Tag: religion

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.

Mailvox: the logic of God

Passerby’s challenge somehow tends to remind me of this series of photographs.  But who knows, perhaps the stag will surprise us:

Definition of evil:  the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing

I’m an atheist and going by Merriam-Webster’s def. of evil above, I say evil exists.  According to VD, my stance is irrational. Prove it. Anyone. Show your work. Lay out the steps proving my logic is flawed. You’ll fail. I will crush you.

Well, let us see about that.  He has made his claim that his stance is rational, (which is to say that evil exists but God does not), so I’ll take up the burden of attempting to falsify it.

  1. Passerby asserts that “the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing” exists.
  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.
  3. A material universal standard of right and wrong must be objective.
  4. Man’s standards of right and wrong are inherently subjective and non-universal.
  5. Therefore the objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong cannot be produced by Man.
  6. The most likely source of an inhuman, objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong is an intelligence of grand scope possessing a direct connection to the area in which that standard applies.
  7. The scope required for that inhuman intelligence to provide the universal standard implies, though it does not necessarily require, extra-universality.
  8. The most reasonable connection between the presumably extra-universal intelligence providing the standard and the area in which that standard applies is that of creator to creation.
  9. The presumably extra-universal intelligent creator that provides the objective, material, universal standard to its presumed creation is quite reasonably described as God.

This logic provides for a small degree of wiggle room here.  A being need not necessarily be either extra-universal nor the creator to successfully impose an objective standard on the universe.  However, since any act of creation that results in an observed objective standard necessarily requires the creation of a standard of some kind, the most rational conclusion is to assume that the standard observed was provided by the creator rather than by some other intelligent, inhuman entity that successfully replaced the original standard.

But I think even if the logic-dictated provider of the universal standard of right and wrong is neither the creator nor extra-universal, its observed ability to impose such a standard upon the universe suffices to justify its recognition as an existent god, at the very least, if not necessarily the Creator God or the Creator God of the Christian Bible.

Christians and the Law

The responsibility of Christians to obey the Law of Moses is a subject
that comes up from time to time, which always surprises me because the
Bible is perfectly clear on the matter.  While it is understandable,
though not excusable, that atheists regularly confuse Christianity with
Judaism when attempting to criticize the former, it is absolutely
bizarre that some Christians are still under the impression that they
have an obligation to abide by Jewish Law.

Christians are not Jews.  Christians are not obligated to follow Mosaic
Law.  Ask any Jew, he should be able to confirm it.  As will the Bible, in Acts 15:

The Council at Jerusalem

Certain people came down from Judea to
Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised,
according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”  This
brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So
Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go
up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. The
church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia
and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news
made all the believers very glad.  When
they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the
apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done
through them.Then
some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood
up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the
law of Moses.” 
The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After
much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know
that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might
hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now
then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a
yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
The whole assembly
became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the
signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it,
That the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
Even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
Says the Lord, who does these things,
Things known from long ago.

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead
we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by
idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and
from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

The Council’s Letter to Gentile Believers

Then the apostles and elders, with the
whole church, decided to choose some of their own men and send them to
Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They chose Judas (called Barsabbas) and
Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. With them they sent the following letter:

The apostles and elders, your brothers,

To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:

Greetings.
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You
are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat
of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to
avoid these things.
Farewell.
So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message. Judas and Silas, who themselves were prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. After
spending some time there, they were sent off by the believers with the
blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them. But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, where they and many others taught and preached the word of the Lord.

The fact that Jesus Christ did not abolish the Law says nothing about
its continued inapplicability to those who are not Jews.  In fact, to
claim it now applies to non-Jews when it did not before on the basis of
Matthew 5:17-20 is clearly self-contradictory, for the obvious reason
that making it applicable to people to whom it did not previously apply
would be changing the letter of it.  Note particularly how Jesus states
even those who “sets
aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others
accordingly” will still nevertheless be part of the kingdom of heaven.

Blind faith in science

Despite philosophy’s failure to do so, some are still fantasizing about Science finally killing God:

Physicists have observed that many of the physical constants that
define our universe, from the mass of the electron to the density of
dark energy, are eerily perfect for supporting life. Alter one of these
constants by a hair, and the universe becomes  unrecognizable. “For
example, if the mass of the neutron were a bit larger (in comparison to
the mass of the proton) than its actual value, hydrogen would not fuse
into deuterium and conventional stars would be impossible,” Carroll
said. And thus, so would life as we know it.

Theologians often seize upon the so-called “fine-tuning” of the
physical constants as evidence that God must have had a hand in them; it
seems he chose the constants just for us. But contemporary physics
explains our seemingly supernatural good luck in a different way.

Some versions of quantum gravity theory, including string theory, predict that our life-giving universe is but one of an infinite number of
universes that altogether make up the multiverse. Among these infinite
universes, the full range of values of all the physical constants are
represented, and only some of the universes have values for the
constants that enable the formation of stars, planets and life as we
know it. We find ourselves in one of the lucky universes (because where
else?).

Some theologians counter that it is far simpler to invoke God than to
postulate the existence of infinitely many universes in order to explain
our universe’s life-giving perfection. To them, Carroll retorts that
the multiverse wasn’t postulated as a complicated way to explain
fine-tuning. On the contrary, it follows as a natural consequence of our
best, most elegant theories.

While it may be true that the multiverse wasn’t originally postulated as a way to explain fine-tuning, there is no question that is the primary way in which it is utilized now.  It borders on the dishonest to pretend otherwise.  The logical irony, of course, is that multiverse theory itself suggests that even if we happen to inhabit a godless universe, there must be other universes in which gods exist.  And then, there is no logical reason to assume that a Creator God which created one universe did not create more universes.  Multiverse theory is not a means of deprecating God, it is merely a means of defending godlessness against the powerful assault of the anthropic principle.

When one contemplate these matters, one quickly realizes that most scientists would do well to stick to science.  Because as both philosophers and theologians, they tend to be remarkably incompetent.