#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
This would appear to count as additional evidence of my scientific hypothesis concerning atheism being an indicator of mild autism. It’s impressive how many conventional atheist talking points he manages to hit on in his rant. And notice he makes false claims of being threatened as well as threats of “digging up dirt”; such actions are endemic to the more emotional elements on the Left.
And never forget, these are the people who claim to have reason on their side.
As I pointed out five years ago in TIA, the New Atheist attempt to
kick out the supposed crutch of religious faith is not only churlish, it is actively harmful to those individuals who happen to need a crutch in
order to walk through life.
A new study
suggests belief in God may significantly improve the outcome of those
receiving short-term treatment for psychiatric illness. Researchers
followed patients receiving care from a hospital-based behavioral health
program to investigate the relationship between patients’ level of
belief in God, expectations for treatment and actual treatment outcomes.In
the study, published in the current issue of Journal of Affective
Disorders, researchers comment that people with a moderate to high level
of belief in a higher power do significantly better in short-term
psychiatric treatment than those without.“Belief was
associated with not only improved psychological well-being, but
decreases in depression and intention to self-harm,” says David H.
Rosmarin, Ph.D., an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School….Patients with “no” or only “slight” belief in God were twice as
likely not to respond to treatment as patients with higher levels of
belief. Investigators believe the study demonstrates that a belief in God is
associated with improved treatment outcomes in psychiatric care.
It’s
fascinating to see how some atheists believe that Templeton funding
renders a study intrinsically unscientific, while blithely citing
studies funded by Big Pharma to argue for the safety of
government-mandated chemical injections. All the while ignoring the
disproportionate tendency of atheists to kill themselves and others.
I
suspect it won’t be long before there is additional scientific support
for my hypothesis that atheism is a consequence of a mild form of
autism.
In his speculation on whether public intellectuals matter, AC Grayling somehow manages to avoid noticing the giant elephant voiding its bowels in the room.
Can one give a catch-all definition of what it is to be a “public
intellectual”? Consider this list: Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein,
Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Stephen Jay Gould, Norman Mailer, Susan
Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, indeed anyone on Prospect’s
list of people who merit or are thought to merit the label. They have
very little in common other than intelligence and engagement, and the
fact that they speak out. Those three things, accordingly, might be
taken to capture the essence.
Very little in common other than intelligence, engagement, and the fact that they speak out? I don’t know, my highly developed pattern recognition skills suggest to me that there just might be something else these notable public intellectuals all have in common. Let’s look over his list one by one and see what the Internet has to say about their religious beliefs.
Bertrand Russell = atheist
Albert Einstein = agnostic
Edmund Wilson = atheist
Lionel Trilling = agnostic
Stephen Jay Gould = atheist-leaning agnostic
Norman Mailer = atheist (during his years as a public intellectual)
Susan
Sontag = atheist
Noam Chomsky = atheist
Richard Dawkins = atheist
My goodness, isn’t that an astonishing surprise! It goes without saying, of course, that A.C. Grayling is himself an atheist. This failure to note this common point is so massive, and so glaring, that it is either intentional, or worse, an indication of the very small scope of the so-called public intellectual’s perspective. Of course, we should probably keep in mind that Grayling is known for his convenient memory lapses, having once falsely accused William Lane Craig of a false claim to have debated him.
This leads me to conclude that the correct answer to Grayling’s question is that public intellectuals matter very much to other public intellectuals. As to their importance to the vast majority of the rest of the world, who don’t give a damn what a few self-important, self-promoting, godless individuals may happen to think about anything, they clearly don’t matter at all.
As I have previously shown, despite the statistical overrepresentation of the irreligious among the highly intelligent, there are still far more highly intelligent religious individuals than there are highly intelligent irreligious individuals. To be precise, the ratio of theists with +2SD IQs to atheists with +2 SD IQs is more than 10 to one. The more significant question, therefore, is why are all of these much more numerous highly intelligent religious individuals so few and far between on this year’s list of celebrated world thinkers? Why are so few of them invited to give TED talks?
Do their religious beliefs somehow negate their intelligence? Or could it be that there some other mysterious factor at work? This is all so very inexplicable in light of the fact that GSS studies over the past 40 years show that the MAJORITY of atheists have IQs of 100 or less.
SM has a request that is appropriate for National Autism Awareness Week. Let’s not forget to be aware of our Socially Autistic friends such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris:
hey vox, can you show me some evidence that dawkins sucks at math? would be awesome thanks.
“The anthropic principle has been an embarrassing problem for secular scientists in recent decades due to the way in which the probability of the universe and Earth just happening to be perfectly suitable for human life is very, very low. The extreme unlikelihood of everything being not too hot, not too cold, not too big, and not too small, to put it very crudely, has often been cited as evidence that the universe has been designed for us, presumably by God.
Now, Richard Dawkins is arguably not an individual particularly well-suited to play around with probability. He may not be quite as mathematically handicapped as Sam Harris, but he is known to have some issues in this regard, being openly mocked for his “comic authority” and “fatal attraction” to mathematical concepts by the French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger.
(“But look, the construction of the relevant space cannot proceed until a preliminary analysis has been carried out, one in which the set of all possible trajectories is assessed, this together with an estimation of their average distance from the specified goal. The preliminary analysis is beyond the reach of empirical study. It presupposes—the same word that seems to recur in theoretical biology—that the biologist (or computer scientist) know the totality of the situation, the properties of the ensemble of trajectories. In terms of mathematical logic, the nature of this space is entirely enigmatic.” )
Schützenberger’s contempt for Dawkins’s mathematical abilities is well-founded, as it’s generally not considered to be a good idea to adopt a casual approach to mathematical probability, as Dawkins does with the “one in a billion” chance of something like DNA spontaneously arising which he invents ex nihilo, before reaching the shocking statistical conclusion that if there are a billion billion planets and a one in a billion chance of life spontaneously arising on a planet, then life must exist on a billion planets throughout the universe! Dawkins is genuinely surprised by his astonishing discovery of mathematical division, so much so that he repeats it twice.”
– TIA p. 151
As a bonus, this was the reason behind the reference to Sam Harris:
“The first thing one notices is that Sam Harris can’t even manage elementary school math. The percentage for the safest cities determined by state voting patterns is not 62 percent; seventeen blue state cities divided by twenty-five total cities equals 68 percent safe blue cities.“
– TIA p. 124
Ed Trimnell observes that not only are atheists far more inclined to attack Christianity than Islam, but some are even willing to publicly declare that Islam should be off-limits to atheist criticism:
“It seems that a writer at Salon.com is upset because the so-called “New Atheists” have been rather unkind to Islam of late. In a piece entitled “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia” Nathan Lean suggests that these New Atheists should simply shut up about terrorism, sharia courts ordering death sentences for apostates, and honor killings in the Muslim world. Then they can go back to doing what atheists in the post-modern West are supposed to do: talk about the threat that evangelical Christianity poses to humanity. (After all, some of those hillbilly reactionary Christians still haven’t fully embraced same-sex marriage!)”
I suspect that this sort of thing might have something to do with the atheist hypocrisy:
“Hundreds of thousands of people have held protests in Bangladesh to
demand that the government introduce an anti-blasphemy law that would
include the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam…. Supporters of Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist group which draws support
from tens of thousands of religious seminaries [and that has the backing
of country’s largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami], converged on Dhaka’s main
commercial hub to protest against what they said were blasphemous
writings by atheist bloggers, shouting “God is great — hang the atheist
bloggers”.”
Apparently the old chestnut about there being no atheists in foxholes isn’t all that far from the truth. Christians are holding to their faith even as they are murdered for it by Muslims in Nigeria and Egypt and by atheists in China and North Korea. Atheists, meanwhile, are showing that they don’t have the courage of their lack of conviction, thus proving my point that post-Christianity in the West is unlikely to look any different than post-Christianity in the Middle East.
A post-Christian West will be pagan, not secular. It will be in the form of dark gods like Santa Muerte and Damballah Wedo, and it will be rooted in death and cruelty. It should be recalled that whereas there never was any medieval “Dark Ages”, there is a very good reason why Jesus Christ was considered “the Light of the World” by civilized and scholarly men who were familiar with the darkness of pagan cultures that preceded Christian society. Merely having to compete with that Christian society considerably improved paganism, as even Julian the Apostate implicitly admitted in his futile attempt to build a paganism capable of rivaling it.
“Julian’s heart was set on a civil and religious reformation. He longed for amendment in law and administration, above all for a remodelling of the old cult and the winning of converts to the cause of the gods. He himself was to be the head of the new state church of Paganism; the hierarchy of the Christians was to be adopted — the country priests subordinated to the high priest of the province, the high priest to be responsible to the Emperor, the pontifex maximus. A new spirit was to inspire the Pagan clergy; the priest himself was to be no longer a mere performer of public rites, let him take up the work of preacher, expound the deeper sense which underlay the old mythology and be at once shepherd of souls and an ensample to his flock in holy living. What Maximin Daza had attempted to achieve in ruder fashion by forged acts of Pilate, Julian’s writings against the Galilaeans should effect: as Maximin had bidden cities ask what they would of his royal bounty, did they but petition that the Christians might be removed from their midst, so Julian was ready to assist and favour towns which were loyal to the old faith. Maximin had created a new priesthood recruited from men who had won distinction in public careers. his dream had been to fashion an organisation which might successfully withstand the Christian clergy; here too Julian was his disciple.
“When pest and famine had desolated the Roman East in Maximia’s days, the helpfulness and liberality of Christians towards the starving and the plague-stricken had forced men to confess that true piety and religion had made their home with the persecuted heretics: it was Julian’s will that Paganism should boast its public charity and that an all-embracing service of humanity should be reasserted as a vital part of the ancient creed. If only the worshippers of the gods of Hellas were once quickened with a spiritual enthusiasm, the lost ground would be recovered. It was indeed to this call that Paganism could not respond. There were men who clung to the old belief, but theirs was no longer a victorious faith, for the fire had died upon the altar. Resignation to Christian intolerance was bitter, but the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found. Julian made converts — the Christian writers mournfully testify to their numbers —but he made them by imperial gold, by promises of advancement or fear of dismissal. They were not the stuff of which missionaries could be fashonied. The citizens were disappointed of their pageants, while the royal enthusiast found his hopes to be illusions. Mutual embitterment was the natural result.”
– The Cambridge Medieval History Vol. I, pp 362-363
That was 1,650 years ago. There is truly nothing new under the sun. Even today, we see “the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found.” The reason Richard Dawkins’s attempt to set up an atheist charity will ultimately be no more successful than the Emperor Julian’s efforts is because the Christian customs they seek to imitate are not inspired and encouraged for their own sake, but by the particular religious impulse. Both history and observation clearly indicate that it is no more possible to maintain the tenets and various aspects of Christian civilization considered desirable by non-Christians without the Christian faith to support them than it is to maintain intellectual function without a beating heart.
Such efforts can be maintained, for a short time, by extraordinary artificial measures. But they will fail soon enough. And then the true nature of pagan darkness will reveal itself again.
Richard Dawkins isn’t so keen on criticizing the God of the Koran:
Asked if he thought the same of the God of the Koran, Dawkins ducked the question, saying: “Well, um, the God of the Koran I don’t know so much about.”
How can it be that the world’s most fearless atheist, celebrated for his strident opinions on the Christian and Jewish Gods, could profess to know so little about the God of the Koran? Has he not had the time? Or is Professor Dawkins simply demonstrating that most crucial trait of his species: survival instinct.
Whoops. It’s funny how these confident, cocksure prophets of atheism-who barely have time to take a breath between slamming the tenets of Christianity and Judaism-often get curiously tongue-tied and shy when the subject of Islam comes up. The idea that Dawkins doesn’t “know so much about” the God of the Koran is absurd. Of course he knows about Islam. And the same disdain and disregard that he has for Judaism and Christianity should surely apply to Islam as well.
The truth is that bashing and mocking Judaism and Christianity is easy and painless. You’ll get praise and admiration from those within the “right” circles of academia, media, and entertainment. Your opponents will argue with and debate your views and they may even offer (gasp) to pray for you. There’s no real price to pay at all.
Well, I know I’m shocked….
While I tend to largely forget about past books in favor of a) the most recent one, and, b) those I’m currently writing, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that people are still reading the older ones. SA writes of his recent encounter with TIA:
Nietzsche’s famous response to his critics was, “Swallow your poison; for you need it badly.” There are realizations that begin by tasting a bit like poison, but end up being just the medicine we need. Vox Day’s book is like that — atheists will instinctively hate it at first, not just because of its content but also because of its ironic writing style. “Poison pen” it may sometimes be; but it’s exactly the sort of “poison” they really need. As anyone who can think philosophically, or even anyone with an ounce of common sense knows, atheism is inherently irrational, since it depends on claiming certainty about a matter it obviously could never know for certain.
Day calls the atheist bluff. Teeing off on some of the chief proponents of irrational atheism today — Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Onfray in particular — the author debunks their empty rhetoric with the simplest of weapons: facts. Particularly good is the author’s treatment of the old canard “religion causes wars,” for which he provides so much counter-evidence that the reader is left wondering why anyone ever thinks such a thing is true. He simply takes the atheists at their word, and tests their claims against the available evidence.
In a way, it’s unfortunate that Day resorts so often to the ironic tone, because opponents will be all too quick to jump on that stylistic feature and claim the author is a mere stylist without substance. That charge would be untrue, and a more calm tone might prevent that, showcasing the evidence rather than the rhetorical flourishes. However, flamboyancy and irony of tone have never stopped atheists from loving Nietzsche or uncritically embracing the random rhetoric of mere stylists like Harris or Dawkins, so their objections might be a trifle hypocritical.
On the good side, Day’s book is immensely readable, and at times is simply laugh-out-loud entertaining. You can dash through it in a night, and indeed, it’s hard to stop reading once you start. The central argument is not a scholarly approach so much as a popularly-accessible one; but that does not diminish the ultimate seriousness of the arguments advanced therein. Anyone who is already a theist, or anyone who is still seriously thinking about the atheism-theism debate can find in this book a helpful resource for casual debate. But the atheist “faithful” who have already closed their minds to the evidence may simply find it teeth-grindingly irritating.
It probably won’t escape anyone’s attention that the New Atheism is done, having mutated into helpless silence in the face of Islam on the one hand and A+ feminism on the other. It’s remarkable to see that women can even ruin atheism; it’s a tactic that we theists should have utilized long ago. After all, the sort of mind that is prone to atheism in the first place is going to be particular susceptible to cries of “sexism” and “racism”, and there are few groups more male and white than a gathering of atheists.
SA’s point that rhetorical flourishes can detract from the dialectic arguments is an accurate one, but the problem is that they are necessary for the majority who are not capable of following the dialectic arguments. What TIA exposes, in crossing the rhetorical divide, is that there is very little but rhetoric in most of the New Atheist arguments, which is why a dispassionate dialectical critique would have been an error and left its atheist readers unmoved. The venom and the spite with which so many atheist reviewers have responded to TIA over the years is proof of its effectiveness in that regard.
It’s also good to see SA single out what has probably been the primary accomplishment of TIA, which was the conclusive debunking of the “religion causes war” line. We’ve seen less and less of that ever since TIA came out, and the historical evidence has even begun to creep into scientific journals such as Nature. While I have no doubt that the Left will do everything it can to be sure I am never credited with having successfully demolished that line of attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular, (it’s amusing to see all the references to a $300 encyclopedia that it is perfectly clear no one has even seen, let alone read), I’m very pleased to see that mendacious, but rhetorically effective argument increasingly absent from the atheism-religion discourse.
And SA’s email is a useful reminder that as long as atheists attempt to rely upon the arguments it criticizes, TIA will remain relevant.
Right on the socionomic schedule, the growth of the irreligious population begins to slow:
After years of marked growth, the size of Americans who identify with no religion slowed in 2012, according to a study released Thursday. Since 2008, the percentage of Americans who identify as religious “nones” has grown from 14.6% to 17.8% in 2012, according to the Gallup survey. That number, which grew nearly one percentage point every year from 2008 to 2011, grew only 0.3% last year – from 17.5% in 2011 to 17.8% in 2012 – making it the smallest increase over the past five years….
Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, says these results suggest “that religion may be maintaining itself or even increasing in the years ahead.” “Our current ability to look at it over five years with these big surveys suggests the possibility that the growth [of the nones] may not be inexorable,” Newport says….
Atheist and humanist activists disagree and pushed back against the Gallup study.
Given that the vast economic depression that began in 2008 still hasn’t even been officially recognized, it should be no surprise that the pendulum has merely slowed, and not turned entirely. I find it amusing that the atheists and humanists are so openly anti-science; one wonders what, precisely, their argument for the continued decline of religion might be founded upon.
What should actually concern the atheist and humanist activists is not the socionomic prediction that non-religious identification will decline as economic conditions continue to worsen. What should bother them is that the growth in religious “nones” considerably outpaces the growth of those willing to identify themselves as atheism. Not only do Low Church Atheists not identify with High Church Atheists, they often have a more favorable view of the religious than they do of their “fellow” atheists.
As for the inevitable appeal to “the youth”, the linear projections never pan out for the obvious reason that young people are stupid, inexperienced, and clueless. Eventually, most of them grow out of it.
In which I actually agree with Ed Brayton for once:
I have little doubt this decision will mark the beginning of British scouting’s long decline into irrelevance:
The Scouts are to drop their historic rule that teenage recruits must declare religious belief, the movement’s leaders said yesterday. In future boys and girls who join the organisation will be allowed to declare themselves as atheists and make a pledge of honourable behaviour that makes no mention of God. The retreat from religion marks a break with a tradition begun in 1908 when the movement’s founder Robert Baden-Powell wrote a Scout Promise which required a vow to ‘do my duty to God’.
It’s really rather remarkable how many organizations are so willing to commit suicide in the name of inclusion and accommodation with the secular world. Especially when it is so obviously unnecessary; membership in the Scouts had grown by nearly 17 percent in the last 12 years.
Perhaps the Scouts will prove different than all of the various mainstream churches that have declined into irrelevance by moving into the world and away from God. But I doubt it. Atheists will doubtless opine that they can’t see any possible reason why scouting should decline just because they are permitted entry, and yet, we see the same pattern play out again, and again, and again.
I’m not keen on judging a blog by its comment section either, except in that one can judge the character and self-confidence of the blogger by how he manages his comment section. Here at VP, for example, there is actual debate among people who disagree with each other and with me. In the posts this week alone, there are numerous regulars disagreeing with me about the limits of the Constitution’s ability to guarantee God-given rights as well as a vigorous debate on the permissibility of gun control between commenters.
PZ, as far as I have seen, is actually quite good about permitting critics to comment freely at Pharyngula, the problem there is not that he cannot bear dissension, but rather that his commenters are such a clueless collection of mid-witted ideologues that most critics stop uselessly banging their head against the wall of idiocy there before long. I actually respect him much more than many other bloggers in that particular regard.
But Brayton is entirely correct to point out that the self-styled skeptics are every bit as tribal and superficial as those they make a habit of denigrating. This is a point I have been making for literally years, and it is good to see that some of the more vocal members of the skeptic community are willing to openly acknowledge it.