Tag: religion

White smoke spotted

“The Catholic church has chosen a new pope. White
smoke is billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, meaning 115
cardinals in a papal conclave have elected a new leader for the world’s
1.2 billion Catholics. The new pope is
expected to appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica within an
hour, after a church official announces “Habemus Papum” – “We have a
pope” – and gives the name of the new pontiff in Latin.”
And a million conspiracy theorists held their breath… and were disappointed.

“Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina has been elected the new leader of the Catholic Church. The 76-year-old – now known as Pope Francis I — was the archbishop of Buenos Aries and was appointed by Pope John Paul II. Bergoglio became the first pope from the Americas elected and the first from outside Europe in more than a millenium.”

Mailvox: where are the miracles?

DL has a question concerning the apparent absence of Old Testament miracles:

I would like to say that I have been reading your blog for over half a year, maybe a little bit longer now. You write about a lot stuff that I have thought for years, it has just given me the evidence and confidence to speak my opinions besides just sitting quietly by while people say stuff I don’t really agree with.

The point of this email is to ask your opinion on a problem I came across during a debate I was having with a friend over the existence of God. This debate has been going on for a while and slowly the tides is turning from him controlling the debate to about a mutual battlefield. The idea of God being omniderigent really put a cap over some of his arguments.

Things were going ok until I was asked the question of “Why doesn’t God do any of the big miracles that he did in the bible today?” What he meant by this is the parting of the Red Sea, destroying a city with fire, and raising people from the dead. I was unable to come up with a completely logical solution for this question. I done some research on apologetic websites on why God would do this and the answers are a little unsatisfactory and doesn’t really answer the question in a logical way.

I would think the answer is fairly obvious.  First, God clearly does miracles for specific reasons.  Consider the repeated response of the Israeli people to His miracles; they kept returning to their false idols and their evil ways, and rejected Him for an earthly king.  Why would it surprise anyone if He stopped bothering to intervene on their behalf when they repeatedly turned their backs on Him after witnessing them?  Jesus himself had the people turn on him despite his miracles and even pointed out that people would not believe regardless of what they had seen with their own eyes.

Second, what would the point of any such divine miracles be?  The Bible makes it clear that there will those who believe without seeing, and Richard Dawkins makes it clear that even if God Himself appears and tells him that he is wrong about His existence, he will not believe.

When X doesn’t happen, the correct question is not “why did X not happen?” but “why does X happen and is there reason to have expected it to happen in the first place?”

The Pope resigns

Sic transit gloria olivæ:

Dear Brothers,

I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church.

After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.

However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.

For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.

Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects.

And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff.

With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.

Fascinating.  Gentlemen, you may start your conspiracy theories.  Wherefore art thou, St. Malachy?

In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves
in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis
diruetur, & Judex tremêdus judicabit populum suum. Finis.

La prossima domanda: chi e’ papabile?

“Three
names are most prominent: Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of
Milan; Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops;
and Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa.

Cardinal
Scola, 70, is highly esteemed by the pontiff, who moved him from the
Patriarchate of Venice to Milan, one of the largest and most important
sees in Europe. He is a brilliant, if at times recondite, theologian, a
major supporter of the New Evangelization and a leader in
Catholic-Islamic dialogue. His election could be hampered by internal
divisions among the Italian cardinals.

Cardinal Ouellet, 68, is a
Sulpician and served as archbishop of Quebec from 2002 to 2010 before
taking over as head of the powerful Vatican office that oversees the
appointment of the world’s bishops. Critics point to the lamentable
state of the Church in Quebec during his tenure and wonder if he would
be able to reinvigorate the faith in the West.

Cardinal
Bagnasco, 69, is very well known among the Italian and European
Cardinals and has a reputation for intellectual heft. He is also
president of the influential Italian Bishops’ Conference.”

Faith as economic artifact

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.

Never go full retard

I have to seriously wonder about the sanity of anyone who is genuinely concerned about the world ending in 2012 due to the Mayan calendar.  Remember, we’re talking about a people who were so collectively stupid that not a single one of them ever had the astonishingly brilliant idea of using the wheel to move things more easily from one place to another:

Ahead of December 21, which marks the conclusion of the 5,125-year “Long
Count” Mayan calendar, panic buying of candles and essentials has been
reported in China and Russia, along with an explosion in sales of survival
shelters in America. In France believers were preparing to converge on a
mountain where they believe aliens will rescue them. 

I’m assuming most of this is pure media look-at-the-loonies hype.  But not all of it is a media invention.  Now, I suppose it’s not totally impossible that a group of people who spent centuries dragging heavy things from point A to point B because the concept of an “axle” was beyond every single one of them had some means of calculating the World Reboot, but I am a little dubious, to say the least.  I’m merely surprised the Mayan calendar didn’t end in “fiver”.

Meanwhile, secularists continue to scoff at the Bible even as the events predicted in it keep coming occurring, one after another.  I’ve observed the pattern over the course of my lifetime.  First they scoff.  “Europe will never be one kingdom.”  “No one will ever buy things with a mark on their hands”.  “There is no Israel”.  “What government beheads anyone anymore?”  Then, when it comes to pass, they claim what was previously asserted to be impossible can’t possibly have anything to do with what was very clearly laid out nearly two thousand years ago.

And the Scouts of Britain fall

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.

Mailvox: the ethics of hypocrisy

RE asks about the hypocrisy of the religious:

I am a longtime reader of your blog, which I have found to be very helpful over the years.  Also, your book the Irrational Atheist is a God send.   I hoping that you would give me your take on something.  I recently had “discussion” with my older brother on religion. My brother stated “religion is bullshit, its made up by man, its full of hypocrites.” He further explained the reason he doesn’t go church or practice his faith in anyway is because everyone that goes to church are hypocrites.

I am sure every church has its large share of “hypocrites”, but I feel he is being unreasonable.  I know it can be difficult to find the right place to fellowship with others, but I still find value in going to church, praying, and reading the Bible.  Can you please provide me another or your intelligent and witty rebuttals to his concern? 

First, relatively few of the religious, or anyone else for that matter, actually fits the proper description of hypocrisy, which is defined as follows:  a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

Most people do not feign to having principles they do not really possess, but rather, fail to live up to the standards of those principles. What RE’s brother fails to realize, as do most people who regularly observe hypocrisy around them and make a meal of decrying it, is that professing ideals and failing to live up to them is not usually an indication that the profession is false, only that the professor has failed.  While it is possible for such failures to be a sign of the profession being false, it is far from being conclusive evidence of it.

Failure is not, in itself, necessarily indicative of hypocrisy.  Moreover, it makes no sense to accuse most Christians of hypocrisy, in that Christian theology expressly and specifically declares that all, without exception, are fallen.  No one is perfect.  No one is worthy.  One can more reasonably question if a self-righteous person is actually a Christian than to claim his self-righteousness is indicative of his hypocrisy being a consequence of his religion.

As for a rebuttal, I would suggest the following: the only reason you think they are hypocritical is because they have standards.  Why do you believe that a complete absence of standards is more indicative of good character than apparent hypocrisy? I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Christianity, dude, at least it’s an ethos.

Divine perfection

And the lack of Biblical evidence for it:

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the
belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include
being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly
simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something
like this view is common among lay people as well.

There
are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it
appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems
unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if
the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible
injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite
power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out
immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came
from.

The second problem is that
while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the
God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and
scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God
in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as
immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he
regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly
surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a
cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot
control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

As those of you who have read TIA know, I do not subscribe to the concept of God as a “perfect” being, or even think that it is meaningful to describe Him as “good”, but rather, a tautology.  And given our intrinsically limited perspective, I think it is stupid to claim we have any means of distinguishing between omniscience and superhuman tantiscience or voliscience. But it is fascinating to see that the Aprevistan view appears to finally have penetrated mainstream thinking.

5772nd verse, same as the first

The Jews never seem to learn from their own history:

Circumcision is one of Judaism’s most important laws and for
generations of faithful it has symbolized a Biblical covenant with God. But in Israel, more and more Jewish parents are saying no to the blade. “It’s such a taboo in Israel and in Judaism,” said
Gali, nursing her six-week-old son, about the decision not to have him
circumcised.

When I was a kid reading the Bible, I always found it to be inexplicable how the Jews would no sooner be saved by God than they would do something bound to piss Him off and land them in some nasty soup.  Now that I am older and a bit more versed in the perversity of human nature, I merely wonder what the inevitable consequence of their willful disobedience is going to be.

And yet some say religion doesn’t provide any predictive models….

Mailvox: the logic of God II

In which Passerby attempts to poke holes in the logical argument demonstrating the irrationality of his position concerning the simultaneous existence of evil and the nonexistence of God.

Well! I wasn’t expecting an entire fresh post devoted to my challenge
in that other thread. I’m so honored. Pardon my late arrival.  Okay,
first off, VD, looks like you threw a gutter ball from your second
premise, as Riki-Tiki-Tavi already sensed. Let’s have a look at it:

2.
The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a
material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be
classified.

Incorrect. The existent fact of wrongdoing/evil
does not require a material universal standard of right and wrong. The
existent fact of wrongdoing is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Good luck making a sound argument for
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Think anyone can do it passably? I
don’t and I suspect you don’t either. So we should agree there. That’s
point number one.

Point number one is incorrect.  Notice here that Passerby is not only taking exception to my point, but to entire philosophies such as nihilism, existentialism, and, ironically enough, rational materialism.  His argument is surprisingly weak, based as it is on the self-evidence of wrongdoing.  Is it self-evident that stealing is wrong?  That not voting is wrong? 

Consider how little sense his argument makes if we substitute a non-existent fact for wrongdoing/evil.  The existent fact of unicorns
does not require a material universal standard of unicorns and not-unicorns. The
existent fact of unicorns is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of unicorns.

If we cannot tell the difference between a unicorn and a not-unicorn, then we cannot possibly declare that unicorns do or do not exist.  But if we have established the fact that unicorns do exist, we have necessarily established a material and universal standard for what a unicorn is and what a unicorn is not.  Therefore, point number one fails and the second step in the logical argument remains standing.

Point number two. Another thing wrong
with this “necessary universal standard” claim of yours (I noticed you
used that word “standard” seventeen times in your post, so to continue
the bowling metaphor, it’s like your very bowling ball to bowl with,
without which… well, game over — but I’ll give you a dollar so you can
go play some Ms. PacMan) is that six billion people in the world could
have six billion different standards of wrongdoing, but everyone would
nonetheless agree that wrongdoing does exist in the world.

So
let’s imagine those six billion individuals’ six billion different
standards of wrongdoing can be each given a numerical value. I’m not
saying it can ever actually be done, but just go with me here. After
they’ve all been given a numerical value, they’re arranged in order on a
vertical meter with a red zone on the bottom and a green zone on the
top. Put the meter on the lowest setting of “1”. That setting belongs
to a guy who disagrees with all 5,999,999,999 people above him whom he
considers to be an increasing bunch of prissy Miss Manners types who see
wrongdoing in all kinds of ways he doesn’t. But he at least sees one
instance of wrongdoing in the world and everyone above him agrees that
he at least got one right. So it seems to me (I’m just now coming up
with this, but I’ll try to land this thing in one piece) that this
minimum setting of “1” is the standard, if anything, for the existence
of wrongdoing. Below that is “0” which represents nonexistence of
wrongdoing.

Point being, our subjectivity is flawed, but it’s far
from useless! There is, after all, communication and agreement. It’s
precisely because of our limitation as trapped individuals of
subjectivity that science is the best idea we’ve ever come up with (or
happened upon) to make gains on objectivity. To paraphrase Steven
Pinker, science is our highest, purest expression of reason.
Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal, but we’ve seemingly made
lots of progress toward it given our technological conquests, our
steadily decreasing rate of violence in ever larger, more complex
populations, etc. I say seemingly because a cosmic rug pulling could be
in store for us a la The Matrix at any time, but that caveat aside,
it’s our processes of communication, cooperation, record keeping,
rhetorical persuasion, experimentation, reason, science, etc. that we
arrive at standards of right and wrong be they amoral (e.g., math,
chemistry, physics) or moral. And we arrive at them, to the extent we
do, through our own shared reasoning, thank you very much. No divinity
needed or even evident. 

Point number two is not so much incorrect as irrelevant, bordering on a category error. In this section, Passerby fails to grasp that an objective standard is more than the sum of six billion subjective opinions, and in fact, no number of subjective opinions can produce an objective standard, by definition.  The more the standard is “influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice”, the less objective it can be, regardless of whether those competing feelings, interpretations, and prejudices are harmonious or not.  Existent evil/wrongdoing requires a material and universal standard, even if our subjective experience of the objective reality is different in six billion different ways.

If the readers don’t mind indulging me in following Passerby on one of his tangents, I will add that Stephen Pinker is wrong about science as he is wrong about so many things.  Science is most certainly not the highest and purest expression of reason.  Not only is it not reason at all, it was specifically conceived, developed, and utilized to replace pure reason.  This is why Science is so often at odds with Philosophy as well as Religion; Science is nothing more than the systematic codification of experience.