PZ's Sunday Sermon 06.28.10

PZ has taken to giving Sunday sermons. This Sunday he elevates the Atheist by first denigrating the Christians. Christians, says PZ, have no more value to life than the father / child bond; they are subservient and like to be ignorant. As usual PZ gives reasons that the Bible is evil and that God is even more evil:

”and what are we atheists doing? Telling them that no, he is not, and not only that, you don't even have a heavenly father at all, the imaginary guy you are worshipping is actually a hateful monster and an example of a bad and tyrannical father, and you aren't even a very special child — you're a mediocre product of a wasteful and entirely impersonal process.”

And,

” Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock, and he didn't care about you — he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics.”

And,

”Your genome is a mess of detritus with a tiny fraction of well-honed functionality, and your body is cobbled together from the framework of a tetrapod — you bear the scars of chance throughout, and you are mostly unaware of them because selection, that is the death of millions, has patched them over…but they're there to the eye that will look. You aren't even the best at much of anything: you're weaker, slower, more fragile, clumsier than the other species we compete with, and although you've got a bigger brain, the majority of Americans, at least, consider it a virtue to keep it ignorant and unused…”

Sounds great so far, this Atheism based on evolution. Also, father / child relationships aren’t what they’re cracked up to be:

” Father and child is inadequate; we have to think in terms of populations and species interacting (not dominating), of being part of an environment. There is more to life than the father and child bond.”

So rather than a relationship and servility and stupidity we must consider ourselves to be,

” That's the next step in human progress, is getting away from the notion of minions living under a trail boss, and onwards to working as a cooperative community, with no gods and no masters, only autonomous agents free to think and act.

Ignoring the usual observation that free agency is considered an illusion or delusion at best by Atheist apologists, this statement really does sum up the total freedom from all constraint that Atheists assume that they get by just denying the existence of a first cause. Certainly no gods, and certainly no masters. You are able to make up your own rules as you go. Ah the freedom.

PZ quite frequently makes these declarations that wind up being contradictions of other declarations he has made. It’s like that with non-truth. If you need something to be valid at a certain point in an argument, you merely assert it and it is so. No need to recognize that it refutes earlier positions. Or future positions.

But this sermon was directed at those who feel so alone in their decision to abandon the concept of first cause: they should rejoice at their total freedom, the freedom from intellectual integrity, personal responsibility for actions, truth as a value, truth as an entity, and all the other onerous restrictions of absolutes that are indicative of religious servility. Freedom. Freedom from rational constraints and logical processes. Yes. Freedom.

PZ says,

”We are apes and the descendants of apes, who were the descendants of rat-like primates, who were children of reptiles, who were the spawn of amphibians, who were the terrestrial progeny of fish, who came from worms, who were assembled from single-celled microorganisms, who were the products of chemistry.”

And this makes us free.