and tone and sacrificed showing a Christ-like attitude. To be fair, this choice doesn’t show itself that often, but where they are apparent, it is pretty significant…. The most notable example of this is the very first sentence of the first paragraph in chapter one.

As you can probably tell, our debate on omniderigence is merely postponed, it’s not at all forgotten…. What you can’t know is how much help TRP provided me in writing TIA; his collected comments and criticisms on each and every chapter would nearly make up a book of their own. I very much appreciate both the time and effort he put into it as well as his attention to detail; I am fortunate indeed to have such a dedicated and intelligent critic. The one thing he appears to have uncharacteristically failed to note, however, is that I not only addressed all of the Unholy Trinity’s strongest arguments, I was careful to address the arguments that the men themselves – particularly Richard Dawkins – explicitly stated are the central arguments of their respective books.

But given the glaring weaknesses of those arguments, it’s very easy to understand how an intelligent man who hasn’t read those books could find it difficult to believe that the arguments I refuted so easily really were the best on offer. Contra TRP’s impression, I didn’t make the “targeted authors look like fools”, the simple truth is that they did it for me. I merely shined a light here and there in order to point out the obvious.

Do you see?

A lot of people forget that Joseph Farah was once a serious, card-carrying member of the mainstream media, so he knows very well whereof he speaks:

While Simon and most of our colleagues like to reflect on the post-Watergate era as heralding a renaissance in good journalism, I can tell you as an eyewitness just the opposite was true.

Where we went wrong was thinking of ourselves as high priests of a new secular religion that was going to save the world. That was never the mission of American journalism. The free press has a vital role in a free society, but it is not to create a “glorious new church.” It is simply to serve as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions, to keep them in check, to be the eyes and ears of the people, to expose corruption, fraud, waste and abuse where it is found.

I can’t help but noting that once more, there’s a theme of “a new secular religion” that keeps popping up again and again. Why, it’s almost as if there’s a feeling that there’s some strange sort of void that must needs be filled!