Tag: atheism

Mailvox: Uber Dawks strikes three

You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him!

I did not mean “objective scientific evidence”, I mean any objective evidence at all. The Bible is not an objective piece of evidence, scientific or otherwise. Wrong. Try again in our bonus round. Reading the comments on your blog this morning, it seems that none of your ilk can come up with anything either. The Courtier’s Reply is still looking mighty valid.

Finally, not that I need to justify any credentials, but since your ilk has been speculating, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Evolutionary Psychology at a prestigious major university. My views are not the minority among atheists, but the majority. Go to Pharyngula and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Read Dawkins more polemical work, read Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been tackled at length by these great thinkers.

Also, for all the mocking of my celebrity atheist paragraph, I was not appealing to these men to validate atheism, but rather to show that the atheist in that comic is a grand caricature, representative of the kind of narrow thinking that you Christian fundies are known for.

evidence
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign.
3. Data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects.

Evidence is any information so given, whether furnished by witnesses or derived from documents or from any other source.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly what one would call concerned about the opinion of anyone who believes that there is no evidence for the existence when God even after the difference between “evidence” and “scientific evidence” has been pointed out to him. I am probably the least likely man on the planet to be moved by the arguments of anyone who genuinely believes Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are, and I quote, “great thinkers”. This is surely the very worst site on the Internet to make an appeal to Pharyngula and as for The Courtier’s Reply, it requires the sort of innumeracy and complete philosophical ignorance we have come to expect of butterfly collectorsbiologists to take it seriously. But I have absolutely no doubt that his maleducated and irrational views are the majority among atheists; that is precisely why I titled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.

The thing that is so ridiculous about the definitionally challenged “no evidence” argument is that even third-rate minds like Dawkins know that it is hopelessly incorrect. The existence of testimonial and documentary evidence for God is the very reason Richard Dawkins wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of scientific evidence over eyewitness evidence in The Devil’s Chaplain, although scientific evidence is less valid in a court of law than eyewitness evidence and is rightly considered much less reliable than documentary evidence of the sort that the Bible represents.

Anyhow, I’m sure we all wish the PhD-to-be great success in his future career in the gastronomical service industry.

Mailvox: the return of Uber Dawks

Apparently not content with demonstrating his complete ignorance of American history and PZ Myers’s confirmed cowardice, Uber Dawks has returned as part of his quixotic crusade to demonstrate that militant atheists are every bit as smart and educated as they are socially adept and sane.

After mockingly laughing my way through the two days worth of posts to your site that were inspired by my email, I’ve come to the conclusion that you and your “ilk” may be even more delusional than I could have ever imagined. When they discuss you at Pharyngula, I would think to myself that no one could be that obtuse, delusional and falsely magnanimous. Turns out that you are all that and more.

PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn’t have to? Courtier’s reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy. You have no objective proof of god’s existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing — one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.

Oh, and all your posters whining about the Christards label…sorry for being honest with you, but you are mentally handicapped if you actually believe that some bearded Jew (who probably didn’t even actually exist) came back from the dead 2000 years ago. So I called you a bad name, boo-hoo. You use negative labels for atheists all the time on your site.

Are you just not smart enough to see your hypocrisy? For all the self-promoting about your IQ, you could not on your best day come up with a universal neutralizer and falsifier for atheism the way Myers has done for theism with his Courtier’s Reply. That’s why conservative sky bully worshippers like you and philosophical liars like William Layne Craig aren’t fit to be in the same conversation with PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins.

In reading the responses from those two other atheists (assuming those emails were real, which I doubt) I have only one thing to say to them. Grow some balls. Stop bowing to the tyranny of the religious majority. You Christians and Muslims are destroying this world with your religious nonsense and killing everyone else in the process. Sam Harris wrote about conversational intolerance and possible retributive violence against dangerous religious groups, and what he says is true. Atheists need to speak out and show that we will no longer tolerate your fairy tales and your killing in the name of them. All atheists need to join together and drag all of you kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not.

Fact is this: Atheists are winning. Look at Denmark or France or the UK. Your sky fairy is about to go bye-bye.

That idiotic cartoon you posted shows that you are as clueless about atheists as you are science. Atheists do not look like that at all. George Clooney, Bill Maher, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are all atheists. Brad Pitt is functionally atheist. Joss Whedon is a feminist and an atheist and has stated that knowing there is no god is “a very important thing for you to learn.”

These guys are famous, they get women and are nothing like that idiotic cartoon. What should I expect though, Mariano from TrueFreeThinker is nearly as bad as you are. He spends his time tossing philosophical chum into the water to be decimated by atheist piranha.

The problem is that you people with your god-goggles on can’t see reality. This is why Darwinian Evolution deniers, Global Warming deniers and Christian fundies go hand in hand. All of you are in the same boat and most of you are the same guy.

Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That’s it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.

Let’s count the most conventional signs of atheist cluelessness:

1. Thinks The Courtier’s Reply is meaningful – check!
2. Thinks the Dark Ages existed – check!
3. Doesn’t know what “evidence” is – check!
4. Science fetish – check!
5. Thinks religion is a serious global threat – check!
6. Thinks atheists are winning in Europe – check!

I have to say that the appeal to Brad Pitt and Joss Whedon is a new one on me. Wow! I will really have to rethink all of my most fundamental conclusions about life, the universe and everything. What use is Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas when you’ve got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters!

And since he brought it up….

Mailvox: homo inedicabilis

Although I am inclined to make heavy use of statistics-based probability in observing human behavior and find that it is a very useful tool in in explaining and predicting individual behavior, I never, ever forget that probability is not certainty and that even a powerful 97% statistical probability means that you can count on rolling boxcars sooner or later. Here are two examples of why I am always careful to distinguish between atheists who merely happen to lack god belief and militant/New atheists who can be expected to exhibit a predictable range of social disfunctionality and political ideology in addition to overt hostility towards that which they claim to be nonexistent.

M writes:

I love your blog. It really keeps me thinking every day. One of the most important things you have done for me is that, while not converting me from atheism, you have taught me that religious people can be just as skeptical and rational, if not more so (probably more so), than atheists. You have also really let me realize how irrational most atheists are. While I already knew most of the flaws, your retorts to their arguments are just so witty, concise, and overall entertaining…. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical of just about everything, from scientific claims to mystical claims to political claims. It’s no surprise that I would find myself loving the skeptics community, a world-wide network of people who embrace rational and critical thinking. Well, or so they claim.

Being a skeptic, I really wanted to go to the Amaz!ng Meeting 8 this weekend in Las Vegas. I forgot something, though. The skeptical community heavily overlaps with the new atheist movement, and they all seem to be, as you call them, “science fetishists”. There’s never enough skepticism about political issues. In fact, skeptics who don’t believe in global warming are quick to be called “climate change denialists.” I myself stay in the camp of “I don’t know, and I doubt you actually do either” but I don’t even say that, because I don’t want to deal with people about it.

It’s obvious that many of these people are irrational, even though they claim to embrace rational thinking. But what can we expect from a bunch of people who think Richard Dawkins has intelligent things to say? I love science. I love skepticism. I also love actually applying my rational thinking to the two. Thank you for writing a blog that actually uses critical thinking. I am glad that while I find one community is lacking, there is another community out there that has the right mindset.

Another atheist, S, writes in response to a previous atheist’s email:

I’m a big fan of your blog and although I don’t agree with everything you write, I think you’ve almost always got something interesting to say. I read your post regarding the comments by one “UberDawks”, and I have to say, I’m surprised that you were so easy on him. (I refer to Rule 1 of the blog- I thought that, given the guy’s total lack of reason or civility, you’d be a lot harsher, though the cartoon was an interesting touch.)

As an atheist, I have to say, I’m amazed at just how bad his “reasoning” really is. Unlike most atheists I find the notion of anthropogenic global warming to be deeply suspect, and I was not particularly surprised to find that the inquiries into Mann and Jones cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing- despite clear evidence that both ignored FOI requests, deleted and manipulated data, and exercised academic privilege to quash dissenting views. One would think that any reasonably literate atheist would at least be able to read those CRU emails.

As for his comments about the Founding Fathers- I think of myself as a libertarian, and I’ve often wondered myself about the religious views of some of the Founders, but I’ve never doubted that the men who built this nation were for the most part Christian in their outlook. It seems to me as though UberDawks has never even read the Declaration- the document makes clear references to Divine Providence and “the Supreme Judge of the Universe” right there in the text. And to ignore the role that Christian theology played in creating the Constitution is to ignore all of the Constitution’s understanding, clearly articulated in the text, of Man’s fallen nature and of the need to protect free men from the depredations of over-powerful governments and less-than-moral men. In other words, one would have to ignore the very reason the Constitution was created in the first place. That’s precisely the kind of leap of faith that atheists are supposed to be above making.

Overall I find UberDawks and his ilk to be mildly worrying. It’s no wonder that atheists can’t be trusted with power- if his email to you is representative of the level of thinking that goes on within the atheist community, secular nations with atheist or humanist leadership are in really big trouble. I also think that the peculiar atheist faith in man-made global warming exists primarily to replace the human need for some kind of faith in something. That still doesn’t make it a good idea; not all faiths are productive, and that particular one is downright absurd (and for once, it’s possible to show this scientifically).

S is correct to be worried about the more rabid species of atheist; their science fetishism and political utopianism is every bit as dangerous to more reasonable atheists and agnostics as they are to Christians and other theists. Still, I didn’t really see any need to kick UberDawk’s teeth in despite his incivility since he was clearly just a drive-by critic and the unreason and ignorance revealed in his email tended to render it self-refuting. One thing that people like him who wrongly perceive me as being intrinsically “anti-atheist” fail to understand is the significance of the difference between one’s religion and one’s political ideology. While they are usually related, they are seldom identical. My religious faith certainly colors my ideology, which is why I describe myself as a Christian libertarian, but the fact remains that I would vastly prefer atheist libertarians with realistic views of human corruptibility in positions of political leadership to both Christian progressives attempting to bring about Heaven on Earth and Christian conservatives seeking to impose Biblical morality through legislative fiat.

Of course, in addition to being imperfectly predictable, Most People Are Idiots, as demonstrated by this commenter at the New York Times. If this isn’t enough to cure you of an instinctive democracy fetish, nothing will.

“I am dismayed that commentators and inquisitors like Chris Matthews let their “guests” get away with the lie that “small businesses, not government, creates jobs.” I can’t believe that these troglodytes get away with pushing such a patently false proposition. As you may guess, I’m a government employee, and my money spends just as well as a window clerk at McDonalds. Spending is spending; buying is buying. I eat food, buy housing and clothing, and pay my utility bills just like everyone else. So why doesn’t keeping my job count just as much as me opening a small business? Let’s stop the lying.”

Yes, let’s absolutely stop all this lying and simply have government hire everyone who is out of work to do… something. After all, since government creates jobs just like small businesses, then there is no reason for anyone to be unemployed ever again! Mises wept.

Help, help, they’re being repressed!

 Come see the religious oppression inherent in the system!  In tangetially-related news, this email from UberDawks may amuse:

I’ve been reading your blog and I have to say that it is chock full of the most delusional christard fundamentalist bullshit I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.   Guess what jerkweed, the CRU was just CLEARED, and Penn State found that the “hockey stick” held up. Where is your precious “Climategate” now?! Packed away with the rest of the fundie Christian myths?

Also, the constitution was not based on the BIBLE you historically inept moron. The posters on your site are idiots. The founding fathers WERE deists and DID NOT base the Constitution on your idiotic cracker-blessed bible. You should all educate yourselves by reading Chris Rodda’s articles at HuffPo.

No wonder PZ Myers won’t debate you, you’re so ignorant that it would be like a mighty bearded hammer fighting a skinny, bald nail.  You don’t understand science, you don’t understand history and I’m pretty sure you are as batshit crazy as Jesus was, I would wait for a response…but you have NO arguments to make.
To reiterate from my previous post, there were only two, at most three Deists in comparison with the 52 Christians, most of them CALVINISTS, who were at the Constitutional Convention.  The same Christian-heavy ratio is true of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  The CRU was “cleared” in a whitewash where the science, such as it was, was not examined in any way, shape, or form and it is a far cry from Penn State finding that Michael Mann was not guilty of professional misconduct to claiming that the university declared that the long-disproven “hockey stick” temperature graph is valid.  When did the myth of Global Warming become adopted as an article of the atheist faith?
UberDawks concludes by demonstrating that impeccable atheist logic which insists that PZ Myers regularly runs away from debating people because he is afraid he will destroy them so utterly.  And to think that these are the intellectual giants who want you to take them on faith that God does not exist.

The myth of Deist America

I suppose we can’t be surprised that atheists so often get Christian “mythology” factually incorrect when they can’t even keep their own myths straight:

The thinkers who formulated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists, not theists, and were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in England and Europe.

Pure.. Unadulterated.. Poppycock. This flies completely in the face of serious scholarship on the subject by Dr. Miles Bradford (University of Dallas) in which he careflully examined the religious beliefs of 55 of the framers of the Constituional Convention and found only 3 whose religious leanings were a bit unclear.

For crying out loud, there were nearly as many MINISTERS signing the Declaration of Independence as there were deists. The lesson is to always treat atheists spouting “facts” like Jehovah’s Witnesses “quoting” the Bible. Always, always, always, ask them for their source. Most of the time, when you force them to trace it back, it will turn out to be pure fiction.

Atheism: the anti-Game

PZ Myers considers why women don’t like atheists:

It’s an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I’d rather not go down that road. So here’s the Woman Problem, and it’s not a problem with women: it’s a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it’s true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.

Let’s me get this straight. Women don’t like a group of men who are known for being socially difficult, taking every excuse to pick arguments, launching unprovoked attacks on other’s beliefs, throwing hissy fits at the drop of a hat, and basically behaving like drama queens on all occasions. And on top of this, they tend to be inordinately interested in science.

This is a mystery? Seriously? All that’s without even taking the high Creepy Guy factor which some of the atheist women report of the skeptic conference attendees and even atheist leaders into account.

Now, obviously not all atheists are hapless when it comes to women. Consider the examples of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins, who managed to marry seven women between them…. But I would be interested in hearing from the women here why they are disinclined to find atheist men attractive beyond the obvious desire to marry a man of like religion.

Let the slaughter begin

Australia has an atheist leader!

As a child, she was a Baptist, now she’s an avowed atheist. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard this week completed the image of a thoroughly modern Australian leader by telling the nation she doesn’t believe in God.

Oh relax, all you hyperventilating godless pansies. Not all ambitious atheists are mass murderers. There’s only a 3 in 5 chance that she’ll be bathing in the blood of Australian virgins as Australia’s Dictatrix-for-Life ten years from now.

Atheism and action

In which the connection between godlessness and the commission of acts of mass violence is explained by Napoleon, as per his personal secretary and biographer, Bourrienne:

During the negotiations with the Holy Father Bonaparte one day said to me, “In every country religion is useful to the Government, and those who govern ought to avail themselves of it to influence mankind. I was a Mahometan in Egypt; I am a Catholic in France. With relation to the police of the religion of a state, it should be entirely in the hands of the sovereign. Many persons have urged me to found a Gallican Church, and make myself its head; but they do not know France. If they did, they would know that the majority of the people would not like a rupture with Rome. Before I can resolve on such a measure the Pope must push matters to an extremity; but I believe he will not do so.”—”You are right, General, and you recall to my memory what Cardinal Consalvi said: ‘The Pope will do all the First Consul desires.'”—”That is the best course for him. Let him not suppose that he has to do with an idiot. What do you think is the point his negotiations put most forward? The salvation of my soul! But with me immortality is the recollection one leaves in the memory of man. That idea prompts to great actions. It would be better for a man never to have lived than to leave behind him no traces of his existence.”

It is those last three sentences that demonstrate the connection between atheism and large-scale tragedy that Richard Dawkins and other historically illiterate atheists have so much trouble recognizing. It is not atheism itself that is the problem, but as I explained in TIA, atheism combined with a burning ambition to achieve immortality through material ends. Whether this immortality is achieved through military glory, the creation of a New Man, or the construction of a new society on the ashes of the old one is not important, the point is that the underlying motivation to commit acts of horrific violence involves more than the simple absence of the belief that one will face judgment for one’s actions in this life.

Those who trouble to actually read the words of the historical individuals will see a striking similarity in the mindset of men as superficially different as Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao. Again and again, it becomes apparent that the ideology that supposedly drove each of them was merely cover for their burning personal desire to seek immortality through action. This is the most obvious in the case of Napoleon, who secretly loathed both the liberty and the bloody regicides of the Republic whose armies he led so effectively, because his biographer was privy to his private thoughts long before his actions began to contradict his supposed republicanism. But, the same concept quite obviously applies to many of the more lethal Communist leaders as well, since most of them were no more genuinely committed to Communism than Napoleon was to liberty, equality, and the French Republic.

For such men of burning ambition, ideology is nothing more than a means to a self-serving end. Men have little to fear from an atheist libertarian or a Christian monarch, but they have everything to fear from an ambitious atheist who dreams of great actions and is determined to leave the world with the recollection of his existence.

Scientific American and social autism

Scientific American reports on a study which implies that atheism may be a form of virtual Asperger’s Syndrome:

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the Bering in Mind blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American Mind), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

This sounds a more than a little sketchy in the usual social science manner; it’s actually a smaller sample size than was the case in the utterly unscientific comparison of the high AS Quotient average reported by atheist Pharyngula readers to the neurotypical range reported by regular readers here at VP, which involved more than 100 individuals. I think it would be more illuminating to learn whether those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or full-blown autism are more or less likely to be atheists, as the reported predilection for non-teleological thinking suggests that those suffering from this form of mental impairment would be tend to be predisposed towards atheism and materialism.

Of course, the existence of neurotypical atheists should not be a surprise since many atheists do not exhibit the impaired social cognition that is the hallmark of the militant New Atheists. This is why it is always important to distinguish between the individual who merely happens to lack belief in gods from the anti-religious socially autistic crusaders who simply cannot understand that your religious beliefs, whatever they might be, are no legitimate concern of theirs.

And while we’re on the subject of impaired social cognition, I found this comment on the article to be as amusing as it is ironic. “Socially speaking, the world is full of all kinds of people, but the atheists I choose to associate with are outspoken because of their innate consideration and compassion in light of another’s plight with respect to primitive irrational superstitions.”

Contra Nietzsche and Mises

I don’t think atheists who strive to argue in support of the existence of non-religious objective values, regardless of whether they are based on philosophy or science, have any idea how weak their case is from the atheist perspective:

“There are no such things as absolute values, independent of the subjective preferences of erring men. Judgments of values are the outcome of human arbitrariness. They reflect all the shortcomings and weaknesses of their authors.”
– Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy

It seemed strange to me why atheist arguments related to objective morality were always so crudely simple and vaguely familiar until I realized that this is because I had seen very similar arguments before in a different context. As it happens, the current atheist attempts to determine an objective basis for morality are following exactly the same path that economists of the 18th and 19th century trod in attempting to determine the objective basis of value. They are literally 200 years behind the best efforts of economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen to find something that does not exist, and due to their general ignorance of economics – Michael Shermer excepted – they have no idea that their quest is destined for complete failure.

I can only conclude that sometime around the turn of the next century, the marginal utility of morality will become the dominant paradigm for a time prior to the whole quest being abandoned in response to a series of massive and inexplicable moral depressions.