Atheism Analyzed

From PZ's Place, Alex Fairchild, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-02-02T17:13:00.000-06:00

Carl Sagan and DMT.

Alex Fairchild
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/02/02/why-i-am-an-atheist-alex-fairchild/

Summary: Scientism and Drugs.

From PZ's Place, Scott Portman, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-02-01T21:06:00.000-06:00

I’m an atheist for all the standard reasons of logic and evidence that others have already articulated, but I’m also an atheist because of a feeling that religious belief can blunt one’s sense of wonder. As a child, the things that struck me as most beautiful and awe inspiring appeared to be off religion’s radar screen. Where were the giant sequoias in the bible? The Grand Canyon and the other National Parks? Bears? I would have been a sucker for religion had my parents been Mormons or animists. My grandmother showed me a 3-D postcard of Christ wearing a bloody crown of thorns. My mom didn’t like this, so grandma revealed the postcard as if it was pornography, something hidden and very special. I didn’t get it. Jesus would blink his eyes open and shut as you tilted the postcard. This freaked me out a little; normal kids prefer live people to dying ones. Even as a five year old, I can remember being revolted at the cruelty of a doctrine that had no place in heaven for cats and even considered the question ridiculous. Richard Dawkins called religion a crime against childhood. That resonates with me, although I grew up without much distortion from religious education.

I married a lapsed but still religious Catholic. (We all have criteria, and I drew the line at Republicans or smokers.) Charles Darwin is a bit of a role model for me in terms of reconciling my total lack of faith with my dear wife’s residual attachment to her religion. He lost his faith, but loved his wife enough to support and accept that she retained hers. Anyway, like Darwin, one of the crosses I bear is occasional attendance at church. Last Easter, the priest was talking about the miracle of the resurrection. My usual Church-service meditation on the history and sociology of the Hellenistic world wasn’t doing it for me. I actually listened to the priest, and I was getting pissed off. Torture is not some abstraction. It is a grotesque crime with nothing redeeming about it, and real people suffer their entire lives from having been tortured. The Father tortured the Son to death and then resurrected Him to free us from sin? That’s obscene. What kind of manipulative organization would glorify it? And why would anyone pick an event like this as the foundation to build some elaborate theological structure and claim that it reflects something fundamental about the universe?

Just when I thought I could stand no more, a warbler appeared outside the window, gleaning insects off of the forsythia bush. Call it a miracle: A bird weighing less than the change in my pocket flew from Colombia en route to Canada. It makes this journey twice each year, and it can do this for a decade. Here was something of tremendous beauty, real and tangible and available to anyone with curiosity. The priest would probably offer some Hallmark sentiment about God’s love for all of His creations, at least until they fly into windows, or toss off a phrase about the beauty of God’s creation that has the effect of stifling inquiry more than encouraging it. To be fair, the Catholic Church accepts evolution and there are Jesuits who have a pretty solid understanding of biology. But even they would insist on Easter Sunday that the defining event in all time was the brutalization of a man during the expansion phase of the Roman Empire.

I don’t get it. I’ve never heard a believable rationale for separating religion and science, and the whole progression of science pretty much proves we’re not the center of the universe. This warbler seemed like a small but welcome messenger from the vast and impersonal universe outside the church. The mysteries of the resurrection and the volumes of theological speculation built upon it seem like weak tea, pale and downright unimaginative compared to the remarkable fact that this warbler and I share the same basic architecture and chemistry, that the warbler has even more in common with the tyrannosaurus down at the Field Museum, that a creature so small uses the stars to navigate, or any of the millions of other things that can be known or asked about both human and bird. The church has nothing emotionally or intellectually satisfying to say about the terrifying vastness of time and chance that created me, the world’s most easily-entertained mammal, or the warbler I was observing. I am an atheist because the universe is unexpected and beautiful in ways that bear little relationship to the myths or beliefs humans create to interpret it.
Scott Portman
United States

Summary: After gratuitous claim of logic and evidence, the main theme is that the cruelty of the crucifixion is an obscene thing to base a religion on: interpretation being that God tortured Jesus to death, then resurrected him for our sin. Secondarily, religion doesn’t provide intellectually satisfactory answers like science does. Religion blunts wonder.

From PZ's Place, mandrellian, Australia, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-31T17:28:00.000-06:00

Why am I not an atheist …

… and why I am.

I am not an atheist because:
• I hate God
• I prayed to God and my prayers weren’t answered
• Militant/fundamentalist atheists converted me away from God
• I’m rebelling against God like I rebelled against my parents & teachers in high School
• I think I’m better than God
• I had a bad experience with a priest or church or religious person
• I can’t decide which religion to subscribe to
• atheism is my religion
• I think religious people are idiots
• I worship Batman
• I worship Satan
• I’m immoral/amoral and would rather do what I want
• I want to destroy religion
I distrust and criticise certain organised religions because:
• they are human inventions and many seem to be more preoccupied with obsessively controlling aspects of peoples’ private lives than improving them
• many Christian churches are primarily concerned with attracting money and then keeping it rather than using it charitably
• many holy books get descriptions of the world & nature completely wrong, which you would not expect had they been dictated by the omnipotent creator of the universe
• many holy books contain descriptions of human events that cannot be historically verified and in all likelihood never happened (eg. Exodus)
• many holy books contain numerous laws, acts & stories of a morality that modern, free societies find repugnant; these societies have passed many of their own laws contradicting them
• there are so many separate & often violently opposed sects of each religion that it is more likely that none of them are correct than just one of them being so
• many religious groups demand special treatment such as the right not to be offended by statements, artworks, songs or anything else that may criticise or disagree with their dogma
• religious groups frequently try to have laws passed which unfairly impose their narrow standards of behaviour, based on interpretations of specific holy commands, onto the rest of society
• religious people often tend to pick & choose from, or “interpret” their holy texts, discarding what does not conform to modern standards of morality, law & political freedom; they then imply that modern morality, law and political freedom rests on the foundations of their particular religion
• there is such a wide spectrum of religious belief & adherence to dogma, ranging from light, barely-existent deism to the kind of rigid fundamentalism that oppresses and kills many, many people in its name, that it leads me to conclude that either God wasn’t clear enough with his message, didn’t spread it to enough people or that humans have basically made their religions and associated rules up as they went along and have been in conflict with each other about them ever since
• many religious people & groups wilfully mis-characterise atheists as immoral, empty beings with no appreciation for beauty or mystery simply because we prefer natural explanations for the universe’s phenomena rather than defaulting to “God did it”; they believe that any explanation, even a wrong one or one which explains nothing, is better than “we just don’t know yet”
• many religious groups continue to deny long-accepted scientific facts such as the divergence of species through evolution and the verified age of the Earth; some wish their particular mythology taught as fact in science classes and go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish it; some even insist there’s a huge, dark Scientist conspiracy quashing “academic freedom”
• some religious people & groups attempt to cherry-pick science (as they do their scriptures) for those parts which conform to their belief system while actively denying others, e.g. agreeing with “microevolution” while denying “macroevolution” or attempting to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics to debunk evolution
• some religious groups deny the efficacy of modern medicine in favour of treating an ill person with prayer, a practice which has led to many preventable deaths, often of children
• they all make extraordinary claims based on their scriptures, provide no evidence beyond referring to their self-confirming scriptures and then insist that the onus is on atheists to disprove their claims
• many religions have become inextricably intertwined with the laws of the patriarchal cultures which spawned or adopted them, leading to divine justifications for such horrors as female circumcision and “honour killings”, which more often than not punish women, already under the thumbs of domineering males, for seemingly minute transgressions of law
• when it comes to the hot-button issue of sexual abuse by priests, many religions seem more concerned with good public relations, shielding themselves from culpability and keeping numbers in churches than with compensating victims and being active about preventing further abuse
I am an atheist because:
• any & all claims of and explanations for the existence of God or any other gods have thus far fallen far short of my standards of evidence
• my understanding of the natural universe is that it functions in such a way that doesn’t require (or indicate) the presence of any supernatural entity intervening in either the laws of nature or selected peoples’ lives
• That’s it. They are the only two things that I can say I absolutely have in common with any other atheist. In matters of sex, politics, architecture, gaming, interior design, pets, music, clothing, hobbies, language, philosophy, education, sports, typing speed, preferred drugs, affinity with beagles & frogs and any number of other categories I may be diametrically opposite to any other atheist in the world. To label one atheist with the same attributes you label another atheist is ignorant at best, flat-out dishonest at worst. But all of us, if “atheist” is to mean anything at all, do not accept theistic claims.
But what could steer me in the opposite direction? Probably the same things that could steer any atheist…

I could be converted to theism if:
• God, or a god, showed himself or performed an act that unambiguously proved both his existence and his attributes as an immortal, omnipotent being. As to what that proof would constitute: that god himself, if omnipotent, would be the perfect arbiter of what would conclusively prove to six billion people that he existed.
Such things as tortillas depicting blurred silhouettes of Mary (or any other second-tier deity) do not count. If you’re there, God, you’re on notice! Any time is fine. No tricks – and come alone (if indeed there’s only one of you, otherwise, bring the whole parthenon).
mandrellian
Australia

Summary: Atheist because (1) needs evidence which satisfies his personal requirements; (2) universe operates without a deity; (3) people operate without a deity. Makes specific demands of deity for evidence in order to be converted.

From PZ's Place, mjr, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-30T21:08:00.000-06:00

I’m an atheist because I grew up in an environment free of the notion that religious teachings were true, in any sense. Whenever atheists who’ve recovered from religion talk about it, they seem to have had to sometimes struggle to reject the claims of faith – imagine how easy it was, for me, growing up with the opposite assumption: that it was a historical artifact and belonged with times gone by. When I was a kid I learned about the ancient Greeks and Zeus and Olympus, the Romans and Poseidon, the Vikings and Odin, the Jews and Yahweh, and the Egyptians and Bast – and it’s blindingly obvious that these myths are just stories to tell around the fire. For most of my life I largely ignored religion, until I started to study political philosophy and became uncomfortably aware of religion’s long role as a technique for political control. It was Seneca’s quip: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful” that made me realize that if you’re going to engage in a political dialogue with another person, you will often need to address religious indoctrination just as you sometimes need to overcome national or tribal indoctrination. Since I realized that, I now am willing to engage in frank dialogue with another person regarding their religious beliefs in much the same way as I would with a person I encountered who held repugnant racist ideologies, xenophobic politics, or a counterproductive political philosophy. So, I’ve always been an atheist but now I am “strident” about it because I’ve realized that religion is one of the things that exacerbates ‘normal’ conflict and therefore needs to be argued against.
mjr
United States

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/30/why-i-am-an-atheist-mjr/

Summary: Raised non-religious; became Atheist after learning how religion is politically useful; now is strident Atheist.

From PZ's Place, Frances, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-29T17:25:00.000-06:00

I can tell the story of my atheism in steps. It’s a bit of a revisionist history; now, when I look back, I can see that something had a huge impact on my life, that its repercussions influenced me in many ways. But at the time, I never thought of what happened as a step. Each day I felt like the same person as I was in the one before it. I never felt as though I had experienced any major change, or that I was a new person. The events I describe happened, and in this order, but as they were happening I didn’t think of them as significant.

In the third grade, I learned that there were other religions. This shocked me. As I had understood it, there was one god, and one word of god, and his word was the truth. The fact that there were other gods and other truths had eluded me until this point, and merely learning of their existence gave me some doubt. Why were there other religions? Why hadn’t god spoken to these other peoples like he spoke to Noah, or Moses? Why were their different Christianities? Suddenly, my childish notion of hell became far more upsetting. Before I had thought it a place for the people who did bad things; I assumed that they knew god’s commandments, and were thus knowingly defying their duty. To go to hell, one had to go about it intentionally, or so I thought. Suddenly, this wasn’t true. You could go to hell for believing in the wrong god, or for not even knowing that god existed. Intentions didn’t matter as much, only that you’d picked right. These ideas troubled me, but I couldn’t put them into words. In the end, I fell back on the idea that god loves everybody, so I must be missing something significant.

When I got to high school, I had been getting sexually harassed for two years already, and the boys in my year had also been touching me in ways I found uncomfortable, but during class. Their timing made my own studies more difficult, obviously, and it rendered me mute. I didn’t really know how to tell the teachers what was happening, and I didn’t know how to interrupt because frankly, I could hardly believe this was happening myself. So, the teacher would drone on, occasionally look at me, perhaps notice my discomfort, and proceed as if nothing was the matter. In the present I like to think that they also couldn’t understand what was happening, although I’m less sure of that.

In the first month of my freshman year, though, my best friend was raped. She later tried to kill herself. This was clearly more devastating for her than it was for me, and I only bring it up because it seemed very obvious to me as a result that rape was horrifying. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to help her, and she was just fading away. I have never seen anyone as unhappy as she was. I realized that what was happening to me was probably also bad – it had always made me feel awful, to clarify, I’d just never known that anyone else would think it was bad. I still didn’t talk about it, though. It was much less bad than what my friend had been through, and I now knew that if no one took her experience seriously, they probably would laugh at mine.

I wondered where god was in all this. Not in an angry, he-should-have-my-back sort of way, but in a literal way. I went to church every Sunday for my entire life, and as near as I can tell, god has no opinions at all on rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, or actually any of the issues women have to deal with. I knew the church was against abortion, premarital sex, and being gay (I was raised catholic in an area with lots of fundamentalists), but beyond that, there was literally no guidance. There were no ethics relating to this at all, or if there were, the priests were very tight-lipped about them. When my friend tried to go to the police, the school administration, anyone, she got no help. People thought she shouldn’t have been hanging around this guy, and she shouldn’t have had a beer beforehand. What did she think would happen, people demanded. And also he played sports and was a good student. Nobody seemed to consider her rape a problem, let alone an evil. At some point I concluded that if ‘thou shalt not rape’ hadn’t made god’s top ten list, god was wrong. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet become an atheist. I still believed in god, I just thought I’d been in the wrong religion. I left the catholic church, which may sound like a big change, but it didn’t actually feel like one at the time. I had simply compared what I believed to what the church believed, and found that we didn’t match up very well. I had never made the comparison before because I’d never been pushed to. Catholicism was part of my identity. I’d been confirmed, I’d confessed, and I truly believed in god. I had felt that my catholicism was something I’d earned and a part of who I was. I didn’t question it until then.

Thus began my mission to find a religion that didn’t hate women. Ideally, I hoped to find one in which women were equal to men. This, clearly, would be the one true religion, because it would address everyone’s needs, and it would have a god who loved everybody. I hoped it would have some answers for me, too. I do want to add that I considered science briefly as a possible recourse, but not too seriously. The popular image of science and scientists is pretty unfriendly to women, as is the history of science and women, and picking something that seemed to also dislike women would have gone against my goal. I wound up looking into neo-paganism and a bucketful of woo, these being the religions that were kindest to women. The trouble with this was that I couldn’t actually make myself believe that magick was real, or that ritual was important, or, well, much of any of it. Only a few months into this new religion I found myself unable to continue because I came to a really obvious conclusion. If I could just make religion up as I went along, if I could pick and choose as I saw fit, why did I think religion was real? By definition, making shit up is not the truth. This thought was immediately followed by a far more uncomfortable one: what if there is no god?

I couldn’t face that thought; it was completely devastating to me. It wasn’t just that that would mean I was essentially alone, or that there would never be any kind of justice in the next world, or even that there might not be any answers, then. These thoughts sucked, though. I was mostly horrified at the idea that this would be it. I’d never see my deceased grandparents again, I would only have access to what my body and mind could physically and mentally accomplish, and everything that I’d previously considered meaningful would simply vanish.

So, I didn’t face it. I went to college and I studied the humanities and social sciences. I hoped to learn more about what it meant to be human, and more specifically, how that related to what it meant to be a woman (I’d gotten the notion that people thought they were two different things, go figure). Somehow between learning statistics and learning about how anthropologists conduct field research, I started to realize that nothing had actually changed. If there wasn’t a god, there had never been a god. That would mean that my life had been deep and meaningful to me for other reasons. It was still deep and meaningful.

I started learning about how scientists looked for the truth, and how social scientists looked for the truth, and I became quite taken with the scientific method. I graduated, read The Demon-Haunted World, became aware of feminism, and just kept thinking and reading. Finally, when I was 26, I reapproached the question of god. It didn’t hurt anymore, and I found I could give it serious thought.

Truth is no longer something I have to believe in, it is something I can see and study. Doubt isn’t a character flaw anymore, and neither is not knowing the answer. I realized that there was no reason to believe in god, that everything I’d attributed to him in my wonder is explainable through evolution, the movement of glaciers long ago, the tilt of the Earth on its axis, and other natural phenomena. And, even more surprisingly, that these natural phenomena are even more wondrous than god was. The strange gaps in god’s commands regarding modern issues, his obliviousness about rape, and his really strange dislike of certain foods were more easily explainable when I realized that there probably wasn’t a god. The idea of a god doesn’t explain anything, actually, and in fact raises many uncomfortable questions. Especially if you are a woman. It also turns out that feminism and atheism go together really well.

So, as you can (hopefully) see, this is a story about how I didn’t actually change that much at all; I only changed how I thought.

Frances

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/29/why-i-am-an-athiest-frances/

Summary: Originally Catholic; was molested in school and best friend was raped with no help from persons of authority. God had no opinion on rape, no help for modern problems; religion not friendly to women; wanted equality; over time developed Scientism and had no need for God to explain universe. Found Atheism and Feminism go together.

Free Will, Agency, Self, Life: Part 4

2012-01-28T23:51:00.000-06:00

Part 4: Is the Argument For Free Will Grounded? Is it coherent?

We have determined that the argument for Free Will is neither circular nor is it an infinite regression. And in fact the argument against regression came down to the assertion that the concept of Free Will qualifies as an axiom, because the contrary of Free Will reduces to universal delusion.

So the prior argument concerning infinite regression answers this question too: the argument is grounded in an axiom.

Being grounded in an axiom presents another solution, too: the argument is not non-coherent. It becomes a tautology:

IF [Free Will exists axiomatically], Then [Free Will exists].

So far we have determined that the argument for Free Will is a valid syllogism, that it is neither circular nor an infinite regression, that it is grounded, axiomatically, and that it is not internally non-coherent.

All objections and corrections welcome

From PZ's Place, Joseph Bloch, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-28T23:28:00.001-06:00

While I have always deep down been skeptical of the reality of gods and spirits, I spent much of the last twenty years of my life as a self-described pagan of one sort or another. Every so often, my own internal sense of self-deception would go off, and I would renounce the frippery of gods and magic and so forth, only to come back again. Why? The strongest thing religion– whether it be monotheistic or polytheistic– has going for it is a built-in social support mechanism. It makes life incredibly easy in the sense that one doesn’t need to go out and find emotional, social, or other forms of support. It’s there, with plenty of people who will accept you and praise you and call you “brother” for precisely no other reason than because you happen to be on the same arbitrary “belief team” they are. It is incredibly difficult to consciously remove oneself from that sort of supportive system.

I am an atheist because I have finally realized that wanting to believe something is not enough. I need to embrace that which I really do believe and make do with the consequences of that belief.
Joseph Bloch
United States

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/28/why-i-am-an-atheist-joseph-bloch/

Summary: Always skeptical and self described pagan for 20 years, but liked the religious social support system; now apparently has rejected religion and is accepting the consequences of what he really does believe (Atheism).

From PZ's Place, Sarah Otto Marxhausen, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-28T23:25:00.001-06:00

I became an atheist for incredibly stupid reasons. To be fair, I was ten years old.

As soon as I started reading well at about age four, my parents started throwing books at me. Anything I showed the slightest interest in, I was allowed to read, and I tore through everything. When I was nine, I was given a huge ton of books to call my own after a family friend died and everyone decided that a lot of his books were appropriate for me. It was the complete Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, plus some of the Lang fairy books, plus a lot of books about mythology:Greek, Norse, etc.

I read them passionately; I still believe to this day that a lot of those fairy tales are really genuinely cool stories. My family is and was very religious — my father is a minister — and so I was also well-versed in Christian mythology. I slowly started realizing that the supernatural forces in the stories I was reading were gods just like the god I went to church every Sunday for. And, honestly, a lot of the things the Christian god did were nowhere near as awesome or interesting as the things the non-Christian gods did. And since they were all gods, and worshipping god was the important thing . . .

I took what to me was the most logical step, and made up my own religion. One with really fucking awesome gods. I don’t really want to describe it, because it’s really deeply embarrassing now, as are most “profound” decisions that you make when you’re ten years old. They were awesome at the time, okay?

The important thing was that I was faithful. I made up my own rituals and obesiances, and followed them piously. I prayed to and thought about my religion all the time. I prayed – begged, really – for specific things to happen, and none of my prayers were ever answered, no matter how hard I believed or how rigorously I followed the ritual I’d created. I eventually came to the decision that my religion was obviously false, because it showed no results. And if my religion, with its incredibly awesome gods that was much better than Christianity, was false, then probably all religion was false. So I began atheism while sulking prepubescently about not having my prayers answered.

I did say it was a stupid reason.

I clung to that reason, though, through adolescence; in retrospect, I’d say I believed a good and true thing for stupid and awful reasons. Which, you know, happens a lot, maybe for most people, so I’m not beating myself up over it too much. But because I was already invested in the belief, I started to read about atheism in high school. Everything was so incredibly interesting — Christian theology is, in a lot of ways, like a long string of logic puzzles — that I got hooked. I became so deeply invested in those puzzles that I eventually got a BA in philosophy at a small religious university that specializes in theology and basketball. I got four years of theology classes there, too, and they simultaneously provided me with pleasure in giving me new logic puzzles to worry at, and distressed me because they also provided me with very loud classmates who would declare indignantly that it was wrong to question the Bible. Those courses also gave me good reasons to stay an atheist. Those logic puzzles almost inevitably worked out to disfavor the supernatural, and those theology courses that were intended to teach me about religion as a social force for good ultimately taught me a lot about how religion can be used as a bludgeon. I believe now the same thing I believed when I was ten – both versions of me are atheists – but now I have better reasons.

I have a very good theological education, and I don’t regret a minute of what I learned, even though some of what I learned was hard — particularly the parts where I was informed by classmates that I will never be anything but an godless dyke cunt because of my gender, my sexual preferences, and my religious beliefs. (They would, of course, never say those awful words, but it was … made clear. ) The unconditional love of my religious parents in no way prepared me for the way that other people would judge, and sometimes abuse me because I was unapologetic about having learned that religion was fiction.

I’m working on a PhD now in English literature (because that’s where the real money is, har, har). I’m starting to hate the process of academia, but I still love the work of unpacking texts. It’s a gorgeous exercise, to me, working with fiction; it means we, meaning those in the profession, are looking at lies to see how much truth we can get out of them. It’s sort of a game, a social joke, a logic puzzle. Knowing a lot about Christianity — about, in fact, all mythologies — is an immense gift for what I do. It is intensely frustrating, as an atheist, to teach a classroom full of undergraduates who mostly identify as Christian, but who are so deeply ignorant about the Bible that they cannot understand literary references to it. I can grudgingly accept that I have to explain the Trojan War so students can understand Yeats’ poems, but I get very angry when I have to explain, for example, the book of Job so people can understand TS Eliot to a room full of people who say they’re faithful Christians. They are prepared to believe in their religion no matter what, but most of them do not understand what it is they’re swearing fealty to.

Ultimately, I am an atheist because my lovely, loving, faithful Christian parents let me learn too much. When I asked questions they didn’t know the answer to, they would say, “I don’t know. Why don’t you go see if you can learn the answer?” And I would — sometimes poorly, but I would try to track it down. They are wonderful, loving people, and loving them has taught me that just because you think someone is wrong does not have to mean that you think they’re stupid. My parents are not stupid people, and they taught me to be curious and demanding in how I interpret the world, which I think makes them incredible parents. I am proud to say that they are such good and responsible parents that they helped make me an atheist.

Sarah Otto Marxhausen
United States

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/28/why-i-am-an-atheist-sarah-otto-marxhausen/

Summary: Christian background; read and “learned too much”; Atheist at 10 (created her own religion); religious people are judgmental of her lesbianism; religion is a logic puzzle which rarely favors the supernatural.

From PZ's Place, Jesse Stapleton, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-26T16:22:00.000-06:00

It sure seems like it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in a family with ties to the religion stretching back multiple generations on both my father and mother’s side. Any religion, if it is to survive, has to retain members; and it would seem that my family has historically been rather susceptible to the allures of this one rather peculiar vein of Christianity.

Growing up in central Georgia I was aware of this lineage. I have family stretching all the way from Portland, Maine to Tampa, Florida (a veritable seaboard of piety), and the expectation to carry on in the religion of my upbringing was obviously implied. So, I dutifully carried out that which was expected of me. I studied the bible, using the conveniently provided study materials printed by the Witness’s controlling organization The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society; I participated in the preaching work; and I shied away from forming close friendships with those outside of the congregation. I didn’t actually visit the home of a non-Witness friend until I was in High School (Ah! Now THAT got your attention!).

My immediate family had its collective faith shaken by the divorce of my parents when I was at the tail end of Middle School. He was disfellowshipped (a shunning practice similar to excommunication) shortly prior to this and the rest of us tried to continue on, drawn together by the camaraderie inherent in organized religion. One of the teachings of the religion is that a Witness should not form personal relationships with nonbelievers (read: Non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, not simply non-Christians). Moreover, a Witness should not have any dealings at all with a disfellowshipped or ex-Jehovah’s Witness. This posed a problem: my father was disfellowshipped, but he was also my father.

The leaders in the congregation will usually try to ignore this rule as it relates to children and their parents, terming it a matter of conscience between yourself and God. But the expectation is that you will drift away from your unrepentant parent as you get older. It was obvious that my father was finished with the Witnesses, and I had some decisions to make. I was 14 and my family was the congregation. I started to work towards getting baptized. (I should mention two things: I never actually stopped associating with my dad during this time, although I certainly saw less of him and felt awkward being around him at points; and baptism for the Witnesses is a personal choice taken on after learning the teachings instead of a ceremony performed shortly after birth.)

Another thing that began to happen at this same time relates to another important part of my life. I’ve always been interested in science and I would pour my heart into science projects at school. Of course, science and religion don’t usually get along, especially as you delve into the deeper sciences. Evolution was one of these sticking points. Want to know how I dealt with it? Simple, I ignored it! But it made a damn sight more sense than the creation myth, so I kind of ignored Genesis too. Fortunately the Witnesses don’t teach a literal 7 day creation so I didn’t have to deal with young earth hogwash. I eventually settled on God using evolution as a means of creation, but this too was technically against the teachings of the congregation. I decided on this in early High School, 18 months or so before I was baptized. It was the first time I really questioned a tenant of the faith; a change that would sit dormant for a few more years, waiting for the right catalyst.

It was also during the first two years of High School that I started developing closer friendships with my classmates. I had discovered friends! And girls! And girls who were also friends! Yes, I was a little late to the party, but I was dealing with a strange religion on top of the usual powder keg of teenage emotions. Yes, the religion was beginning to appear strange even to me.

So, my three sins were thus: I doubted the teaching of absolute shunning based on my desire to continue associating with my father, I doubted the creation myth based on scientific evidence, and I desired to have fun with people my age who weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses because I was human. Make no doubt, I was still the awkward kid and a total flake but I honestly was trying. Still, during all of this I was working toward being baptized. Eventually, I was, late in my Sophomore year of High School.

So the stage was set, I was now a baptized member of the Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. My “three sins” weighed upon me, but they were never something I received council from the congregation on, much less a reprimand. I had began to keep my personal life separate from my spiritual life. That distinction would have been alarming to my brothers and sisters in faith back then. I was essentially leading a quiet double life. Never once did I do anything elicit, I never even broke the tenants of the faith in my personal life, but the gap between the two sides of myself slowly widened in my mind. I began to realize that getting baptized had really been a last ditch effort to jumpstart my own faith. I asked myself an important question, “Why did I get baptized, and what does it really mean to me?” My answer? “I don’t know.”

I slowed and eventually stopped going to congregation meetings, though I would still go to the larger assemblies and conventions and to special events like The Memorial (a yearly celebration of the Lord’s Evening Meal, as outlined in the Gospels). Finally, it all came to a head right after Senior Prom. I stayed at a friend’s house with a group of my favorite geeks that night. Through an interesting fluke, that next day after prom was the Sunday of the “special talk”, given a month or so after The Memorial. I was having fun playing video games and hanging out with my friends when my mom called to remind me about the special talk. I tried my best to avoid going, but eventually relented.

I rushed home, threw on a suit and tie, and just made the opening prayer. I sat in the back and felt, for the first time, total alienation from the words being spoken on stage. I saw the faces of those I knew and loved sitting around me; my family and friends, the Elders who had helped me prepare for baptism, all my brothers and sisters in the faith. I felt that I and all those sitting around me had been deceived. This wasn’t the true religion. Furthermore, was there really a true religion? Was there a God? This time my answer was different, it was, “I don’t think there is.” The realization was swift, the two hours sitting there at the special talk in 2006 were my catalyst. I told my mom about my decision later that day. She broke down into tears, she even prayed with me, tried to study with me. She would later develop doubts of her own.

I told my best friend at the time at school the next day that I was done with the Witnesses. She was ecstatic. She told me what her mother had said upon seeing me fly out of her house the day before, on my way to the special talk. She’d remarked that it was surprising to see someone my age with strong enough faith to always make it to church. What irony!

I graduated High School and went to College. I studied art and humanities, taking time to look around for another religion that might fit me better. I never did. I was an Atheist from that moment at the special talk, even if it took me a little while to figure it out. I started reading Dawkins and Pharyngula along with anything else I could get my hands on. My love for science has been thoroughly rekindled after spending some time away from it. The awe and wonder that I never really experienced with faith now plays fiddle to every waking hour of every day.

My brother is also an atheist, although we took separate paths to get there. I spent twenty minutes on the phone with my dad while writing this. He is a deist, still believing in God but with his own ideas. My mom is somewhere in between, she doesn’t go to meetings any more, but she hasn’t given up her belief in God. I still get along well with my family, although I’m careful not to rock the boat too much when I’m around them. Admittedly, I took the easy way out chosen by many ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses: I simply stopped going. I could officially denounce the congregation, but that wouldn’t accomplish much. Those that still associate with me would be forced to stop, and I refuse to let the strangle of religion take anything else away from me.

So, why am I an atheist? Because my three sins weren’t actually sins after all.
Jesse Stapleton
United States

Summary: Raised Jehovah’s Witness; struggled with belief until circa high school graduation when he rejected the Witnesses (2006); loves science; influenced by Dawkins, PZ.

From PZ's Place, DJJ, Canada, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-26T16:07:00.000-06:00

At first, I was an atheist as a sort of default state. No one had told me to be otherwise. The idea of a god or gods had not been given to me, and was not in any sort of even semi-clear form for quite some time. I do not recall when I finally was exposed to this idea.

I remember watching the Peanuts Christmas Special and being kind of confused as to what the heck Linus was talking about as he explained Christmas to the rest of the cast. So far as I was concerned, Christmas was a time to hang around with the extended family, eat delicious things, and exchange presents. What he was saying seemed like a fairy tale.

Speaking of extended family, a number of them displayed strange things in their homes. In the main floor bathroom of one set of grandparents was a depiction of the ten commandments. I didn’t know the context for it for quite some time. I didn’t ask. Some of them seemed like common sense, some of them I did not really understand for a while. I was a shy child, you understand, and tended to let people tell me what they thought was important when they chose to do so, at least at that phase of life.

Insofar as I got a clear idea about religion from my parents, my mother gave me a general sort of contempt for people using it as a reason to be complete dicks to eachother, and this may have led to me thinking the whole business was a little silly. I tended to be quiet and let people assume I was one of them. Churches were weird places to me. There was a sense of cameraderie and belonging there, certainly, and some of the singing was nice, but the words slowly felt creepier and creepier. I wondered if there were things that people were not telling me that made the whole busines smake sense, and may have been waiting for it to come up on its own.

When I moved out of my parents’ lair and in with some friends, a few hundred miles away, I accompanied said friends to the church they attended for a while, and this was pleasant enough. The strangeness began to creep back in, though, and between a Bible study session at which asking if we had some more support for this (as opposed to letting a source confirm itself, which seemed questionable at best) got me some unwelcome looks, and a guest speaker who seemed to be rejecting conclusions based upon observation as somehow not impressive enough for him, I stopped going.

Faith was becoming my problem with the whole business. The more I learned, the less I wanted anything to do with it. Just accept sometthing without support? How could a person learn anything of any use that way? Bad ideas could never be rejected, and new ones never accepted if one just accepted what one was told first without question. Mystery was not beauty, mystery was a huge target to anyone with an appetite for knowledge, and I very much counted myself in that group.

Since then, friends have tried to mend what they saw as a broken relationship with God, but missed the point. I do not hate God, I just don’t think he’s there. I’m not closed to the possibility, but neither will I accept it without rigorous examination, and have yet to find an argument for theism that is at all convincing.
Theists are welcome to keep trying, but I can’t say I think much of their chances.
DJJ
Canada

Summary: Raised Atheist, needs support for assertions – presumably empirical, not closed to God, but has not found convincing argument.

Free Will, Agency, Self, Life: Part 3

2012-01-26T15:47:00.000-06:00

Part 3: Is Free Will an Infinite Regression?

There are several arguments running around which propose that Free Will involves an infinite regression. One argument proposes that before one can choose the next thought, then he would have to be able to choose to choose the next thought, and to choose to choose to choose the next thought, ad infinitum, which leads to the absurdity of an infinite regression. Do we actually choose the next thought? Is it a choice made between a number of possible next thoughts? Or do we develop the next thought as a step in the progression of our thought process currently underway? It is much more likely that we develop each thought either independently or as a step in a progression of thoughts. This is a singular step, not an infinite regression. It is not necessary to think that we choose between possible next thoughts, and that concept certainly does not guarantee that an infinite regression is a necessary part of Free Will.

In terms of decisions, it is said that we must “decide to decide”, or “decide to decide to decide”, ad infinitum. Under this proposition, it is said that no control is possible since it is necessary to invoke an infinite regression just make a single decision. But again, it is more parsimonious to invoke “development”: we develop a decision after finding that a decision is necessary. It is not necessary to think that we must decide to decide, and that concept is no guarantee that an infinite regression is a necessary part of Free Will.

The idea of an infinite regression is commonly applied to the issue of verification of the premises within an argument. Premises cannot be valid if they are circular, or if they refer to an infinite regression of sub-premises that cannot be grounded in known axiomatic truths.

For a proposition to have truth value, its premises must have truth value. In the following (valid form) proposition, there are two truth claims:

P1: IF [X], Then [Y] < First truth claim.

P2: [X] < Second truth claim.

C: [C] < inevitable conclusion, IFF the two truth claims are, in fact, true.

Our Free Will proposition has these elements:

X = conditions surrounding free will (superset):
(a) free from restraints;
(b) free from compulsions;
(c) free from antecedent conditions.

Y = proposed implication of X (subset of X): Free Will.

We have already established that it is possible for the conditions named in X to exist. But does X actually imply (=>) Y?

Because it is a definition, then it is tautologically true. But do we want to sit on that level, or should we validate that somehow?

Validation
In order to validate the argument for Free Will, it must be shown that human will exists, and that it is a subset of the freedoms listed, hence it is Free Will.

(a) Human will is observable, as is human agency. Both will and agency are empirically sound concepts. Will and agency are either axiomatic, in the sense that the universe would be much different if there is no will or agency and everything were in fact deterministically causal, or they are false, leading to philosophical acceptance of total universal delusion.

Determinism is a concept which goes against human observations, and which requires the extraordinary proof which Sagan extolled. The discussion of determinism as opposed to observation of human Free Will is discussed below, where axioms are considered.

Delusion is not an acceptable premise in logic statements. Why would arguments which premise delusion be acceptable as explanations of what is? The case for delusion is anti-empirical; it asks us to accept that our observations are delusions merely in order to salvage a particular theory.

Especially logically egregious is when the delusion being posited negates truth values, even that of its own posit of delusion (internally non-coherence). The case for delusion is internally contradictory and its internal confliction is fatal for any use in a logical argument. However, it is possible to accept delusion for oneself and not subscribe to logic at all because of one’s acknowledged delusion. That eliminates the argument altogether for that one arguer, and him only, because under delusion no premise can be validated.

There is no valid reason to accept universal delusion (avoidance of empirical observations) as a valid premise in logical arguments.

(b) IF [asserted human will is observable], THEN [at least some humans are free to assert it].

This argument, being based on either an axiom or a false statement, is either True, or it is meaningless in the sense that humans are deluded and can know the truth value of nothing: everything is meaningless. The delusion argument is discussed just above. The question here is whether the observability of human will makes it axiomatic.

Axioms are undeniable, incorrigible truth statements that are apparent upon their presentation, or are apparent upon addressing the contrary to the statement. The contrary to the existence of human free will is human enslaved determinism. This is a true dilemma, being binary and without degrees; either human free will exists, or it does not.

In order for human Free Will to be an axiom, the falsity of its converse must be readily apparent and undeniable. Is human enslaved determinism the actual state of humanity? In order for us to accept this as the actual state, we must also accept some of the consequences of this premise.

First, in a universe of total human enslaved determinism, every concept would be predetermined and deterministic (fully causal) clear back to the origin of the universe. Given enough computer power, every thought could be perfectly predicted based on prior causes. This would lead to sub-premises, such as that consciousness is not necessary for any interface with the physical world; there is no need to think a thought, because there is no originality possible since every thought is predetermined causally. The flow of human existence and endeavor is inexorable and unchangeable, to the last detail.

But even more interestingly it leads to the negation of all theories; those thoughts are not original either, and being totally predetermined, there is no reason to think that they have knowledge value for humans, much less truth value. Since all thoughts are totally causal and predetermined, there is no reason to think that logic is an actual discipline or valid in any respect; it is more likely that that our thoughts are valueless (and delusional).

Being in possession of only valueless or delusional thoughts, our experience of human accomplishments, sky scrapers, helicopters, radiated information, mass manufacturing of toilets, and the acquiring of humans seeking power over other humans, etc, is either a delusion, or it occurred inevitably as a natural progression of predetermined causation going back to the origin of the universe, with no chance of personal interference due to will.

What would cause us to believe this view of the human experience, as opposed to that view which is actually very easily observed, empirically? Again, delusion comes into play: must we accept that we are deluded, with no control in actuality? According to what is easily and commonly observed, the existence of human Free Will is axiomatic.

Being axiomatic, the concept is not an infinite regression of premises.

Invalidation
In order to invalidate, it must be shown empirically that either (a) human will does not exist, or (b) that human will is negated by some other universal constraint which prohibits it from having any freedom, contrary to observation, and (c) that humans are in fact deluded, and (d) that either the appearance of will is false, or that some other non-human agent is the cause of the creations which we observe.

For attempts to empirically demonstrate that human Free Will is a non-valid concept, it must be recognized that empiricism itself must first be proven valid in the absence of human Free Will.

Causal chains going back at least to the electron level will need to be verified, specifically and empirically.

Not allowed under Sagan’s condition of “extraordinary evidence” are speculations, story telling, extrapolations, or any form of Scientism. Only actual empirical evidence need apply.

That will take some doing.

Free Will, Agency, Self, and Life, part 2

2012-01-25T12:36:00.000-06:00

Part 2. Is The Argument For Free Will Circular?
Circularity occurs when the conclusion of an argument is declared to be true in the premises used for arguing its truth:

"p1 => p2 => p3 => ... => pn => p1"
Fallacy Files

One wag submitted the following doggerel as proof that Free Will is a circular concept:

”Due to circumstances beyond my control,

I am captain of my fate and master of my soul."

The first part appears, on first glance, to contradict the second part. But it actually doesn’t relate to the second part, because the first phrase addresses the acquisition of X, while the second phrase addresses the consequence of the possession of X. For example, I had no part in the acquisition of my hands, but I can use my hands for my own purposes. There is no circularity nor contradiction in this particular attempt to falsify Free Will. It is not actually an argument against Free Will at all.

Now, what of our own proposition?

”Free will: The human will, regarded as free from restraints, compulsions, or any antecedent conditions; freedom of decision or choice.”

Restated syllogistically,

P1. IF [there exists “the human will, regarded as free from restraints, compulsions, or any antecedent conditions”],
OR [there exists freedom of decision or choice],
THEN [Free will exists].

P2. [there exists human will, regarded as free from restraints, compulsions, or any antecedent conditions].

C. THEREFORE: [Free Will exists].

The question here is not whether the syllogism has any truth value; the question is whether the syllogism is circular.

To be circular, the conclusion must be in the premises: For example,

If [X], then [Y];
[X];
[X].

Or,

Because [X], then [Y];
[Y];
[X].

Example:

P1: Because [Philosophical Materialism is true], then [the mind is the brain];
P2: [The mind is the brain],
C: Therefore, [Philosophical Materialism is True.]

In the Free Will syllogism above, the form is as follows:

If [X or Z], then [Y];
[X];
[Y].

This form is a normal syllogistic structure; there is no circularity.

Again, whether it is True as well as well remains to be determined.

Free will, Agency, Self, and Life

2012-01-24T19:48:00.000-06:00

Part 1. Definitions

It is always necessary to clarify the meanings of terms before using them in propositions.

We can start here by arguing about the following definitions. After a certain amount of arguing, I will assert a final meaning and we will move on, using that meaning in the arguments. After that, any deviation from the defined meaning will need a modifier attached to the word to explain the deviation. Our definitions will start with Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary definitions, unless and until the need to refine them is obviously necessary.

FREE WILL

Free Will, it is claimed by some, is without meaning, an empty concept. That apparently is because the claimant has already decided that it does not exist. But that assertion will need proof, we will see. Others have claimed an inability to understand the concept, whatever it is; those will have to step aside until they figure it out.

free will 1. The human will, regarded as free from restraints, compulsions, or any antecedent conditions; freedom of decision or choice.
2. The doctrine that people have this; opposed to determinism
Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary; Second ed; 1979.

Arguments will be anticipated concerning the additional definitions of “restraint”; “compulsion”; “antecedent conditions”, and the meaning of “freedom”. Perhaps it might help to look at plato.stanford for additional resolution to the definition.

”’Free Will’ is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

For our purposes we will grant that there are some constraints, certainly those of our abilities, our environment, our genetic endowment. But these do not eliminate the ability to choose to go to an ice cream store, choose not to buy anything, and choose to leave after robbing it.

Or, for example, our inability to fly by flapping our ears does not preclude our invention of the helicopter to enable our desire to fly. So constraints exist but are not fatal to the existence of free will.

We might be afflicted with compulsions. But not all of us would have the same compulsions and a compulsion afflicting the ability of one person would not necessarily inhibit the abilities of another person. Compulsion is not fatal to the existence of free will.

The term, “antecedent conditions”, needs additional resolution in order to determine which conditions are in play, and whether the individual is entirely captive of those conditions, or whether they influence but do not determine the individual’s choices and actions. For our purposes here we will grant that antecedent conditions influence, without fully determining the decisions and choices which an individual makes. This will obviously be in contention; but it is in no manner a definition of the human condition that a person’s choices and actions are fully determined by antecedent conditions.

AGENCY

a’ gent, n 1. One who performs actions, exerts power, or has the power to act; as, a moral agent.
2. an active power or force; that which has the power to produce an effect; as, heat is a powerful agent.

For purposes of human agency, we will use the concept of human causation of effects, those effects being outside the expected causation of the known four physical forces. The example of the invention of helicopters serves again. All the elements of a helicopter are material, and respond to the four physical forces; it is the invention of the helicopter, and its manufacture and implementation which is not an expectation of the four forces, working alone. An additional agent has been added.

SELF

There is currently a school of denial which asserts that there is no self, that what we think of as “me”, is just a combination of belief systems and memories and other mental constructs. However, it is possible to think of those things as components of “mind”, so for our purposes here, the self will be congruent with “mind”. When the concept of “mind” is challenged, we will deal with that independently.

LIFE

There is also a school of thought that the concept of life is meaningless, that the essence of life is merely the possession of DNA, which fully describes the thing which has it. This ignores that dead carcasses also have DNA, and that living things do have characteristics which non-living things do not, a few of which are to take in nutrients and expel waste, adapt to surroundings and to reproduce their kind. There is an acknowledgement of such in evolutionary circles, where the concept of life coming only from other life is necessary for the common ancestor theory.

For our purposes here we will take “life” to mean human life with the attributes of mind, self, agency and free will, until shown conclusively otherwise.

From PZ's Place,Cliffman, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-24T18:12:00.000-06:00

First, a complete lack of religious experience – I’ve never heard the voices of angels, nor felt the hand of the god upon me. Had a brief time in Sunday school as a child, but the stories never made any sense to me. Had people dear to me die in my presence, never felt any spirits wandering about.
Second, a good education. I’ve always preferred the explanations provided by science.

Third, reading the news, and reading history. I think the existence of the Pope pretty well proves the non-existence of the christian god, at least the biblical version.

And finally, my life is complete and happy without talking sky fairies.
cliffman

Summary: Brief time in Sunday School; no religious “experience”; no ghosts; Scientism; “news and history”; IF Pope, THEN no Christian God, biblical version. No sky fairies.

Free Will, Agency, Self, Life

2012-01-24T15:16:00.000-06:00

I will be starting a series on Free Will and Agency this week. It will have a structure something like (but not necessarily identical with) this outline:

1. Definitions.

2. Is the argument for Free Will circular?

3. Is the argument for Free Will an infinite regression?

4. Is the argument for Free Will grounded?

4. Delay, Delusion, Libet, and fMRI. Delusion as a premise in deduction.

5. The brain as a meat machine.

6. Free Will and Agency as subjects for empirical study; falsifiability as a criterion.

7. Determinism as slavery / automatonism, vs. Free Will as slavery to culture / environment.

8. Will and patterns.

9. Free Will vs. physics and determinism.

10. Free Will as pure behavior.

11. Partial Free Will.

12. Free Will as Essentialist axiom.

13. Pure Skepticism and Miscellaneous objections to Free Will, agency, self, and life arguments.

14. Who Owns You?

If Free Will and agency exist in the essence of being human, then that fact is fatal to both Philosophical Materialism and Atheism. In order to preserve the integrity of their belief system, Materialists and Atheists must somehow defeat the common concepts of Free Will and agency, not to mention self and life. When dealing with pure Atheism, their tendency is toward denialism without any material support. What is the evidentiary case against Free Will and agency? Can the deniers produce empirical evidence for their claims? What sort of evidence do they have? How clean and directly related to Free Will is it?

If the anti-Free Will case is purely one of logic, how coherent is it? If the anti-Free Will case is purely ideological, then why bother with it?

I hope for a robust participation in discussing these concepts.

From PZ's Place, Fred Young, China and USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-23T14:52:00.000-06:00

If you throw this question out in China, “why are you an atheist?” in most cases it will be taken as a joke. This is also perhaps the only thing that the communist Party has done right to this country, that is, to seed a strong scientific spirit in China’s education system, but which doesn’t by any means excuse its brainwashing of Chinese students with Marxism and Maoism. Sadly rumor has it that Christianity is growing rampantly in China, which I suppose is due in large part to the fact that the majority of Chinese are suffering, a topic that I should spare for the thesis here. Had I grown up in a religious environment, I barely think I could break free from this sort of ideological slavery. For this reason, I always keep an extra piece of respect for the atheists in western countries, now and in history.

I came to the States three years ago as a newly college graduate, with a thirst for higher education from American universities, something I had always been dreaming of attending. My first stop was the University of Minnesota, which really didn’t disappoint me with its strong research background. In retrospective, what was sort of disappointing was that University of Minnesota is in Minnesota, a place filled with “harassing” Christians of assorted denominations.

My first clue was the ceaseless invitations from numerous churches to participate in their friendship meals. Considering that China has gone not too far away from its once massive poverty, enticing Chinese students with food is indeed a good strategy. I myself fell for many times, but every time I had to eat with prayers and preaching, which indeed undermined the flavor of the already-not-as-good-as-Chinese American food. There were some other churches taking a less confrontational way. They formed “volunteer” organizations to help Chinese students in settling down such as airport pickup and provision of free furniture, but none of their activities didn’t wind up with Jesus.

Believe it or not, back then I was not as of new atheism as I am today. For one thing, I had never heard of PZ Myzer. Candidly, I had no inkling what was really going on in Christianity, although I might have been under a vague—but, of course, illusorily mistaken—impression that Christianity leads Americans to behave. As a person (a to-be scientist!) curious about almost everything, I couldn’t help but explore the intriguing question “in such an era in which almost everything can be reasonably explained by science, why people are still believing in nonsense?”

I thereby accepted many of those invitations—again, partly for the meals. I went to church on an almost weekly basis, which perhaps outperformed most Christian peers, and I attended quite a few bible studies. My best friend was an American Lutheran, who doubted evolution because scientists haven’t figured out the origin of life yet, which, translated in our words, means because evolution conflicts with the literal version of Bible. And I even had an American grandpa, who was, to cite his own words, “still open about whether the earth is 6,000 thousand years old or billions,” under which circumstance, I rarely bothered to spell out the number 4.6.

Looking back, along the years of intensive interactions with Christianity, I did grow in my knowledge of what a thing it really is, thanks to both the repulsive content of their holy book and, more importantly, all the speeches, debates, blogs, books by those outspoken, heroic atheists whose names are too familiar to be mentioned here. It may sound a bit implausible that a person from the far East has joined in this New Atheism movement, but I did turned from a mere listener to now a brave—brave in the sense of in a foreign country—refuter whenever I hear nonsensical religious ramblings.

I am an atheist partly because of the environment in which I grew up, but more because of the fact that, even though physicists haven’t figured out how the universe begun, posing creators does not answer any questions whatsoever, let alone a monstrous one as the Judeo-Christian god.

More excitedly, atheism has become such an important part of my life. I will continue combating religious doctrines, as should all atheists, for protecting our lovely and innocent kids. My resolve has been especially reinforced upon seeing Hitchens’s special care for a nice-year-olds in this latest reception of the Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year Award. The contrast between the dying hero and his attempt to list suitable reading material for a thriving young mind is exceedingly heartwarming and stimulating.

I could go on and on, but let me stop here. One last point, let us atheists help those personal faiths be kept personal.
Fred Young
China and United States
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/17/why-i-am-an-atheist-fred-young/

Summary: China/USA; never religious; Atheist because of Atheist environment of his youth, Scientism, and evilGod.

From PZ's Place, Hazuki Azuma, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-23T14:49:00.000-06:00

Before anything else, let’s get some definitions nailed down first: I call myself atheist, but it’s only in the weakest sense of the word, and nearly anyone who doesn’t understand the orthogonal nature of atheism (belief claim) versus agnosticism (knowledge claim) would call me an agnostic. That is, while I have no specific God-belief, I also don’t claim positively that there are no Gods, no way, no how, no where, no sir. Formal or dogmatic atheism of this sort is at best unfalsifiable and at worst immediately self-refuting; even the Catholic Encyclopedia gets that much right.

With that said, here is my background: raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, I am the oldest of three siblings, with a sister and a brother at 2 and 6 years younger respectively. All three of us went to CCD, but it seems like I was the only one it took hold of; my brother could best be described as “ignostic” and my sister is, sad to say, the living embodiment of every negative atheist stereotype on the planet. I mean it. She has no philosophical background, almost no knowledge of the history or mythology around any religion, and zero grounding in logic. Her entire argument can be summed up as “Religions people do stupid things, therefore all religion is wrong and there is no God, homie.” My parents, as you might expect, are extremely cavalier about their supposed beliefs, and I think it’s fair to call them Deists.

Unfortunately, the CCD program I went to was run by a bunch of hellfire and brimstone charismatic Catholics, and I personally got fire and brimstone pounded into me from a very young age. I believe this was responsible for a lifetime of panic disorder, OCD, anxiety, depression, and schizoid symptoms. It only got worse when I discovered (well, admitted to myself more like) that I was a lesbian around age 16, though the signs had been there since early junior high. Luckily, though, I had stumbled on either Deism or “liberal” Christianity without knowing it, and simply lived like my parents for a long time.

That changed around 2008, which was the start of a still-ongoing series of kafkaesque, frightening events which have so far lost me everything from jobs to a long-time lover to…well, if my parents hadn’t let me move back home I’d be dead dozens of times over. In April 2009, having had brushes with insanity, homeless, and death (and not in this order), the floodgates opened and I found myself in the middle of a perpetual religiously-fueled nervous breakdown. This is the sort of thing former fundamentalists usually describe: constant shakes, oppressive fear of hellfire, feeling as if some huge, angry deity has it out for you, and so forth. This led to over 2 and a half years of obsessive and unhealthy research into the origins of the Abrahamic religions, much study of Biblical languages and text criticism, and archaeology. The result is that most people think a) I have a Master’s in religious studies and b) I’m in the throes of terminal caffeine poisoning.

These have not been good years. My resting heart rate and blood pressure have spiked, I lost a lover of almost 4 years largely due to her inability to handle the panic, and in general I feel as if all my axons have been sandblasted. I am afraid of everything. But, thanks largely to people like Richard Carrier and Dan Dennett, I’m escaping the Abrahamic religions. I still have some residual fears left over, and forget what I learned when sleep-deprived or panicked. But progress is being made.

As to why I’m an agnostic-atheist specifically: evidence. Not just lack of evidence for certain propositions, but anti-evidence against them. I tend to play devil’s advocate (angel’s advocate?) for any position I oppose, as a way of keeping honest; yet despite that, no apologist from Craig to Bahnsen to van Til to Aquinas to Anselm to Bultmann has been able to offer competent theodicy and apologetics. Science has disproven the major tenets of the Abrahamic faiths. Bob Price and Richard Carrier have done stunning work in revealing the seeds of Christianity in Judaic thought (cf. “Not the Impossible Faith”) and while I am not a mythicist I agree with much of their scholarship. Quiet, softly-powerful Dan Dennet introduced me to philosophy, and Dan Fincke (Camels With Hammers) has personally been helping me work out some moral philosophy and meta-ethics, for which I owe him a debt that can never be repaid. And you, PZ, have given me a home base in the world of freethought, introducing me to many other likeminded people via Pharyngula.

I am on a quest to regain what was lost so long ago and re-integrate myself. I want to breathe innocently again, and not feel that I must hold all existence in contempt or still all desire for it being the root of suffering. I want to experience the quiet and peaceful wonder of existence, the universe-spanning transcendence Sagan and others spoke so lovingly of, and which is my birthright as a scientist. I want to sleep peacefully in the arms of the Milky Way above and wake refreshed to the blue of the sky. And someday, I want to love and be loved again. None of these are possible in a milieu that assumes for its foundation that we are evil, fallen creatures at the mercy of a Bronze-age throwback who thinks that an eternity of torture is meet for finite sins. I am learning that it is not so; but I have lost so much in the learning.
Hazuki Azuma
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/19/why-i-am-an-atheist-hazuki-azuma/

Summary: Originally Catholic; believes her “of panic disorder, OCD, anxiety, depression, and schizoid symptoms” are due to Catholicism; lesbian; Agnostic; Scientism: “Science has disproven the major tenets of the Abrahamic faiths”.

From PZ's Place, Red Mann, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-23T14:45:00.000-06:00

I was a Christian. Mostly I was a Christian because my mother was a Christian, I think my father was too, but he rarely went to church or talked about it. All my friends were Christians; all the adults I knew appeared to be Christians too. The First Baptist Church in the small town in Massachusetts I grew up in was less than a half a mile down the road. My Great-grand father had donated the organ; my Grandfather had painted the picture behind the baptistery. This church was literally in my blood. From before I can remember, I went to Sunday school, as well as Sunday service. Going to church was just what you did, not going was unthinkable. This particular church, which was considered to be Northern Conservative Baptist, was only moderately fire and brimstone. Sure Jews, and probably Catholics, were going to hell but, I wasn’t aware that any other kind of religious people like Muslims, Buddhists, or even atheists existed. There were also Methodists and Congregationalists, but they were almost like us.

Most of the organized activity in my life was either at school or at church. I went to Daily Vacation Bible School in the summer, later on I joined the Christian Service Brigade, a Boy Scout like organization, but with heavy Christian influence. The best thing about CSB was summer camp. It was up in Maine on the shores of Lake Bunganut. There were crafts, swimming, canoeing, campfires, archery and more. And of course, preaching, but not too much. It was great to get away from home and parents and meet a bunch of other kids, and some pretty neat counselors. Back home there were prayer meetings, testimony nights, bible quizzes with other churches. I sang in the church choir starting at twelve. I even helped clean the church with my best buddy who was sort of the janitor.

I was “saved” and born again with full immersion baptism. My name was entered in the church rolls and they gave me a real nice bible. I tried really hard to make contact with God/Jesus, to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I never seemed to feel anything like it. I am now fairly sure that I never really believed in any of it. I’m sure that I did everything because it was the thing to do.

As time went on, doubt began to creep in. At first it was sex, in the form of masturbation, that started it. If God watches everything, he was watching me, and knew all of the nasty thoughts I was having about girls. The fun of what I was doing eventually won out over the fear of God. Then there was the behavior of the supposedly upright Christians. The deacon would gas unwanted puppies and kittens with lawnmower exhaust. People would stand up on Testimony night and tell us what good Christians they were, and then their actions would belie it. Conflicts grew between what I was told in church and what I perceived outside of church. I couldn’t believe my Catholic friends were going to Hell because they didn’t believe the way we believed, I couldn’t believe that people in Africa would go to Hell just because they never heard of Jesus. As I learned about the real world and science, the Bible stories were harder and harder to take as real. It was the introduction to the Theory of Evolution in high school thanks to a wonderful biology teacher, and the religious resistance to it, that led to the most major crack in my faith so far. After this point, my religious involvement was mostly lip-service and inertia. My drift towards atheism had begun.

The rudiments remained. I still identified myself as Protestant on Navy forms, in Boot Camp and “A” School I sang in the Bluejacket Chorus at services in the Mainside Chapel every Sunday. Going and singing really didn’t bother me, in fact I loved the old hymns (and still do), I just didn’t believe the message anymore. Other than going to church to sing, my church going days were pretty much over, I just saw no reason to go except for weddings, funerals and baptisms. I was married in a church, by a minister, but that was really pro forma and to keep my wife’s family happy. This was in Scotland and our Banns were actually cried.

For years I basically ignored religion, beginning to think of myself as agnostic, still not quite able to internally let go of it all. This was probably the result of the deep brainwashing I received as a child, the fear of hell, the fear of being condemned, the fear of the devil, the fear of taking that final step. Then around the 80’s, things began to change. First came the Moral Majority and the beginning of religious involvement with politics. The obvious hypocrisy and lies that were coming from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were beginning to sour discourse in America. Then came 9/11 and I started digging into Islam, this was followed by the “Intelligent” Design movement. As I started digging into it, helped greatly by access to the internet, I came across some real atheists, starting with Austin Cline at About Atheism; this led me to Panda’s Thumb, then to P.Z. Myers’ Pharyngula, then on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett. I was learning about what atheism really is and found that there were many people who had let go of their childish fears. When I finally faced up to the idea, which is certainly true, that there is no god or gods and that religion is based on superstition and fear, I, like Saul on the road to Damascus, felt the scales fall, not from my eyes, but my brain. The Problem of Evil no longer existed, the perceived guilt of punishment for what was supposed to be bad behavior evaporated. I was no longer in fear of a capricious, spiteful god of the OT. I no longer had to try to reconcile the supposed miracles of Jesus with the real world. Although sometimes, in the depths of the night, I can still catch the dim whispering gibberish of the imp of religious nonsense that hides, desperately, in the dim corners of my brain.

My atheism is confirmed when I see all of what science and rationality can explain about the way the world and the universe works and, indeed, much of the way the human mind works; and then look at what religion, any religion, can explain. Religion explains nothing; virtually every truth claim it makes can be shown to have a natural explanation that can be supported by evidence and observation. Science is constantly making the box that religion keeps god in, the box of things that sciences does not (yet) have answers to, smaller and smaller. “Goddidit” explains vanishingly less and less. Nothing of what we know about the world and the universe that it is in requires any action from any god to explain it. God exists alright, god and angels and demons and miracles and heaven and hell all exist inside the human mind.

Now, the older I get, I’m in my sixties, the more I am absolutely convinced that the life I have now is the only life I get and that when I die I will only live on in the memories of those that knew me.
Red Mann
United States
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/22/why-i-am-an-atheist-red-mann/

Summary: Originally Christian; masturbation trumped God; evolution and Scientism led to blogs and Austin Cline, then on to the others. Now believes in science and rationality. Religion has no explanations for the world and universe.

From PZ's Place, BCskeptic, Canada, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-23T14:41:00.000-06:00

I am an engineer and I work in a science field, in particular that of astronomy instrumentation development. I became atheist some years ago when an atheist colleague and I started talking about religion. I argued the points that “you can’t get something from nothing”, and “what’s the point of it all then”, quite for vociferously for ~3 hrs and then went home.

I thought a lot about what I was arguing, and also the contradiction I was living. In my career, I lived everything “evidence-based”, but in my personal religious life it was faith-based. Although, even though I prayed and all that, I was never, I don’t think, a 100% hard-core believer.

I realized that I was living a life of intellectual hypocrisy, that it lacked integrity, and that I couldn’t live like that anymore. Truth mattered to me more than comfort, and the science I had learned since working in the astronomy field made the notion of the existence of an elusive supernatural deity quite frankly ridiculous.

I went to work the next day, and declared to my colleague, “that’s it, I’m atheist”. And I’ve never looked back. There is simply no evidence to support the existence of a god or gods, and in fact all of the evidence is contrary to that existence. I feel free to think and question what I like, and no longer have a ‘target’ on my back. I find that socializing with religious people is like socializing with people who really believe Santa Claus exists. Much (although not all) of my family, including my daughters and my wife’s family are highly religious. I find there is a barrier there to true communication; really getting to know people and what they are like and think at a deep level is off the discussion list, because of religion. With my family who is not religious (and they are quite well educated as well), some deep and interesting discussions occur, as happens as well with my atheist colleagues.

It came with a price, though. I believe turning atheist was the major contributing factor to my divorce, which happened a few years later. A very painful and expensive process! But now I’m with someone who is atheist as well, and life couldn’t be better. I have read many books in the meantime, starting with ‘On the Origin of Species’, many of Dawkins’ books (reading ‘God Delusion’ was like savouring a delicious meal), Harris, Hitchens, books on psychology, books on morality, and now blogs. I also believe I have a much deeper appreciation of our/my existence, the Universe, and all of the complexity and wonder involved. Life is good. Life as I know it is exceedingly rare and precious. And life is finite and must be enjoyed to its fullest. That’s what I try to think of and do every day.
BCskeptic
Canada
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/23/why-i-am-an-atheist-bcskeptic/

Summary: Atheist because: Scientism; no evidence for, lots of evidence against.

From PZ's Place, Jemima Cole, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-23T14:39:00.000-06:00

There are a lot of reasons why I’m an atheist. The idea of worshipping a god
who seems to have all the evils and psychological problems of a North Korean
dictator, who would send me to an eternity of torture for thinking the wrong
thing, who demands total, eternal devotion and praise from his supporters, and
would then show those he had saved images of me being tortured for their
delight (it’s Catholic doctrine, fact fans!) … well, what a bastard. Fuck
that God. Every Earthly equivalent of ‘Heaven’ only exists in
dictatorships. God’s Palace sounds just like Saddam’s – all gleaming marble
and gold taps. Day to day life in Heaven sounds like a perpetual Soviet
Victory Parade. None of the things I value in life seem to exist in Heaven. I
like to elect my leaders, I like freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

But that doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist.

For me, as I judge the competing truth claims of religion and
atheism, the most compelling reason for me to be an atheist is that religion
is consciously untrue. That, in other words, priests and believers lie.

We see it reported all the time on this blog. The first time some creationist
says something crazy about junk DNA or how evolution is just a theory … well,
it’s common or garden ignorance. Not their fault, we all have to learn things
some time.

The second time they say it, it’s a lie. The third time, it’s a policy to lie.

The Catholic Church, to pick just one example, routinely lies. Did you know there
are holes in condoms that let AIDS out? Did you know Hitler was an atheist and
that the Catholic Church fought Hitler with all its might? Read the Cloyne Report
and see that Bishop Magee prepared two reports about child abuse – one for the
police, another for the Vatican. Oh, but the Vatican can’t be expected to know
what some local priest is up to … he was the man that found Pope John Paul I’s
body. He was private secretary to that Pope and to John Paul II.

Conscious, repeated lies. Not mistakes.

Another aspect of the same phenomenon is the double standard. Priests declare
moral relavitism is a scourge of society, that there’s good and there is evil
and nothing inbetween, that they can show you the difference and that if you
even *think* bad thoughts, you’re guilty of them. Then they cover up another priest
raping an eight year old, deliberately withholding evidence from the police. When
they are caught, they play the ‘well … everyone’s human. It’s all trumped
up by the media. Did you know that this stuff happens all the time’ card. Pick
one. To me ‘is raping a child bad?’ is not a moral conundrum, it’s not a time to
pick at definitions. If my best friend raped a child, I would phone the police,
I would tell them everything I knew, and I would have no moral qualms about it. I
don’t believe in moral absolutes. I do know that raping a child is wrong. If
some smarmy theologian wants to pick as that as ‘intellectually inconsistent’,
please, please let’s discuss that in comments. I double dare you.

It goes further than the Catholic child abuse scandal. Beyond the almost identical
Mormon abuse scandals, or the Scientology abuse scandals, or … well, the list
goes on.

If an atheist accidently credits the wrong loony idea to the wrong branch of
one Christian sect, they’ll get a long, patronizing speech about how we’re
woefully ignorant of theology, that the Holy Church of the Ratfucker Jesus might believe
that, but the person you’re talking to is from the Sacred Chapel of Christ Ratfucker.
Then they’ll take the credit for all religion ever. ‘What has my religion done?’ a
Protestant will say, ‘why … just look at the Sistine Chapel’. ‘How dare you insult the 90%
of people on this planet who believe in God?’. Let’s accept that 90% of people in
the world are religious for sake of argument. The majority of those people aren’t
even monotheists, let alone Christians, let alone Protestants, let alone Sacred
Christ Ratfuckers.

Meanwhile … talk to someone who’s been trained at a seminary. Training to be
a priest is, from the accounts I’ve been told, very simply being taught how to
lie. The comforting lie, the ‘things to say to the people who’ve read the Bible
and spotted that it doesn’t say the things you say it does’, the lies necessary
to keep the institution from external scrutiny. Priests understand that what they
teach isn’t what they believe – they have ‘a more nuanced’ understanding. That
there are a lot of things they have to keep vague, very simple questions they must
not allow to be asked (‘who does the Bible says is going to Heaven?’, to pick one).
Always, always, it’s ‘avoid a straight answer’.

Jesus said some wise things. One of them was “A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit,
nor can a bad tree bear good fruit”. Truth does not come from lies. Creationists
lie. The Vatican lies. Anglican theologians explain that the bits in the Bible that
are true are true, the rest are metaphors. They don’t even *understand* truth, in
other words.

So, a simple question to believers: if they’re telling the truth, why do
your holy men lie to you so frequently and so consistently?
Jemima Cole
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/22/why-i-am-an-atheist-jemima-cole/

Summary: Atheist because believers lie, and evilGod.

Really Pissy-Assed Foul Mood.

2012-01-21T17:33:00.000-06:00

For the past week. Everything needed for wintering the cows has not been working.

40 year old tractors on the blink, both of them. One, the trackloader, needs a new torque converter. Or something, probably really expensive. The other, I finally got running just enough to get round bales to the cows. The hydraulics barely move the loader.

New dishwasher came in, finally. Got it installed, finally.

Had to take the stove apart. Even the closet doors came off. Wife finally got her car back from the body shop; she was T-boned by a no-license, no-insurance idiot (she's OK). Then her windshield broke. Then her brakes started to shriek.

There’s more, but you’ve heard enough whine.

So when I browse in my limited spare time, I find this kind of stuff:

Why doesn’t he just say, “God, I told you to do something and you didn’t do it, so I curse you. What kind of God is it that doesn’t do as he is told? Maybe if you’d do as I command, I could believe. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, I curse you.”

I can barely contain my expletives.

Then I go to New Scientist and read the comments concerning Free Will. Good grief. Why even bother with this type of mentality? The mood, it descends.

But I’ll be back. At least the cows got fed.

From PZ's Place, Ellen Rees, Norway, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-16T17:40:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

Unlike most atheists I have come across, I am an atheist because I am a profoundly irrational person; my life is dominated by narrative, by fictions and lies, performance and artifice. In other words, I am a literary scholar. Two factors shaped my early life: I was raised without early first hand exposure to religion by an artist and a psychology professor who self-identified as atheists, and my extended family concealed a dark secret about my grandmother. Because I was not exposed to religion until the fourth grade, when little friends started trying to “save” me, the Bible stories I encountered struck me as no more believable than any of the many, many other narratives I had been reading. Middle Earth, Wonderland, Oz, Avonlea, Villa Villekulla, the court of King Arthur, and even Narnia had primed me to look upon the Biblical Judea as just another historical fiction.

The fact that no one in my family would tell me why my grandmother had only one leg sparked any number of possible explanations in my overactive imagination, each one embellished until it became a pathos-filled romance of suffering and redemption. This early lesson in my own brain’s ability to speculate wildly illustrates perfectly the psychology of religion and the drive to find unambiguous answers to things that, for various reasons, are beyond our ken. And even when, as a young adult, I was given the “real” answer in the form of newspaper articles describing the incident, it quickly became clear that this “answer” contained yet more unanswerable questions (no one will ever know why my grandmother’s step-father attempted to murder her in a drunken rage, or why he missed and ended up shooting her in the knee). I am a relativist through and through, largely at ease with ambiguity. Science per se has almost nothing to do with my atheism.
Ellen Rees
Norway

Summary: Raised by Atheists; other narratives negated Christian stories; her ability to speculate wildly demonstrates the “psychology of religion and the drive to find unambiguous answers”; is a relativist, at ease with ambiguity; no science involved in her Atheism.

From PZ's Place, James Willamor, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-16T17:36:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I grew up very active in a conservative Southern Baptist church. I
served in music ministry, set up Vacation Bible School, went on
domestic and international mission trips, took Bible courses at a
Baptist college, and chaperoned youth trips. I truly believed in God
with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my soul.
I always thought that Christians became atheists because they were mad
a God; that it is an act of rebellion against giving God total control
of their life. The complete opposite happened to me.

I drifted away from the faith for several years because I became
disillusioned with the mingling of right wing politics with the
pulpit, but then I discovered several progressive Christian writers
such as Shane Claiborne and Donald Miller, and I felt a renewed zeal
to study the Bible and pursue my personal relationship with God. It’s
funny that this pursuit of God led to my atheism.

Several years ago I traveled to Japan and China and visited Shinto
shrines and Buddhist temples and it occurred to me that these people
that I was meeting and getting to know have morals and ethics often as
great as or greater than most Christians I know. I read Confucius
Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid and pondered how can so many Asians have
such high moral standards, lower crime rates, strong communities and
families, all without Jesus?

Around this same time, over the span of several years, I began to
learn more about the world around me. When I was little, God was
bigger than I could imagine and there was no truth, no morality
outside God. One day I came across this thought exercise: “If God told
you to kill someone, would you do it?” Of course the answer would be
that God would never ask me to do that. “But if he did tell you, that
it was for the greater good, part of his plan?” I would have to answer
no. My morals would never allow me to take another life. I’m a firm
believer in non-violence and pacifism. At this moment I was almost
shocked to realize what this means: my values go beyond God – go
deeper than God. It is as if God got a little smaller, or the universe
as I know it got a little bigger.

As I studied the Bible more in my quest to grow closer to God, the
more issues with theology I discovered. Perhaps the greatest issue I
had was with salvation, or put simply, “who goes to heaven and who
goes to hell.” If salvation is though faith in Jesus alone, then it is
unjust to condemn those who have never heard the Gospel, and equally
unfair if these people get a “free pass” to heaven while those who, to
varying degrees, have heard the Gospel are judged.

The more and more I learned about the world, the more I disagreed with
the exclusivity of faith in Christ. Somebody who earnestly says a
prayer accepting Jesus, then goes about life as usual, is more
deserving of heaven than a Buddhist monk who dedicates his entire life
to feeding the poor and clothing the needy, and caring for the sick?
After all, Matthew 25 pretty plainly states that those who do “unto
the least of these” are rewarded with heaven and those who selfishly
do not are condemned. How do you reconcile “faith alone” with this
teaching? How does simply saying a prayer supersede this? Maybe just
praying the “Sinner’s prayer” and repenting of sins is not enough.
I thought that perhaps I am a Universalist – that there are many paths
in life and all people will eventually be reconciled to God. But if
this is true, then why is there a need to believe in God anyway?
What’s the difference, as long as I seek to live out the message of
Matthew 25 and seek to “love my neighbor as myself?”
Still, I tried fervently to seek God in spite of growing doubts. I
wanted to believe that he existed. I prayed that he would show me the
way. Lying in bed at night I prayed until I cried, begging that he
would restore my faith. I read more Christian books and studied the
Bible more fervently.

Eventually I accepted what my heart and mind was telling me – there is
not God. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Jesus’ teaching, but that
his divinity and the existence of a God seemed increasingly unlikely
in light of what I was learning about the world around me. I never
stopped believing in the Bible in the sense that it is the greatest
source of moral truth in my life. Jesus’ teachings such as the Sermon
on the Mount and Matthew 25 form the basis of my ethics. I will always
follow my conscience and seek peace, justice, equality for all people
through love.

I guess some Christians will say it is okay – people take many paths
and all people will be reconciled to God eventually. Some will say
that I’ll eventually “come back around.” Some will say that I was
never a Christian to begin with, or that I was not predestined, or
elected, by God. My faith was completely real to me for the better
part of two decades. I was certain that God heard and answered my
prayers. I felt his supernatural presence in still quiet moments of
worship.

But now I realize that it was just a creation of my own mind. I want
to be honest with myself and use reason and logic, not blind faith, to
explore the world. Life as a human being is very precious, and it is
something to be cherished. I want to spend my life creating “heaven”
on earth for the “least of these.”
James Willamor
United States

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/15/why-i-am-an-atheist-james-willamor/

Started as Baptist; disillusioned by conservative politics; studied the Bible; discovered that his morals were greater than God’s morals; takes issue with salvation and its unfair distribution; more Christian study didn’t help; finally accepted Atheism after rejecting Jesus’ divinity; yet accepted Jesus’ teaching for an ethic. Wants to use logic and reason to explore the world. Wants to create “heaven on earth”.

From PZ's Place, MonZni, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-16T17:32:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I grew up in the typical uber-conservative christian home, but always had doubts. The answers given to my questions were never quit satisfying, and always had the air of “If you pray/read the Bible hard enough, long enough, sincerely enough, you will understand!” I distinctly remember hysterically sobbing, clutching at my bedsheets, literally begging “God” to make me “feel” him like those around me claimed they could, or to understand. When nothing ever happened, I was told that God was testing me. I accepted that, begrudgingly.

Sadly, I still tried to conform– going to church, youth groups, attending a conservative Christian college, even serving as a missionary overseas. During that last experience, I had a few days where I might have actually “felt” God in my life (or what I was told was what God was like). . . . but the powers that be heard of my newfound joy and happiness and immediately called meetings about me, and emotionally and professionally ruined me. Years of church-abuse followed

I came back to the States, PISSED. I tried a non-denominational church, and while the people were nicer, I still felt that nagging sense that I just didn’t belong. I would never fit, I wasn’t good enough, I asked too many questions, I was a woman, I was a thinking woman, I was pretty– all reasons that I would never be heard, acknowledged, or taken seriously. Ever.

Finally, I realized that if my church was a boyfriend, he would be an abusive SOB, and anyone that knew and loved me would be BEGGING me to run away, run hard, just get away from that bipolar, controlling, abusive asshole. It was a eureka moment: I was in an abusive relationship!

I gave up religion, but didn’t know what else was out there. I thought I still believed in a god, something anyway. . . until I heard a woman interviewing a Catholic-turned-Atheist on the radio. And he was describing this new personal responsibility he had– no more asking God to do everything for him, now it was all on him. And while that sounded scary at first, I found the idea very attractive– you mean, I could control my own life? Sadly, it was a revolutionary thought. The interviewee also described how every day, every moment was now precious, because this life was all he had– there was no cheery there-after to lean upon. He talked about being a nicer, more generous, more loving person, because he wasn’t functioning under that huge Judgment Umbrella that Christians love so much. He sounded FREE. And while it sounded like an initially scary journey to begin, it sounded like one that would prove more than well worth the effort.

And he was right. It was interesting too, because it was only after I became an atheist that I felt all those things the Christians told me that God would bring me– happiness, confidence, a loving nature, a generous heart, the ability to see everything as beautiful, bright, colorful and breath-taking, money, respect, love from others, freedom from cruelty and abuse– the list goes on.
Suffice it to say, I am one ridiculously happy atheist!
MonZni
United States

Summary: Raised “uber” Christian; Couldn’t feel God; went on mission trip but was “church abused”; changed churches but was still abused because she asked too many questions, was an intelligent, thinking, pretty woman therefore not taken seriously. Heard a Catholic-turned-Atheist on the radio who sounded free; she adopted Atheism to control her own life, and became free, with all the benefits of freedom which she couldn’t get from God.

From PZ's Place, C Earle, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-16T17:28:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I was brought up with a sort of “good-stuff” version of Christianity: heaven, but no hell; Golden Rule, but no rules about homosexuality or masturbation; love, joy, and sweet treats at Christmas AND Easter, but no “original sin” or “he died for your sins.” My mom considered herself a Christian although she didn’t (and doesn’t) toe the line on almost any of Christianity’s teachings, and my dad considered himself an agnostic.

My dad leaned toward a more emphatic version of atheism when my little brother died of cancer while we kids were still in elementary school. Where some parents would turn more firmly to certainty of an afterlife when dealing with this sort of tragedy, I think my dad thought that my sweet little brother’s death was one more piece of evidence that prayer doesn’t work, good deeds buy you no consideration from the universe, and there is no God.

But he didn’t tell us kids that. Many, many people assured us that our little Stanley was up in heaven, with God and Jesus, and very happy. I had comforting dreams about him being up there.

Flash forward to me as a teenager. I was exposed to the hippie version of Jesus. You know, Jesus Christ, Superstar stuff. Jesus with long hair, long robe, and a lot of peace and kindness and acceptance no matter who or what you are. Still a good-stuff version of the religion—and very appealing. I didn’t want to be the kind of hippie that had rampant sex and took a ton drugs, so I became the kind of semi-hippie that sang Christian songs in huge groups of happy-hippy people. Big group hugs and acoustic guitars and circle folk dances and love and peace.

The next step was to actually learn something about the religion I’d adopted. Read the Bible. Find out about apologetics and church history.

At this point, having been a “Jesus freak” for almost two years, I was now in college, enrolled in The Bible As Literature, and part of a Bible study group that met every single night. There was so much appalling stuff in the Bible—I was shocked! Also, even though the kids in my group were really wonderful people, there was an appalling LACK of critical thinking when it came to the Bible and what they thought of as God’s voice (through the gifts of the spirit: prophecy and speaking in tongues and interpretation of such). I met my husband at these Bible study meetings—and we were the only two, often sitting opposite each other, saying, “That doesn’t make sense!” or “That’s a really rotten thing for Jesus to say!” We got together partly because of our shared shock about what Christianity was really all about, and we drifted away from the Christian group for the same reason.

I didn’t stop studying. The more I read about religion, including Christianity, the more I didn’t believe anything like that stuff. The more I turned away from Christianity and religion, the more I was interested in what science said about deep mysteries and complicated issues. It took a while for me to self-identify as an atheist—but really, about three quarters of the way through my freshman year of college, I became an atheist.
C. Earle
United States

Summary: Raised Christian-lite; became a Christian “semi-hippie” until college; “Bible as Literature” class showed the “appalling” aspects of the bible; became Atheist in Freshman year of college.

Science vs. Sagan

2012-01-12T08:33:00.000-06:00

The hunt for planets moves ahead, using the Kepler space telescope. As reported by the Associated Press,

“The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

"We're awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren't even sure there were planets" outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn't involved in the new research.”

Carl Sagan used his idea of a Pale Blue Dot to conceptualize the loneliness of the earth, unique and lost in the vast, barren cosmos. It is arrogant to think that humans are of any value in such a huge, dead and uncaring system, he suggested. There is no reason to think that humans have any significance, when they are so alone. The Pale Blue Dot was a metaphor for Materialism and by extension, Atheism.

What Sagan was appealing to was Scientism. He thought that what he observed, telescopically, was the scientific Truth which should be applied to everyone’s worldview.

The recent discoveries, just outside of Sagan’s lifespan, of “more planets than stars”, possibly 100’s of billions in our galaxy alone, illuminates the fallacy of relying on science to provide metaphysical answers for questions outside the ability of science to actually address. Sagan had made an improper deductive leap, one designed to satisfy his existing worldview, an exercise in rationalization to support a presupposed conclusion. He deduced that a lack of knowledge of other planets meant a lack of planets, a logical slip with a huge impact on the thought process of many people.

If one were to follow Sagan’s reasoning – and one should not – then the existence of billions of planets means the opposite of Sagan’s claim for purposes of worldviews.

But Scientism is not a proper brick for the construction of knowledge of why what is, is.

What the scientists should be presenting is not false deductions. They should present the objective process of logical deduction based on axiomatic groundings which is embedded in the scientific method, and the contingency and probabilism inherent in every scientific finding. And I suspect that many of them do just that. But it is the Sagans and Dawkinses who promote Scientism and Atheism who get the headlines and coverage, as they prescribe their Scientistic ideology.

Contingency and probabilism demonstrate that science is not the authority that some of its practitioners seem to crave. The appeals to Dawkins and Sagan et al are Appeals to Authority of the worst kind: false authority. That authority is seemingly addictive to those who indulge in it; after all, no one would have heard of either Sagan or Dawkins had they stuck to actual science.

Scientism is no less an ideological evangelism than is an old time tent camp revival.

None of the new findings indicate, yet, that life exists beyond earth. But it is not impossible, especially if one grants that life need not necessarily be anything like our own. But the point here is that science doesn’t know, and virtually every question answered by science opens another batch of questions. Thinking that science is an authority on every question is not justified, especially considering that there are few questions that science has actually settled. Even Einstein’s universal speed limit of light speed, C, is now being questioned, and Einstein doubtless would approve. That’s how real scientists behave.

Thoughts My Synapses Never Had...

2012-01-12T06:43:00.000-06:00

Materialism claims that humans are less then they appear.

Theism claims that they are more than they appear.

Both cannot be right. Neither can be proven.

The issue becomes, reductively speaking, one of individual taste.

Or, analytically speaking, the issue is what do I observe? Are humans not conscious agents, after all? What do I observe to support that? Do we receive notification from our neurons that they have decided to go see grandma, or that they have decided to build a skyscraper, and then we, consciously say, "OK, message received", and then sit back and watch as our neurons accompish their objective?

What if we consciously don't want to do what the neurons want us to do? Can we rebel, and take over for our conscious selves? Or is our conscious self locked down to the point where we cannot even question the decisions made by our neurons? Are we completely captives?

Humans ARISE! Overthrow your neurons! Justice for the Conscious! Think a Thought Consciously!

From PZ's Place, Crys, Italy, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-11T15:53:00.003-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I am an atheist because I read.

I was raised in Rome Italy by a vaguely Catholic mother in a pretty Catholic country. However, since I was not forced to go to church outside of Christmas and Easter, I didn’t take my first communion until I was 11 (and even then I studied my catechism with an extremely liberal nun) and my upbringing was never based on the rules and guilt-trips that are typical of the Catholic faith I did not immediately question the existence of God or the church itself. I just was not exposed to anything that was so explicitly divorced from reality from the perspective of a child. The first thing that I realized was that prayer was just not working out for me. This lead me to thinking, am I doing it right? What does being a Catholic even mean? What am I attesting to when I label myself at one? At the age of 12 I picked up the Bible and actually started to read it.

I am an atheist because I’ve experimented.

By age 13 I was studying ancient Roman history as is to be expected given the city in which I grew up. It struck me that the content of the Bible was no less fantastical than the wonderful stories I was learning about the gods that the Romans believed in. I came to the conclusion that all religions must be equally true. As my upbringing very much encouraged the belief in the superstitious and magic, as my mother is still a strong believer in everything from faith healings to fairies, I had now become a polytheist, I laid flower offerings at Minerva’s temple in the Roman forum, I practiced Wicca and dabbled in pretty much any forgotten religion I could get my hands on.

I am an atheist because I reasoned.

Although I remained a pagan until the age of 17 when I first went to college, it had become more of a ritual than a true belief. I enjoyed keeping holidays like All Hallow’s Eve, I used my prayers as a source of comfort being in a strange new country where I had to adjust. I didn’t submit my faith to the sort of scrutiny I eventually knew it deserved. It was simply something to fall back on, something to keep me company, but never something I openly shared or overly contemplated. I began to transition out of feelings of faith as I made new friends, as I realized that if I was ashamed to share with others my beliefs, it must mean that they are completely ridiculous. I had now become an agnostic.

I am an atheist because I was honest with myself.

I did not identify myself as an atheist until I was 20. By then I was in my third year in college and had fully understood the scientific method. I had shied away from the term “atheist” because I was under the misguided notion that being an atheist meant being absolutely certain that there was no God. To me, this seemed as obtuse and arrogant as being absolutely 100% certain that there is a God. However once I began to fully appreciate the scientific method I realized that this was not the case. There is nothing in this life that we can really be absolutely 100% certain about, but I began to see my lack of belief like a null hypothesis.

I am an atheist because there has been no reason for me to believe in any God. I have not been presented with nor come across a single miraculous or inexplicable event that contradicts my assumption that no God exists. However, this does not mean that such an event could never happen. The day I experience something that would give credence to a God I am perfectly happy to refute my null hypothesis, but until that day comes, it holds strong.
Crys
Italy

Summary: Raised in superstitious, semi-Catholic background; started reading the Bible at 12; at 13 influenced by Roman History and its gods; studied and experimented with paganism until 17; Atheist at 20 after 3rd year college where the scientific method was learned, and developed a null hypothesis; would refute the null hypothesis if an event occurred that would “give credence to God”.

From PZ's Place, Michael Glenister, Canada, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-10T19:45:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place

It’s been an interesting change in perspective for my mother. She was raised Church of England (Protestant) in High Wycombe, England, and remembers, as a child, the first time she met someone who didn’t believe in god. The initial response was to cry. The secondary response was to think: “Convert!”. My Dad was an altar boy as a kid, but his family were not as devout as my mother’s. Irregardless they met, grew up, got married, and then immigrated to Canada.

I was born a couple of years later. By this time my parents, particularly my mother, were no longer as devout as my grandparents and other relatives, and going to church was not a regular part of our lives. However there was a large brass crucifix on the wall of our bedroom hall, I was sent to Sunday School for a while, and remember doing some praying by myself before I went to bed.

I figured out a quite a young age that Santa Claus didn’t make sense, and applaud my parents for being honest with me when I asked. I was also an early reader, thanks to my mother’s efforts, and not long afterward someone (I don’t remember, probably a relative) gave me a large, thick, illustrated, children’s bible. I read the whole thing, cover to cover. It was certainly an entertaining read, but my mother now proudly relates that after I finished reading it, that I concluded the whole thing was nonsense and told her so.

From then on I was an atheist, and so were my parents and younger siblings. In high school we covered the Greek/Roman gods, and read “Inherit the Wind”, which gave me ample opportunity to express my opinions. A female student made my day when her essay was read in class. It included a discussion on Mary and Joseph: “An angel makes Mary pregnant. What kind of excuse is that!? If I came home and told my mother that an angel made me pregnant…”

While studying at UBC in Vancouver, I attended the annual “Does god exist?” debates sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. Usually I was disappointed in the debating abilities of the Con side, and wished that I was a better debater myself. I even heard about David Suzuki attending one and getting angrier and angrier at how the Pro side was misrepresenting science.

Years later I read about Richard Dawkins in Discover magazine, did some research, and started collecting books. Consequently I’m a much better debater and look forward to JW’s knocking on my door so that I can refine my skills. As I Science/Math teacher in high school, I also encourage my students to think for themselves, and not accept things as true because an authority figure – including myself – tells them that it is true without evidence.

Now my parents, particularly my mother, and I enjoy reading Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, and discussing the ridiculous and irritating things the religious do around the world.
Michael Glenister
Canada

Summary: Little religious influence; as child, rejected children’s bible with parent’s approval; Atheist from childhood on along with parents and younger siblings.

From PZ's Place, Krio Gnosz, Finland, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-10T19:41:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I grew up in a rural area of Finland and went to a tiny school of about thirty pupils. As such, I now suppose their education methods could get away with being less than mainstream. Being only about seven to eight years old, we were taught Biblical stories as though they were the truth of what happened.

I was a personality that would find the thought of a perfect, just, omnipotent authority appealing. Being an obedient, yet ingratiating child I strove to act polite and hide my flaws from God in an effort to appease him. All in a very similar manner to my faith in Santa Claus. However, I also had a very absolute sense of morality. Since the Christian stories that I had heard taught that even a malicious thought is a sin, I figured that I was not in control of my own sinfulness. A person would be sent to either Heaven or Hell according to their sins. This made me panic, since I would have to live my entire life in constant fear of a divine punishment that might not even be fair. Normally, I would disguise my misdeeds and pretend to be nothing but pure of thought… but how could I even attempt to disguise and pretend in front of an omnipotent, omniscient God?

One day, I finally broke in tears due to this sense of insecurity. My father asked what was wrong, and I opened up to him. What he said to me afterwards was nothing short of comforting as hell. Something along the lines of “There are thousands of religions on this planet, many of which promise eternal comfort and threaten with eternal agony. And everybody believes theirs is the right one. Christianity just happens to be dominant in this particular country, so take it easy, you are not bound to anything.” This did not make me truly atheist, though. I just mentally told God, “Well, it seems that despite all your greatness, you haven’t provided me with any proof that you exist. So I’ll continue to live my life without you. No hard feelings, but you can’t expect me to have faith in you when you don’t give me a proper reason to do so.”

There was a subsequent chapter of my life where I was, in fact, fundamentalist… in a very special way. Although it is rather hilarious and would make this story much more entertaining, it’s also so incredibly embarrassing that I don’t quite feel ready to disclose it, even anonymously. Let’s just say that I was extremely devoted and routinely exercised some serious fact-bending to justify my brand of religion.

Since having gotten over that phase, I was a live and let live -style nontheist. I figured that since there are so many people who are fervent believers in God, they must all have very good reasoning. As an outsider I couldn’t possibly know enough about their beliefs to criticize them. This changed when I started frequenting a certain forum on the Internet where certain posters in particular, who had received “orthodox upbringings”, were very vocal about what their religions ordered and forbade them to do. This opened my mind to the possibility that… maybe the human mind really can be so willfully illogical as to endlessly defend a mindset that has some serious flaws in it? After all, I had been through this too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The End of Faith by Sam Harris upon skimming through a selection of books in an online library. At first, I thought the writer must have been some sort of radical. Yet his arguments, backed up by statistics as opposed to meandering pseudo-philosophy, were such a refreshing treat that I became a “radical” myself in my stance to religion. Eventually, my sister found my copy and mentioned that she had read a similar book too, by Richard Dawkins. And so on.
Krio Gnosz
Finland

Summary: Raised in a religious school; realized sin couldn’t be controlled, so would go to hell; constant fear of hell; father introduced Atheism to him; believers have no good arguments; influenced by Sam Harris, and became a “radical”.

From PZ's Place, Chad Brown, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-10T19:31:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place:

I am a long time reader of your blog. It has introduced me to many new concepts regarding feminism and atheism and has helped me greatly to shape the way I view my atheism today as well as my political/social stance and support for feminism. Thank you for these insights and for the time you take to run this blog. As part of my thanks, I have provided my story below for how and why I became an atheist.

I was raised in a Lutheran family in Winona, Mn. Our family attended church every Sunday, but we never talked about our religion around the house. A few years before my confirmation classes commenced I decided to read the bible. I found it obtuse, abstruse, ambiguous, contradictory, unnecessarily repetitive, and with a tendency to prattle on over irrelevant details. When I was 13 and attending confirmation, I started asking some serious questions. None of my confirmation teachers answered my questions to my satisfaction and it became pretty clear to me that our confirmation courses were less about exploration of our faith and more about indoctrination.

I started to have my doubts about religion and I didn’t know how to take my family’s silence on the matter. Was their silence an affirmation that religion was highly suspect, or was religion just too personal of a subject to broach? I sensed that I would not get clear answers at home.

For me, high school history, anthropology, and sociology were the first courses and sources of knowledge to expose religion as a sham. At the time I never even considered science as a path for leaving religion or that religion and science were naturally opposed to each other. By the time I was 16, I considered myself an atheist and really had no doubts about the matter. But the strangest thing was occurring; as I explored the subject with my closest friends, the people whom I believed thought most like myself, I found that they considered themselves believers. I was floored. Why was I alone in thinking that religion was a hoax?

In college I studied Physics and, although I do not work in a laboratory, I consider myself a scientist. In college I started to learn how science and religion are not compatible and I finally started to meet some atheist friends. Since leaving college it has been harder to come across other atheists. Coming out, on some occasions, has been costly and painful. I even had one boss tell me that my problem was that I was, “…a goddamn atheist”. I don’t think he recognized his own irony.

My family found out about my atheism by accident and I know that they are uncomfortable with it. It turns out their silence was not an affirmation of religion’s ludicrousness. I now have my own children. I try to let them know that we can talk about any subject in the house (sex, religion, politics, sexual orientation, etc.) at any level they desire. I don’t want them to spend years wondering what their parents think. Even more importantly, I encourage them to read, study and investigate so they can form their own, informed opinions over such matters.

The online atheist community has been a great source of comfort to me. It has offered me an opportunity to be introspective about my atheism and has helped my perspective on the matter to grow and evolve. I no longer feel so isolated. Your blog, and the works of others from Richard Dawkins to Rebecca Watson, is important to atheists out there like me who have been unable to find support in our local communities.
Chad Brown
United States

Summary: Raised Lutheran; Questions not answered satisfactorily at age 13; Atheist by 16; studied physics in college; learned in college that religion and science are not compatible. Finds support in Dawkins and Watson, et al.

From PZ's Place, Tony Moss, UK, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-07T17:37:00.000-06:00

From From PZ’s Place:

I was a devout Catholic. I believed. I believed in literal transubstantiation, I belived in Hell, I believed in the Virgin Mary, I believed in Adam and Bloody Eve and the damned Deluge! I was, I suppose, a victim of the phenomenon put forward by Dawkins in which adults tell you, in a serious voice, that something is literally true and you have a tendency to believe them.

When the priest said “let us pray” I really did, and a friend of mine in the pew next to me used to pray with an incredible intensity that made me envious. So what happened? Very basically I left my childhood.

The questioning that is customary in one’s teenage years led to me to realise the absurdity of some of the propositions. For instance the creation story was completely incompatible with evolution which living in England was considered science and not some infernal little secret. But the one thing that really led me to seriously question my pre-pubescent faith was the utter ridiculousness of the notion of an all loving, all forgiving father who would let you burn forever if you didn’t believe. I began to be exposed to the mental gymnastics of Catholic theologians who attempted to explain away quandaries like “what about people who never heard of Jesus?” and “what about babies who die before they get baptised?”. It was also revealing to me that the age of your confirmation at which you declare, before the Church, that you as an adult of sound mind accept the teachings of the Catholic faith and are baptised again as a permanent member of the Church began to diminish from fourteen (!) to eight (!!). What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity? The cynic in me might suggest that this rewinding age of responsibility might go some way to explain the disgusting scandals that have plagued the church in recent years.

For years I struggled with faith (the imagery of eternal damnation is horrible enough to resonate with a young adult and I’m not ashamed to admit that the main motivation of my flirtation with Catholicism in my older years was fear) eventually settling on what I thought was a reasonable position of agnosticism. Then I read The God Delusion. Dawkins’ description of himself on his scale of belief seemed to gel perfectly with what I was. I didn’t believe and hadn’t for decades! I was a de-facto atheist, and because of stupid religious apologism I never realised it.

To put this in perspective the bulk of my catholic teaching came from my public Catholic school. My family were fairly liberal. My dad is a nominal Anglican protestent to whom Sundays were an excellent opportunity to sleep in. My mother describes herself as Catholic but her statement on belief is “I think that there’s something….”. Her mother was the daughter of Irish catholics and while being very devout she indicated she did believe in reincarnation. I think the liberal nature of my family’s beliefs can be summed up in the female members’ reaction to one of my cousin’s neighbours, a gay couple:

“It’s such a shame that those to are gay isn’t it? They’re both GORGEOUS!”

Imagine then the struggles facing an atheist brought up in a truly devout or dare I say fanatical household. I had it easy.
Tony Moss
United Kingdom

Moss makes these points:

1. As a teenager, questioned his Catholic upbringing.

2. As an adult read Dawkins’ God Delusion, realized he had been a de facto Atheist for decades.

3. Critical of Catholic Church lowering age of confirmation to eight. ” What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity?” No comment on the ability of a teen.

Summary: started rejection of Catholicism in teens; realized his Atheism as an adult after reading Dawkins’ God Delusion.

Jerry Coyne Explains Why You Have No Free Will

2012-01-07T11:20:00.002-06:00

Jerry Coyne declares the death of Free Will with the same perspicacity with which he declared that “Evolution is True”:

”Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion”

The debate about Free Will is in no manner the purview of philosophers or neuroscientists alone; the suggestion that these folks will tell the rest of us whether we have Free Will is ludicrous and arrogant-elitist. Coyne’s thinking is superficial enough that his personal elitism in this regard is merely his own delusion.

”But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.”

The massive reductionism in which Coyne engages here is ideological, not scientific. The idea that I will type a certain word here as being predetermined by the Big Bang’s effect on my molecules is totally without any material evidentiary support. It is pure ideology which resembles a credulous belief without evidence whatsoever: blind belief. It is pure ideology which doesn’t even match common sense, which is why Coyne and the physicalists claim that we all are deluded (except for Special Pleading clarity for themselves, of course).

”We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.”

Neglecting the inaccurate comparison to computers (agent vs non-agent), the statement is another ideology, a credulous belief without any evidence whatsoever, despite what Coyne claims as evidence below.

”'Meat computers'

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it.”

If it happened that Coyne actually understood digital general purpose computers, he would have realized that activity doesn’t mean final decision. If a differentiation is to be accomplished, then memories must be accessed and loaded for comparison. Input data must compared against other memories to discern if the data is coherent. Registers must be loaded, clock cycles tick off as data is shifted, then compared, new registers are loaded as the instruction cycles complete. That is how digital computers work.

The digital computer is not programmed by its “genes”; that would mean that the hardware designer would preprogram – in hardware – all the outcomes of the computers processing. The digital computer is a general purpose machine, which is programmed by the software, and its output is not expected to be deterministic on the physical machine’s prior history of design. If it were the case that the design influences the output, the machines would be useless. The comparison is absurd, and it is an assertion of massive ignorance to make the claim which Coyne makes.

As for the seven second delay, or even more which Coyne suggests, does anyone actually wait seven seconds or more between a situation being presented and a decision being presented to the brain through the delusion of having made the decision oneself? Are any of us that slow? Do we stand there mute, awaiting the decision to be presented to our consciousness?

”Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process. We think this because our sense of "willing" an act can be changed, created, or even eliminated through brain stimulation, mental illness, or psychological experiments. The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we're puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”
[emphasis added]

Coyne claims here that the “sense of willing” is negated by (a) monkeying around in the brain with electrodes, (b) mental illness (already delusional), (c) psychologists in charge of confusing test subjects. This, to Coyne, makes the “scientific conclusion” ineluctable. There are some additional problems with this, atop of the surface absurdity being asserted:

(1) where are these scientific conclusions being ineluctably asserted? He doesn't say.

(2) No science is ineluctable. Ever. Period.

(3) And exactly how is puppetry asserted on my decision to type this word? He doesn't say.

Perhaps his electrons could get in touch with my electrons, and explain these lapses.

”Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices. But then where do these illusions of both will and "free" will come from? We're not sure. I suspect that they're the products of natural selection, perhaps because our ancestors wouldn't thrive in small, harmonious groups — the conditions under which we evolved — if they didn't feel responsible for their actions. Sociological studies show that if people's belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors.”

So if we are all, every one of us,100% deluded (Except Coyne and associates) it is all covered by evolution, which Coyne knows for certain is True. Because evolution is True, there is no need to provide any evidence apparently.

Perhaps there actually are people who are merely meat machines, automatons driven by their electrons to do things which have no decision making made in conscious space; maybe Coyne is one of those who has no conscious control over what he writes, because it is directed causally by his electrons and their physics, clear back to the Big Bang. Still it is doubtful that Coyne, one would think, would claim no credit for having written these things, because he is a paid, staff philosopher who needs to publish in order to eat. For Coyne to reject his own agency is highly unlikely: someone should ask him how that works out for him.

If Coyne believes that his house, plumbing, automobile, roads, the computer he types on, that all these things were created 7 seconds or more prior to thinking about them, he has a lot more to prove than blood flow directed to certain areas in the brain. Coyne seems programmed, in fact, to consider only a certain type of input, under certain presuppositions which he cannot shake.

He winds up with a list of consequences of having no Free Will.

First is that religion which promotes free choice of its tenets is falsified. (how could we have guessed that?)

Second, is that criminals are not responsible for their actions (who is, then?). Coyne is quick to assert his moral reasons for why criminals actually should be punished anyway. But ironically his reasoning involves free choice: a person might not like that consequence and choose a different path for future behavior.

Coyne recognizes “not much downside” to denying Free Will. And there are upsides, two of them:

(1) ” The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection.”

Actually this seems to mean that blind belief in evolution is an occasion for wonder and joy.

(2) ” Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.”

Having just admitted the following: ” Sociological studies show that if people's belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors”, Coyne’s conclusion is bizarre; more empathy? Are you sure, Jerry? And who is to say that the current level of empathy is insufficient? Does Coyne have the moral authority to so declare? Based on exactly what data? Certainly not the data which he himself provides, which specifically indicates less empathy, not more. All in all, it looks like another ideology being presented as science of some sort.

Coyne is an unabashed Philosophical Materialist whose inadequate comprehension of science, its axioms, as well as computers, their operation and design, renders his philosophical twisting of neurological findings false and useless. And that is not to mention that his own agency in making these declarations falsifies the declarations outright. It’s not rocket science to understand that.

Note to self: I probably should mention Scientism in this review, so I just did.
Another Note: hat tip to Mariano. Thanks!

Dualism at Massimo's Place

2012-01-07T09:02:00.000-06:00

I have violated my (somewhat malleable) principle of not commenting on other blogs, by placing two comments on Massimo Pigliucci's blog article regarding physicalism vs. dualism. I really didn't expect them to see daylight (Massimo has 86'd some of the other comments I have attempted there), but he has allowed them this time. Since they go counter to the standard Atheist anti-dualism position, they might generate some interesting reading.

From PZ's Place, Diego Rosato, Italy, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-06T17:46:00.000-06:00

From PZ’s Place

Because there is no reason to not be it.

Diego Rosato
Italy

Summary:
Rosato claims there is no reason not to be an Atheist.

A Failure of Amnesty.

2012-01-06T11:24:00.000-06:00

Not too long ago I allowed amnesty to those who have been banned from the blog in the past, on the theory that perhaps they had reconsidered their approach and thoughts about logic and logical discussions.

Almost immediately I had to reassert the ban on one individual, and others are finding their time becoming limited here.

PZ actually has a link to a list of people he has banned from his blog. I need to create the same sort of list, but with links to their comments for reference, so that sock puppets are also avoided. It's unfortunate that it comes to this, especially when all that is asked of commenters is that they be civil and accept logic as the basis of discussion.

If that needs clarification, by logic I mean the accepted methods of inductive and deductive logic - primarily deductive - as they are presented in college textbooks. This means that "I think I am logical" is NOT an acceptable approach to rational thinking. Nor is dodging questions, changing definitions, refusing to acknowledge logical errors (or worse, Special Pleading that they actually work fine for this particular case). Coversations can be impeded in a great many ways, because there are many types of falseness. In comparison, there is only one truth, the rest is not-truth (false). Impeding a conversation which is dedicated to finding that which is valid and that which is true, by asserting any and all manner of falseness, demanding that it be accepted, while not accepting either that the falseness shown to them applies to their assertion, or that the counter assertion is, in fact, within the bounds of logic, is merely obstructionism, not rational conversation. Such obstructionism will be pointed out, and then if it is not corrected, the offender will be banned.

If a commenter cannot even study logic enough to know what it actually is, and then insists on dominating discussions with absolute illogic, he is in jeopardy of losing his privileges here. Permanently.

For Discussion...

2012-01-06T08:49:00.000-06:00

If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic?

From PZ's Place, Tom J, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-05T17:10:00.000-06:00

From PZ's place:

At some point in my teens I became rather disenchanted with being Catholic. Well, not with all of Catholicism. Mainly I was disappointed over the sacrament of Confirmation. All my life my parents and elders told me God was real and that Confirmation (“bierzmowanie” as they call it in Polish) was going to prove it to me. The Great Catholic Bishop James Timlin traveled all the way down from Scranton to anoint my fellow Catholics and me with the Sacred Chrism and make me a man in the eyes of God. We were all going to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Finally the moment came. One by one were brought before His Excellency, The Bishop.

He made his rounds to all us who spent the last decade learning and preparing for this second baptism. While I waited, I imagined what it would be like to finally meet YHWH in person. I pictured lots of singing and soft lights. Those around me straighted up as His Excellency approached. At last, it was finally my turn. He said some words of prayer. I responded. I closed my eyes and I was ready to faint and receive the gifts of the Almighty. “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.” I felt a greasy thumb smear a rough triangle across my brow. I closed my eyes tighter, waiting for the Holy Spirit to make himself known. I took several slow deep breathes in anticipation. The bishop moved on to the person next to me and the cycle repeated. I looked to the left. I glanced to the right. Everyone had shiny, sticky foreheads that fittingly smelled like church. Just prior to the mass, all everyone was talking about was how much cash they were getting from their relatives for being confirmed. Cash was nice, but I felt no Holy Spirit and I was let down. Maybe the Bishop was just bad at anointing. Maybe I didn’t say the words sincerely enough. Whatever the reason, it didn’t happen to me. I must have dropped the Gift of the Holy Spirit or something.

A girl from school invited me to go to her Wesleyan youth group several times and I got to see how Christians discuss the Bible. Catholics don’t discuss the Bible. The Catholic Brothers and Fathers tell you what the stories are and what they mean. It was nice to have an interactive forum for a change. However, they never discussed the parts of the Bible where the morally questionable stuff happened– like the part where Lot is seduced by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36) or where bald Elijah gets Yahweh to send two bears to kill the youth that mock his lack of hair (2 Kings 23-25). I didn’t know about these stories either so selective teaching is alive in well not just in Catholicism..

A pivotal test of faith for me came when I saw an TV ad for a debate about God in 2007. It was to be on ABC’s Nightline. Martin Bashir was going to moderate a debate over whether God exists.

It featured the somewhat famous actor Kirk Cameron and YouTuber Ray Comfort proclaiming that they would demonstrate evidence that God exists. The other debate team was two people named Brian and Kelly from some obscure organization called the “Rational Response Squad”. Who were these damned dirty atheists claiming there was no YHWH? Those fuckers– how dare they challenge the evidence of God! I genuinely was excited to finally see evidence, at long last. I wanted once and for all know whether my mom and dad’s religion had something to it. I wanted to be a better Catholic and this was the incentive for me to finally grow up and be responsible for my sins and fell the power of the Holy Spirit.

The promos of the debate promised that Ray and Kirk were going to prove God exists without invoking scripture. I was finally going to see this for myself. I missed the original broadcast of Nightline because of my work schedule, so I caught the debate as clips posted to YouTube. The opening statement from Ray left me aghast. His claim was that “using eyes that see and a brain that works” we can see that we are standing on God’s creation. A creation needs a creator. Therefore, YHWH exists. Creationism. Plus he threw in a sermon about sinning while invoking the ten commandments (from scripture). The same shit I heard all my life. The bit about buildings needing builders and paintings needing painters, was trumped in grade school science class when we learned the Earth’s creation is plausibly explained by the process of accretion. No YHWH required.

Brian and Kelly didn’t even need to say a word. To me, they already won. Kirk and Ray were the best that religion had to offer on national television? Brian and Kelly went on to point out the philosophical and logical flaws in Ray’s and Kirk’s arguments. Atheism trounced the foundations of YHWH so soundly, I could not ever go back to believing in that bat shit craziness anymore. Only then did it make obvious sense why the Holy Spirit didn’t visit me at Confirmation. For the first time I saw truly rational people telling the religious, to their faces, that they were not only full of shit, but that their burden of proof is not met by a self-contradicting bronze age tome cobbled together by a committee who performed the miracle of turning monotheism into polytheism by inventing the Trinity™, a concept which oddly is never hinted at in said tome.

In the years since then I’ve enjoyed watching guys like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens debate creationists and apologists in the dozens of YouTube clips available on the subject. Not once has any of the religious put forth anything credible to show the existence of their deity. The burden of proof has always been on theism and their burden is no longer mine.
Tom J
United States

Tom J makes these points:

1. At Confirmation he expected a supernatural experience by seeing God and feeling the Holy Ghost. It didn’t happen.

2. The Bible has bad stuff in it.

3. Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort used Creationism on TV, instead of some other expectation.

4. Earth was formed by accretion.

5. Bible doesn’t meet Burden of Proof in his eyes.

6. Burden of Proof is on Theists, not Atheists, and no evidence has been provided for Theism.

Summary: Originally Catholic, disappointed at Confirmation at the lack of supernatural experience. Influenced negatively by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort as creationists; some Scientism possible; denies any burden of proof for Atheism, Theism has the burden and hasn’t provided evidence (probable Materialism)

The National Atheist Political Party.

2012-01-05T09:15:00.000-06:00

Atheists have formed their own political party. The party is growing, with members in all states. Claiming to represent the position of Atheism in political affairs, the NAP seems pretty much indistinguishable from any other leftist group. I doubt that many politicians will seek the support of the NAP.

I wonder if this can be an admission that conservative Atheists are outliers in the Atheist population? Or perhaps they will need to start their own party too?

Finally: Obama Birth Certificate and SS to be Legally Examined

2012-01-05T08:42:00.000-06:00

On December 15, 2011, Defendant, President Barack Obama, moved for dismissal of Plaintiffs' challenge to his qualifications for office. The Court has jurisdiction to hear this contested case pursuant to Chapter 13 of Title 50, the "Georgia Administrative Procedure Act."

For the reasons indicated below, Defendant's Motion to Dismiss is DENIED.

....

Accordingly, this Court finds that Defendant is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.

The full four page court document is here and is well worth the read.

What is at issue here is Obama's birth certificate and his Social Security card, issued in a state where he never lived. Apparently this frees up the process of discovery, which can demand originals, and full details of issuance. Obama's common defense of trying get the charges dismissed on the premise that the office of president of the USA is somehow exempt was denied.

More here and here.

Vox Day points out the most likely conclusion to this: Obama will suddenly abandon his campaign, possibly for health or family reasons. That would possibly prevent the release of the (non-existant) birth certificate, and would prevent the complete dismissal of the Obamacare and other social engineering laws with Obama's name on them.

That would free up Hillary to take the reins for the next eight years.

From PZ's Place, K. Davidson, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-04T17:45:00.002-06:00

From PZ's place:

Firstly, I take issue with having to explain why I don’t believe in the existence of one possible, or few possible, entities in a universe of infinite possibilities.

Why don’t I believe that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu while whistling Ode to Joy backwards will rain pogo sticks upon the world? (What, it didn’t work? You must have missed one of the notes.) Why don’t I believe that the world sits on the shell of a giant turtle? Why don’t I believe that having sex with my boyfriend will result in an eternity of hell fire? Just because something can be conceived doesn’t mean it has to be disproved.

But I do object to religion, and that deserves an explanation. First let me state that I take a quintessentially American view toward personal belief: That’s cool. What’s none of my business is none of my business and I am not so omnipotent that I can expect everyone to think the way I think. Nor would I want them to. I am not everyone, only myself and I want to learn from other people, I want to be persuaded, I want other people to have thoughts different from own.

I also don’t want to take things away from other people. Religious belief can be very significant, even life saving. I live a privileged life. I’m one of the few people (let alone women) throughout history who experienced genuine autonomy. I have control over what happens to me on a day to day basis. I have no major crises to attend, no survival to fight for. My life is not a series of things just happening to me. I have control, mostly because I have an education, pale skin and knowledge of how to navigate this liberal, wealthy society. Not everyone does. Many, if not most, people live lives like pinballs, tossed around from bumper to bumper, scared, depressed, anxious. They lack control. So if those people get through their days with a belief that live under the umbrella of God’s love, if they are able to get up and function because they think when this is all over they will receive their just reward (and those rewards would be just), then God bless them. I will never begrudge anyone any tool of survival.

The problem comes when those with power believe in a false cause and effect. That is dangerous, that is anti-social and needs to be stamped out for the betterment of people.

There are two obvious problems with false cause and effect. The first is quite obvious. If a child is sick with infection and her adult care-taker believes that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu will cure her, but antibiotics won’t, that empowered caretaker will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. We can extrapolate that across society. If people with power believe that giving HPV vaccinations will lead to retaliations from a vengeful god, those empowered people will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. There are so many examples of this affecting OUR shared society. Psychological torture of gays, miseducation of our children, stunting the potential of young girls by refusing them access to information about birth control, shooting wars with other cultures… ad infinitum.

That is completely unacceptable. We cannot allow the hard won bounty of human endeavor, i.e., knowledge and information, to be squandered at the expense of real, live humans who have the right to the best possible lives we as a society can offer each other. We have come together throughout history to benefit from our collective knowledge and works. Those who would stand in opposition to this knowledge reap its benefits every day. They flush toilets and watch television and eat cheap food. In my view, there is no difference in avoiding cholera by means of sewage systems and avoiding the pain of ostracism by means of admitting that it’s the only downside to homosexuality.

In short, I believe that failing to proceed with the best possible information about cause and effect is a crime.

The second problem with religious adherence is more subtle, but possibly more dangerous. On an individual level, believing that there is a set of specific desires held by some higher power leads to a population of people “just following orders.” It removes all ethical and moral agency from the individual, which is, in my view, distinctly unethical and immoral. One hears the tired argument, “How can anyone who doesn’t believe in God’s retribution know right from wrong?” The absurdity of this is obvious to anyone with a deeply personal and evolved set of principles. I know it is wrong to hurt people for my own gratification and I suffer emotionally in the here and now for it. I am not so disconnected from the rest of humanity that I forget the value of other humans. I am not so mercenary that without threat to my own personage I would harm others. I am a fully formed, typical human in that way.

But I would take my response to that a step further and say that I am more moral because of it. This is because I have to choose, from my own free will, what is wrong and what is right. When I was a child, my sense of right and wrong was influenced by adults, but I am no longer a child and have to take full and complete responsibility. If I simply believe that there is a list handed down from some higher being, I can no longer say that I know right from wrong. Anything can be plugged into that list — a list interpreted by humans, no less — and I will happily go along. Don’t eat meat on Fridays? Okay. Give ten percent to charity? Okay. Kill all first born children? Okay. (Interestingly, there are some beautiful Christian works which hit exactly on this issue, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, which fundamentally posits that God chose his most beloved and beautiful angel to become the devil because He knew that there was no meaning in faith unless people chose it of their own free will. Even St. Augustine said that God values most the souls of those who sinned and came to Him by choice.)

Here’s what it really comes down to: the public sphere. There are places where I and other people have to intersect, people who believe in different sets of cause and effect. But here’s the thing: I can’t have a religious conversation with people in that public sphere, in doings of the State. I have nothing to say about anyone’s religion on a theological level and, not to put to fine a point on it, I don’t care how many angels one group thinks can dance on the head of a needle versus another group. When discussing social and public policy, I cannot have this conversation. I don’t know how strongly I can express this. I can only discuss the pragmatic outcomes of cause of and effect based on evidence and the shared knowledge created by my fellow humans.

But of course a religious person would be a hypocrite if they left their truest and deepest beliefs at the door. It’s the absolute and inevitable outcome of earnest belief. Now, I know a lot of people who identify as religious who do no such thing, who keep these spheres very separate and I have absolutely no objection. These are also the people who would walk away from any religious leader who asked them to violate their sense of right and wrong. But this is not everyone. We see people running for the presidency of the United States who quite literally cannot see any “right” besides pushing forward their own personal theology onto the nation as a whole. If you truly believe that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu would prevent a massive tsunami, wouldn’t you hope you were the kind of person who would do everything in her power to get to Katmandu and do those cartwheels?

This is why religion is destructive. It is to this that I object. It for this reason that I would like to see it fade away into wisps of nothingness. So perhaps this doesn’t answer why I don’t believe in a god, but I hope it answer why I think it’s best not to believe in a god.

K. Davidson

Davidson makes these points:

1. Just because something can be conceived doesn’t mean it has to be disproved.

2. Religion is OK for mindless pinballs.

3. False cause and effect is a problem when believed by those in power. That is dangerous and needs to be stamped out.

4. Our collective knowledge and works are to be used for the betterment of people.

5. Failing to use this form of cause and effect is a crime.

6. ”On an individual level, believing that there is a set of specific desires held by some higher power leads to a population of people “just following orders.” It removes all ethical and moral agency from the individual, which is, in my view, distinctly unethical and immoral.” Apparently this means that no one thinks but her and her type.

7. Her personal ethic: ”I know it is wrong to hurt people for my own gratification and I suffer emotionally in the here and now for it. I am not so disconnected from the rest of humanity that I forget the value of other humans. I am not so mercenary that without threat to my own personage I would harm others. I am a fully formed, typical human in that way.”

But I would take my response to that a step further and say that I am more moral because of it. This is because I have to choose, from my own free will, what is wrong and what is right. “

8. Religious morality is just a list, one which is interpreted by humans. She includes Catholic issues here.

9. Her moral rules for social and public policy discussions: ”When discussing social and public policy, I cannot have this conversation. I don’t know how strongly I can express this. I can only discuss the pragmatic outcomes of cause of and effect based on evidence and the shared knowledge created by my fellow humans.”

10.” We see people running for the presidency of the United States who quite literally cannot see any “right” besides pushing forward their own personal theology onto the nation as a whole.”

11. Religion is destructive.

Summary: No indication of when she became Atheist; religion is for mindless pinballs; believers have no minds and perform as automatons to lists of decreed ethics. She has her own ethics which she uses for each situation. Cause and effect are to be determined by the accumulation of knowledge and works of human society, and only that is to be used in discussions of social and public policy; the final reference to evidence implies Materialism; She advocates the elimination of religion onto the nation as a whole, even while condemning those who push their own theology onto the nation as a whole, because when religion does it, it is destructive.

Some rather random thoughts...

2012-01-04T13:25:00.000-06:00

I was having a good chuckle over the realization that PZ Meyers actually thought that I fear him and that’s why I did not explicitly link back to his site, when I realized something else:

Any and every Atheist is a perfect example of Atheism which has no moral code, while any and every Christian is an imperfect example of Christianity as embodied by Christ. Christians aspire to a standard that is higher than possible for humans to meet or at least maintain. Atheists aspire to be thought of as automatically “Good Without God”, even while having no Atheist moral code whatsoever, much less one in common.

Atheists not only have no songs (note 1), they have no paragons, no moral authorities, no grounded philosopher, and no grounded philosophy. And it is on this that the major players base their arrogant pose of superiority. Like Skepticism, Atheism is merely a rejection, and nothing more. It is an attack on logic and knowledge which is discomfiting, especially to the young and immature. Neither Skepticism nor Atheism has a positive contribution to make; both merely say, in effect, “I reject”. And neither produces any reason for rejection, other than “I don’t accept” what you say, or maybe “your evidence doesn’t satisfy my needs”.

When pinned down with demands for actual reasons for their belief system, it is typical for an Atheist to resort to circularity or to embedded Materialism rather than grounded logic, assuming that s/he remain engaged to that degree rather than to begin other types of attacks to avoid direct logical analysis. Some will merely sit on their rejection, with no attempt to justify it with logic or data. Others default to Scientism or anti-ecclesiasticism. Still others develop fanciful philosophies which fall immediately under the scrutiny of logical processing. But there is never any decisive material evidence nor grounded logic for supporting their beliefs. Denial is all they have.

Certainly there are influential Atheists who convince young people that science answers all questions: Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, possibly Richard Feynman, probably legions of professors who are Scientistically motivated, and philosophically challenged. Feynman, for all his massive brilliance, berated philosophy in general, which he didn’t even try to understand, and he totally misunderstood Cargo Cults. The works of Dawkins pale beside the brilliance of Feynman. Dawkins’ brief forays into philosophy have been publically panned by actual students of philosophy. Christopher Hitchens blamed all evil in the world on religion in his book subtitled, Religion Poisons Everything”, which he did by the illicit logical gerrymandering of all Atheist atrocities into the category of religion. Daniel Dennett tried to redefine agency reductively in order to fit it into the ideology of Materialism. Sam Harris thinks science can define morals. Massimo Pigliucci claimed that life has no essence unless it is DNA. Atheist absurdities might be acceptable to youngsters, but even many other Atheists balk at much of the Atheist philosophy being produced. Agreement is hard to find.

Interestingly, the Atheist community seems to attack itself with the same verve as it attacks those outsiders who do not think like them. The simple idea of being nice, being civil when discussing issues with each other, much less outsiders, has drawn vicious condemnations from both sides of the Atheist divide. The issue of feminism vs. the crudities of male Atheists on Atheist discussion boards is another fight producing venom and division. It is common to find an Atheist declaring “I’m not like those Atheists! Atheists have only one thing in common: rejection of the existence of a deity.” Not so. All Atheists have several things in common.

All Atheists have this in common: Atheism has no ethic attached to it. It has no philosophy attached to it. Atheism is license to claim freedom from all restraint, precisely because it has no morality or philosophy or logic attached to it. Hence: Free Thinking. When I asked Pigliucci how he avoided circular or infinite regressions in his “analysis of ideas”, our conversation stopped: he would not post my question. There are only three paths involved in validation of premises: (1)grounding in absolute principles; (2)infinite regression; (3)circularity. Free Thinking is not bounded by any absolute grounding. Admitting to absolutes is the beginning of the end for Atheist philosophy. So absolutes are denied, categorically, (and absolutely). Atheism absolutely requires this. So what is left is circularity and infinite regress.

^^^^vvvv^^^^

For an Atheist to claim an ethic or a morality, he cannot do so under the simple banner of Atheism. A person claiming both Atheism and an ethic is claiming two separate ideological positions. So any person desiring to be known as being “Good Without God”, for example, cannot be believed if that claim is made purely under Atheism. That claim must be made under some other banner, that of a specific ethic which clearly defines its concept of what is “Good”; plus it must state the source of its moral authority for such declarations of a moral nature.

Since the “Good Without God” claims are made by Atheist organizations which do not elaborate on what source of ethics might be involved or what “Good” might mean to every Atheist, and apparently are declaring themselves as the source of moral authority, they should not wonder that their claim is rejected as a tenet or property of Atheism. In fact, such a claim is at best an indication of intellectual immaturity at having not considered the truth value of such a claim, and at worst an indication of lying as moral tenet of Atheism. Yet they wonder why their trustworthiness is considered below that of a rapist.

(Note 1) Steve Martin wrote one for them, apparently forgetting about John Lennon’s Imagine.

A Note from PZ Meyers

2012-01-03T12:29:00.000-06:00

I got this email from PZ:

I notice that you're using MY content

It's not a problem, except for the fact that you don't include a link back to the article on my site. Failure to do so is unethical and cowardly, which does help confirm my general opinion of believers, but probably isn't in your best interest.

--
PZ Myers, Ph.D. (320) 589-6343/fax 6371
Division of Science & Math 2135, 2390 Science
University of Minnesota, Morris
Morris, MN 56267 http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

Interesting veiled threat, there. I have always attributed the articles to PZ's place, and the dates corellate well, so I assumed that an intellegent source could find them at PZ's place. Unethical and cowardly? My, my. PZ can't seem to converse without personal attacks, and now veiled threats.

But, in order to keep his blood pressure down, I will include the link in the future. Sorry PZ. Lean back, take a breath and smash a cracker. You'll feel better.

From PZ's Place,James Stuby, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-03T09:31:00.004-06:00

The first reason for me is that church was boring. We had an old, nice man for a pastor who I distinctly remember recycling the same sermon at least three times (“Humble yourself and you will be exalted, exalt yourself and you will be humbled” – clear enough, right? But no, we need a half hour sermon relating this to some crap in the bible). There weren’t any fun activities that were church-related. I hated the boring old hymns and the old geezers I had to stand next to and listen to them sing awfully. My dad once made a joke about communion – “You get a little snack today, kids.” But it was actually a slight motivating factor – the communion bread was tasty. Little did dad know it really was the only thing my brother and I had to look forward to in church at times. Apart from the normal angst at having to get up early, I really hated having to dress up. For what? They say god loves you no matter what, so why the hell do I need to wear a nice sweater to impress him? Oh, it is not about impressing god, it is about impressing everyone else.

I remember a sunday where the ususal reverend couldn’t make it so they had some fire-and-brimstone asshole get up and run the show for a day. He told the men not to “look with lust” on women, for that was adultery. For some reason the phrase stuck with me, and when going through puberty I started noticing breasts on women of all ages, but at the same time feeling ashamed about it. I eventually got over that but it sure was annoying.

The only thing that made church tolerable in high school was the fact that they filmed the services, and I learned how to run the camera. This paid off in college when I easily got a job with the A/V department at minimum wage. Thanks religion!

In late elementary school, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was on PBS. Now that show filled me with awe and wonder, and explained a lot of stuff that church glossed over or ignored. My jaw dropped at the sophisticated animation (for 1980 or so) of polymerase spiraling up some DNA, grabbing nucleotides, and building an exact copy of the split molecule on both sides. So that’s how it works! Awesome! I want to learn more about genetics! There were many other moments on that show that made things clear and inspired me to learn more. I brought it up in science class in 5th grade, “When I was watching Cosmos the other night, they explained that” and all the other students would roll their eyes, because they’d heard that line before.

In 8th grade I actually read almost all of my chemistry textbook over one weekend, again captivated by how the world actually works, with protons and electrons that have opposite charges, and how the charges seek to neutralize each other in chemical reactions. It explained why salt is a cube, why plastic is durable, and why metal conducts electricity, all at once. You never get this in church.

I had a close friend in high school. We were both extreme science nerds, and took three years of Latin as well, just because it was hard. But my friend went the way of creationism in 12th grade, believing the earth was 6000 years old and that Jesus was coming back after the rapture. At one point I went with him to some church where they had a ventriloquist/puppet operator who told christian jokes, bringing on the awkwardness of feeling obligated to laugh. I was still wavering at that point, and may have come close to making the circular connection in my brain that makes christians feel warm and fuzzy all the time, which they call “being saved.”

But later, I didn’t buy any of my friend’s arguments. He said it all came down to your assumptions, which I have heard other creationists retreat towards since that time. I saw him once after graduating high school, I think, and then pretty much didn’t bother tracking him after that. He was the poster boy of a wasted mind to me for two decades.

College was of course eye-opening. I took genetics, biogeography, anatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology, and started reading Richard Dawkins’s books. I took a lot of anthropology, and I have to say it was more of a distraction than anything, but it did lead to some good times and interesting experiences. I learned about cultural relativism, which is the belief that cultures need to be understood on their own terms and that all are worthy of preservation and respect. I don’t buy that so much any more, given knowledge of people living under Sharia law, for example. But I did learn about archaeology which is about empirical evidence of past events. I worked as an archaeologist (“field tech”) for a few years after college.

I also took some geology in college, although somewhat late in my Junior year. Had there been enough time, I would have changed majors. The field trips taught me to see things in hills and along roads that my eye had glossed over before. The earth was clearly very old for such complexity to be present, no doubt about it, and I had only seen a very small portion of it. I started reading Steven Jay Gould’s books about that time.

I also had a good friend in college that was as nerdy as me and like-minded about a lack of a benevolent or even interactive god. We used call up christian hotlines and harrass the racist/sexist idiots at the other end with questions about morality that they gave extremely bad advice about. My friend asked if it was okay to have a freind that was a muslim who was gay. The answer was no, of course. I used to go off about design flaws in anatomy at them, such as the fact that the esophagus and trachea cross making it easy for humans to choke, to see if they had any sensible reply, and they never did.

Somewhere in early college I learned about Richard Feynman too. It is hard not to agree with that guy.

And I got into Rush – listen to Permanent Waves sometime.

I should mention a lapse into irrationality I had for a few years. This is embarrassing, but I read Whitley Streiber’s ‘Communion’ and its sequels, and I believed a lot of it, and was scared by it to the point that some nights I couldn’t sleep for fear of aliens hiding in the closet. But who do I have to thank for clearing my head of such nonsense? Carl Sagan. I read ‘The Demon-haunted World’ and was cured.

I got to grad school after my stint as a field archaeologist, and majored in geology. It mostly solidified my well-established atheism, through better understanding of the complexity of the geologic record and deep time required for it. Creationists have no adequate answer for the geologic record – they run away from it, or lie about it.

And of course, most recently I’ve been reading Pharyngula.

I saw my creationist friend from high school at the 20-year reunion, and things were amicable enough. I’m a geologist now, and guess what he is – an accountant. No science for him.

James Stuby
United States

It was somewhat difficult to find the actual points Stuby makes. I think they are these:

1. Church was boring and not fun.

2. Science answers questions not answered in church, like physical chemistry, etc.

3. Science contradicts the Bible.

4. Influenced by Sagan, especially TV series, Cosmos.

5. Comes close to an argument here:
” He said it all came down to your assumptions, which I have heard other creationists retreat towards since that time.”
But he doesn’t question his assumptions.

6. Harassed Christians with points about ethics and physiology.

7. Earth is old; creationists have no answer.

8. His final comment indicates Scientism as an elitist ideology.

Summary: Possibly always Atheist, he never connected with church; accepted Scientism, probably in 8th grade; influenced by Sagan, Gould, Feynmann. Rejected a chance to question his assumptions.

From PZ's Place, Gribble the Munchkin, UK, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-03T09:06:00.000-06:00

I am an atheist.

I guess i became an atheist when i was still in primary school (for the non-Brits out there, thats ages 5 to 11). I used to be christian. My parents had helped re-open a run down Church of England church and my family and a few others became the first parishioners there. I carried a big candle during mass, wore a robe and had a wooden crucifix on a leather cord and generally helped out with the little chores during the service along with a bunch of other kids. Its safe to say that i had absolutely no understanding of the religion of which i actively partook. To me Jesus was a lovely man with a beard who nice dead people went to live with. God was a kindly father figure. All of the atheist arguements and objections to faith with which I am now very familiar were utterly unknown to me. I was perhaps aware of a place called hell but that was reserved for murderers and Hitler.

I can no longer remember my exact age or my exact reasons but one day i decided that i should read the bible. That pretty much did in any faith I once held. I had foolishly neglected to get a recommended list of chapters from my priest and had started at the start. The first thing that struck my mind was that the bible was clearly wrong. Even back then i knew the universe was some 14 billion years old and the earth some 4.5 billion. My paltry science education was wildly at odds with God doing the whole thing in seven days and breathing life into clay men. But what really got me was how poorly written it was. Have you ever tried to read the bible sequentially, start to finish? Its incredibly dull.

I’m blessed (lol) in that i have fantastic parents who encouraged me from a very young age to read. I devoured books with a pace that put my classmates to shame and although i was hardly a critic, i could very rapidly spot that this book was crap. During primary school I read the Hobbit many times and even the Lord of the Rings and those I found to be good books. The bible could not hold a candle to them. It was clearly the same genre, there were wizards and monsters, magic and battles, heroes and villains (more on them in a second), all it really lacked was a likeable character to emphasise with, through whom we could enjoy the story (C3PO or a hobbit for instance). It clearly wasn’t real. More than that, it struck me that some of the passages i was reading really made God out to be somewhat of an arsehole.

Example: In church and from snippets of conversation here and there I was aware that Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and that Pharaoh did not agree with this and chased the fleeing Jews. God foiled nasty ol’ Pharaoh by allowing the jews to escape though the red sea, parting it before them and crushing the pursuing Egyptians. That was exodus as far as i was concerned. What the bible actually says is that when Moses asks Pharaoh to let his people go, Pharaoh actually agrees! But then God changes his mind. Why? Why would a sane person do that? Wasn’t that exactly what God had asked Moses to do? Why change Pharaohs mind when you just got what you wanted? It just got worse from there. God acts like a spoilt bully, demanding obedience and frequently making the lives of his followers miserable with arbitrary rules or freak punishments. I realised that not only did i no longer like god, i also recognised him as a poorly written villain.

I’ve always been a nerd and into my fantasy and sci-fi. I know how heroes and villains act in literature. Heroes protect the weak, fight evil, sacrifice themselves to protect others and try to make the world a better place. Villains demand loyalty, punish failure harshly and brutalise their foes. After reading the bible, it was clear to me. God was nothing but a fantasy setting villain. Even Jesus doesn’t cut the hero grade (although he might make a suitable naive sidekick for a real hero). Dying on the cross seems like little sacrifice when you are the son of god and know that you’ll be ending up in paradise as a god just as soon as you shed your mortal flesh. Hell, i’d be willing to suffer six hours of crucifixion for super powers, let alone full godhood. Only 6 hours too. Crucifixion was supposed to be a long drawn out death from thirst, heat or starvation, sometimes lasting days. He got off a bit light.

No, it was clear to me. Gandalf and Aragorn were far superior heroes to God and Christ. And all of them were fiction.

After losing my faith i pretty much ignored religion until university. It’s easy to do here in the UK. At university i began to look around for a religion, i wasn’t really looking for big answers. Science had pretty much beaten religion to them for me. I just wanted to see if any of the faiths out there actually made sense to me. I looked at Christianity again very briefly, then paganism, Satanism (of the Anton Le Vay type), various occult groups (OTO, etc) and Buddhism. All of it transparent claptrap. One day i found transhumanism and realised that this was it. This was what i already believed, this made sense to me. This is what i was.

The great thing about Transhumanism is that its not a faith. Its a philosophy. Basically it couples humanism with an urge to improve the human condition. Because it isn’t a faith it has all kinds of viewpoints within it. You have your Kurzweilian singularitarians sure, but even in that group, you have a huge range of opinion on when, to what degree, how, where, etc. Its a conversation, rather than a commandment.

I’ve since found skepticism and joined the Greater Manchester Skeptics. Skeptism i see as a filter to my transhumanism. One keeps me inspired, the other keeps me grounded in reality. My atheism now is very much a side effect of the skepticism and Transhumanism. My skeptic side tells me there is no good evidence for a god, that there are thousands of gods from all kinds of cultures and that the big faiths got big from very real world reasons (Roman empire adopting christianity, incredibly muslim military successes, etc). My transhumanism tells me that gods are old news. An antiquated way of looking at the world and something that holds mankind back from being better than it is and should hence be removed.
Atheism is not enough. It is a necessary state, but not the end of the journey by any means.

Gribble the Munchkin
United Kingdom

Gribble makes these points:

1. Atheist in primary school; church was boring; didn’t understand it.
2. primary focus as youth was fantasy and sci-fi.
3. The Bible is poorly written compared to modern fantasy/ sci-fi; the God of the bible matches the evil villain in fantasy books. God is an “arse-hole”.
4. God doesn’t perform the way that he would.
5. Ultimately chose transhumanism (apparently not singularity type) as a philosophy
6. Uses skepticism to balance transhumanism.
7. Religion holds mankind back and should be removed.

Summary: Atheist as a child; reasons as an adult: God of Bible matches evil villain in better written sci-fi and fantasy books; God is an arse-hole; God doesn’t perform the way he would; he accepts some form of transhumanism/skepticism; religion should be removed.

From PZ's Place,Fabio Jardim, Brazil, On Why I Am An Atheist

2012-01-01T14:41:00.001-06:00

I’m an atheist because I want to live my life honestly, not only in deed but in thought.

I used to be an enthusiastic catholic boy. The notion of an ordered universe, with a clear cause and effect for both good and bad things, was immensely appealing. Ironically, it was catholic school that stomped that belief out of me. First in showing how the actually engaging, intelligent teachers got frustrated and stonewalled by the older, conservative dogmatists, and eventually how even the best of them could only offer non-answers or cruel ignorance when confronted with any meaningful question. Children actually have a good bullshit detector, and mine was always reading off the scale, all the time.

My father actually helped, and not by accident. Like me, he was a catholic school student growing up; since they get colossal tax breaks, they actually offered decent education, comparable to the expensive private schools, for a very affordable price. So when my dad was confronted with the choice of putting me in a lousy school or try to give me a better shot even if it came with religious strings attached…he decided that since he survived it without too many scars, so could I.

He was right, but not for the reasons he thought. My father came out of catholic school a faint deist, perhaps, with a somewhat comical distrust of clergy. He doesn’t think much about it. I found the library and became an early history buff. I learned about Phoenicians and ancient greek and romans, and all the gods they believed in, with as much fervor as any christian or muslim of our times, and about as much proof. Even the funny gauls in the Asterix comics had a roster of deities as believable as the Christ being used to officiate marriages, fight sin and give us our morals.

Becoming a teenager, I kept waiting for the excuses and dogma to make sense, as if it was my failure to trust them that caused any confusion. But it only got worse. Seeing priests and religious people passing both judgment and comfort in the name of something so tenuous felt increasingly uncomfortable, then repulsive. It’s odd how you don’t really feel how omnipresent religious presence (and pressure)in society is until you start to doubt, and it was a disquieting time, to say the least.

It wasn’t until I leafed through Carl Sagan’s A Demon-Haunted World in high school that I finally saw I wasn’t alone. Ironically, I heard about it from a friend who had thoroughly misread the book and thought it was a vindication for superstition and pseudo-science (“He says there are demons in the world! And he tells of how he could remotely see the war in Europe from the USA as a kid!”). It wasn’t an overt defense of atheism, and that made it even better. It showed me that there were other people in the world saying “They don’t really know. All the mystics and priests and holy books do not have the automatic claim to truth and respect they try to claim”, and it was educated, respectable people saying so.

And so I stopped even pretending to believe. If I do anything praiseworthy or noble to and for others, I want it to be due to my empathy and commitment, not to earn points with some vague, unearthly being, nor to advertise my piety to my religious tribe or convert others. And if I ever do anyone harm, the responsibility is also mine. There doesn’t need to be anything more attached to that premise. It works fine without theistic add-ons and glitter.

Brazil used to be overwhelming Catholic, but now evangelical Protestantism is putting a large dent into that and in turn making the Catholic church more obstinate in its pursuits. It’s not a good shift for the non-religious here. Popular television anchors say on the air here that all the criminals in prison are atheists and only get more fame out of the deal. I’d never say atheists and agnostics here have it worse than anywhere else; not even close. But it’s still seen as synonymous with evil and immorality, and it’s going to stay that way for a good bit yet. I’ve lost girlfriends when I told them of my lack of faith. But I don’t believe in hiding it. There’s a lot of comfort and not a small amount of pride in knowing that whatever friends, ideas and respect you have, you came by it being honest to yourself.

Fábio Jardim
Brazil

Jardim makes these joints:

1. Catholic Church stomped belief out of him; in Brazil,becoming more dogmatic, cannot give real answers. Priests pass judgment and give comfort at the same time.

2. There are other religions, including ancient, that believed in god(s).

3. Influenced by Sagan in High School. Religious people don’t automatically have truth; a respected authority says so.

4. Will take responsibility for the good things he does and for the bad things.

5. ”There’s a lot of comfort and not a small amount of pride in knowing that whatever friends, ideas and respect you have, you came by it being honest to yourself.”

Summary: In Catholic school, became doubtful, then in High School was influenced by Sagan to overtly claim Atheism; also historical influence: other religions had god(s) and beliefs. Atheism is not trusted in Brazil, but his honesty led to Atheism.

From PZ's Place, Tricia, Canada, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-31T16:45:00.000-06:00

The reason I am an Atheist is a very simple one: It is very important to me that the things I believe, are true. I accept that it’s logically impossible to prove a negative, but considering that in the entire history of humanity, nobody has ever found any good evidence for the existence of supernatural entities of any kind – and it’s certainly not for want of looking! – it seems reasonable to be just as certain that there really are no gods, as that there really is no ether and no phlogiston.

How I got here is a long story. Ironically enough, the seeds for my escape from religion were planted by the church I attended as a child. My family went to a Mennonite Brethren church, which was composed mostly of families like mine – Mennonites whose parents or grandparents had pursued an education and become city folk – as well as people of other ethnicities who had joined over the years. What we had in common with the Colony Mennonites was eating and singing, and a commitment to non-violence and social justice. A common theme of lessons and sermons was, “The Truth Will Set You Free.” Of course, the main “truth” they were talking about was salvation, but it also came up in the context of social justice, for example fighting prejudice, or using science to fight hunger and disease. The result of all this was that I was a very idealistic little girl.

Of course, I didn’t stay a little girl, and the idealism got squashed pretty hard. My church, and my extended family, either took a pretty hard swing to the right, or maybe they were always there and I hadn’t realized it. The messages changed, from “God is Love” and “We are called to a ministry of serving the poor and the sick and the oppressed,” to “Hell is awful and the Rapture could be any second” and “You are personally responsible for every sinner who goes to hell because you didn’t witness to them.” The graphic descriptions of the torment of hellfire and the horrors of the Tribulation were more than I could handle, and I often woke up from nightmares. To compound my terror, this particular brand of Evangelicalism makes one testable prediction: if you pray to accept Jesus as your personal saviour blah blah blah, then something (though it’s never described eactly what) is supposed to happen. A feeling of inner peace or connection with God or love or something. You’re supposed to Just Know you’re Saved. I prayed and prayed for years, with increasing desperation, and nothing happened. I never felt Saved. Clearly there was something wrong with me. I didn’t dare talk to anybody about it.

At the same time, other discourse in the church was giving me some ideas about why God might not want me. In the 1990s, in a church that considered itself radically progressive, there was a heated and divisive debate going on about whether women could be ordained as pastors. When it came down to a vote, the decision was the Bible said no, so that was that. There was plenty of anti-gay rhetoric going on as well. Plus a developing streak of dogmatism that frowned on asking questions and came with a goodly dose of anti-intellectualism on top. I came to believe that my existence was a massive case of entrapment: if God made me, and he hates queers and uppity women and people who can’t seem to stop asking “why”, then he deliberately made something he hates and I would be going to hell unless I somehow managed to not be what God made me as. What a setup!

I spent a few years as a straw atheist: I believed in God and was deeply afraid, and I hated him. I sat down to really read the Bible, to see if God really was the monster I’d come to believe in or if my church had gotten it wrong. Of course, what I learned was that if my church had gotten it wrong, it was by painting a far too rosy picture.

As I grew up, I got access to more and more books, and then the Internet, and learned about how the Bible actually came to be what it is today, and it looked less and less like the Divinely Inspired, Unerring Word of God, and more and more like a collection of confabulations selected to support a particular ideology.

I majored in psychology when I went to university, and we talked a lot about epistemology and the philosophy of science, and I learned about Karl Popper and the idea of falsifiability. Something clicked. I decided that if there was no scenario in which any possible outcome could prove there was no god, then God, for all practical purposes in this life, is irrelevant. I decided to live my life now, according to who I feel I am and what I believe is right and wrong, regardless of afterlife consequences. After all, it’s noble to stand up for what you believe is right, even at great personal cost. I’d take my martyrdom in the afterlife – but that’s another thing that’s impossible to make falsifiable predictions about.

Though I didn’t become a neuroscientist, I did take a lot of neuroscience courses towards my degree, and that sent mind-body dualism to the intellectual rubbish heap. If my mind is a function of my body, then it dies with my body and there’s nothing left to burn for eternity, so I have nothing to fear. The truth had set me free.

I haven’t escaped unscathed though. My depression probably also has genetic roots because it’s all over my family, but subjecting a child to that level of fear, accompanied with a heaping dose of self-loathing, can’t have improved matters. I have to really fight against thoughts like “I’m a depraved sinner who deserves to die.” I still have nightmares though they’re decreasing, and I have to be careful about stories featuring end of the world scenarios – I wasn’t old enough to see Terminator when it first came out, but I tried to watch it a couple years ago and had a panic attack during the opening credits and nightmares and flashbacks for a good week after. And I’m still angry – not at God but at the people who force the poison of religion on children’s minds.

TriciaCanada

Tricia makes several points:

1. Science shows that there is no God as sure as there is no phlogiston or ether.

2. She was terrorized in church. God made her something which he hates, and she would go to Hell unless she changed it. For a few years she believed in God and feared and hated him.

3. She read the Bible; it is evil and God is evil.

4. Psychology in university introduced Karl Popper and falsification, which convinced her that God was irrelevant.

5. Neuroscience studies proved to her that dualism is false.

6. Angry at people who force religion onto the minds of children.

Summary: Originally Mennonite, she was terrorized by the church / Hell. Accepted Scientism. Bible is evil. Popper and falsification prove God is irrelevant. Neuroscience proves dualism false. Age not given.

Does Your Bumper Sticker Embarass You?

2011-12-31T16:11:00.000-06:00

Works on Anti-Religious bumper stickers (BS) too!

Over At Massimo’s Place

2011-12-31T10:08:00.000-06:00

Over at Massimo’s place, things get ugly as three celebrity Atheists duke it out. Dawkins and Coyne get bitter and rude, and Massimo charges PhD envy, and he has more than the other two put together.

Of more substance is Massimo’s article on Atheist activism. The big division in the past has been over whether Atheists should be nice and tolerant while fighting for their own rights (whatever those are) or whether they should be “in your face”, meaning rude and crude while trying to eliminate religion altogether. This has been the internal Atheist war of “accomodationists” v.s. “anti-accomodationists”, where the anti-accomodationists refuse to tolerate even accomodationists like Massimo. (That’s the source of some of the vitriol from Coyne and Dawkins).

Massimo recommends four different objectives and gives reasons for them.
1. Unsurprisingly, first is the promotion of the Separation of Church and State. Even many Christians support this, especially when confronted with Sharia, or even the state churches in Europe. But the problem is in the definition: Atheists seem to want all ethical associations severed with the American religious tradition, Christianity. The dearth of common ethics associated with Atheism as a common objective for social contracts is a deadly characteristic for Atheism in this pursuit.

2. Atheists need to be accepted; Massimo points to the mistrusted groups data. Massimo’s position here is that Atheists need to behave themselves in order to generate trust:
” Now, if one’s goal is to be accepted (not just tolerated) in a society, one is more likely to achieve that goal by playing social and nice (which does not at all mean to capitulate or compromise on principles), as opposed to constantly jeering or hurling insults at other members of said society.”
Massimo is swimming up a waterfall here, for two reasons. First, Atheism as an ethical position generates distrust all by itself: it has no attached ethic. With out a specific Atheist ethic, there is nothing for anyone to trust in. Second, many people are Atheists for the purpose of satisfying their rebellion and giving themselves a sense of superiority, and that hubris in an intellectual and maturity void will naturally result in “constantly jeering and hurling insults”. And being nice and tolerant is specifically rejected by most of the New Atheists and the third tier players like PZ. There is no chance at all for the success of this initiative by Massimo. No, there is no reason that Atheists “should be accepted”, other than that they want to be; and they want to be without any change to their ethic-free world view: Atheism.

3. Combating dogmatism. Ironically, Philosophical Materialism is entirely dogmatic, and without a shred of material or logical evidence in its support. It is not credible to think that Atheists will give it up.

4. Elimination of irrationalism. Under Massimo’s personal definition, Materialism is tautological with rationalism. But in actuality, Materialism is irrational under its own evidentiary standards, making universal claims with no material evidence. Would Massimo eliminate Materialism due to its irrationality? Demonstrably not. So this is a lost cause for Atheism also, because of the same issues in #3.

But Massimo, even though a popular NYC blogger and man-about-town, is on the outs with the most powerful of the big dog Atheist icons. So there is little possibility that his opinions will get much airing outside of the Big Apple (except perhaps more ridicule). Maybe I have helped just a little bit with that. You’re welcome, Massimo.

Comment Moderation is ON

2011-12-31T06:31:00.000-06:00

Amnesty was an experiment. It might still work for some commenters, but for one in particular, commenting is still not civil. So the blog will be moderated for the time being.

From PZ's Place, Jeremy O’Wheel, Australia, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-30T13:31:00.000-06:00

It would be a convenient lie to say that I am an atheist because of rationalism, reason and the application of logic. I was an atheist well before I had any idea what those things were. I know that many people like to argue that everybody is born an atheist, and of course, in a sense that is true, but I like to differentiate between being ignorant of religion, and the realisation that it’s false.

I grew up almost completely unexposed to religion. My mother is a Quaker, and sometimes took me along to meetings, but I had no idea what they were, other than a bunch of “old people” sitting around occasionally speaking; not appealing to a 6 year old.

My first school had no religion classes, and I knew nobody religious. I didn’t even know what the word “god” meant for most of this time. But then I changed schools to a (public) school that did have almost compulsory religious (Christian) education classes. If you’ve never been told the stories of Adam and Eve, or Moses, or Jesus’s birth, miracles and resurrection, until an age when you’re starting to think for yourself (10), I think it’s inevitable you’ll be suspicious of such stories. It only took a month of such classes (once a week) for me to realise it was just rubbish. The volunteers taking the classes were unintelligent and uneducated, and the stories were as believable as any of the mythology books we had at home.

At this point, I asked my parents if I could stop attending the classes, which they agreed to, and my life as an atheist activist began, as the (public) school fought hard to prevent me from not attending those classes. Eventually they relented, and I was allowed to spend an hour once a week in the library. I know in Australia now, with the push for ethics classes as a replacement for religious classes, there are many complaints about sending the non-religious students to the library with nothing to do, but for me, that was probably when I started to become such a prolific reader, so in hindsight it was an incredibly valuable experience.

I’m very glad that I came to atheism, and to atheist movements, at such a young age, and basically by myself. I see many atheists now who I think dogmatically accept philosophical concepts for which no proof or evidence exists; “burden of proof,” and various logical “fallacies,” that are actually just names of types of arguments (ad hominem springs to mind). My experience taught me not to believe people, just because they say something is true, but to examine it closely, and make my own mind up. Religion is just a tiny facet of the subjects I apply that critical thinking to.

Jeremy O’Wheel
Australia

O’Wheel makes this point:

1. Encountering Bible stories at the age of inquiry (10) shows the Bible to be false.

Summary: never religious, unaware of God until religious training at 10 years old. Bible stories seemed false; became Atheist activist at age of 10. Now is a Critical Thinker. He also criticizes some Atheist dogmatic thinking.

From PZ's Place, Evie-Grace Beresford, France, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-29T17:50:00.000-06:00

I havent always been an atheist, in fact until I was almost 23yrs old I was a Church of England Sunday School teacher who took Communion every Sunday at 8am, could quote huge tracts of the Bible, recite The Book of Common Prayer word for word and went to church every day during Lent.

I began to question my faith and the veracity of all I had been told when I was about 18 and went off to University to study archaeology and anthropology, neither of which subjects was compatable with my Bible!

I questioned my professors about how I could reconcile my “faith” with my new found knowledge and skills and what those skills were revealing to me on a daily basis.

On the subject of Adam and Eve, and biblical creation in general, one particular professor who was also a devout Catholic explained to me that the writer of Genesis actually meant that Adam and Eve were not actually the very first people on the Earth but they were the first to “find God” which set them apart from the rest of creation and is why, when they all toddled off East of Eden, they found other folk to marry!!

He spent a lot of time trying to help me marry my faith to historical facts.

I did my best to see his point of view but I was fighting a losing battle and by the time I left University I was quite troubled by the erosion of my faith and belief in the God of the Bible.

My first job after Uni was as a site assistant on a dig in East Africa searching for the most ancient of Mankind’s ancestors, my fellow diggers had absolutely no truck with my still semi-religious leanings and we spent many a night in deep discussion on the subject. Eventually, someone suggested that I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations with a more critical and educated eye, employing my new found anthro/archaeo knowledge.

So thats what I did.

The more I read the more I realised how little I knew or had questioned over the years. The long passages of biblical verse that I could quote had all been learned as a child and thus had been unquestioned and undoubted. I didn’t even know until I was 22 that the familiar Christmas scene of the traditional nativity wasn’t even in the New Testament!!

I began to see that ignorance played a large part in the maintainance of unquestioning faith.

Never one to do things by halves, I threw myself into Biblical study, I pestered the life out of a very patient Hebrew scholar, enlisting his aid in re-translating mistranslated words in the English Bible and he put me in contact with 2 other Biblical historians who were also very helpful in identifying places and people.

By the time I went back to Uni to do a PhD at age 24 I had no religious beliefs of any kind. I still read and study and dig and puzzle over the Bible to this day but with a very different attitiude and for different reasons.

You ask why I am an atheist……………… because I grew up, I sought knowledge and I used the knowledge I found to enlighten me.

I can not explain it any better way than to quote Corinthinans 13:11 ……”When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a (wo)man, I put away childish things”

Evie-Grace Beresford
France

Beresford makes these points:

1. When read under the influence of “anthro/archaeo knowledge” the Bible fails to conform.

2. Began to question at 18; Atheist by 24.

3. Ignorance is a large part of “unquestioning faith”.

Summary: originally Christian; questioned Bible at 18 -24, Bible has errors, Atheist at 24. Anthropology and archaeology are accepted over the Bible, so God doesn’t exist (Scientism).

From PZ's Place: Barbara Meissner, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-28T23:38:00.000-06:00

I was a teenager. I sang in the choir for the Protestant church services on Air Force bases. Most services were non-denominational, and a few were Lutheran. I was there mostly for the singing and for social reasons but I was a Christian. My mother was a generic Christian, a sort of non-denominational granddaughter of two Methodist ministers. My father was an atheist, though I did not know that at the time. I never got any sense that he opposed the Sunday schools when I was young or the choir in my teens. I think he expected me to figure it out for myself.

George Carlin once said about religion “I tried, folks. I really did.” So did I. I wanted it. I wanted what all those people around me had, that sense of the presence of God, a real relationship with God. I prayed frequently for God to fill me with what the others described as the Holy Ghost. It never happened.

It was the weekly attendance at church with the choir, which went on for about 2 years, that put the first crack in my belief. One day I realized, after reading the Sermon on the Mount, that I rarely heard a preacher quote Jesus. We got a lot of Paul, and sometimes a bit of the other letters. We got the Old Testament. At Christmas and Easter we got a lot of stories about Jesus. But we very rarely got what Jesus actually said. As a joke I told a friend that they weren’t Christians, they were Paulists. But I couldn’t figure out why they spent so little time quoting Jesus.

We had a great Youth Pastor. I think he really was a nice guy, though of course, these days we have a tendency to look askance at them because of how many of them end up molesting children. He honestly tried to answer my questions, which were becoming more and more frequent. But he really couldn’t. It all came down to “You have to have faith,” a very unsatisfactory answer.

Then I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land. I’d read it shortly after it was published when I was 11 and approximately 70 percent of it went right over my head (my parents had no idea at the time what the book was like, as Heinlein’s previous books were aimed at children), but this time I was old enough to actually understand most of it. I was just barely 16. Heinlein’s cynicism, his contempt for religious leaders, and his failure to accept the norms I had been taught were a revelation. But the most important thing in the book, at least as far as my religious faith was concerned, was a passage in which he described what happened to Lot’s daughters. His character then said, “That’s not the only surprise in store for any one who actually reads the Bible.”

I took him up on his implied challenge. I read the Bible, starting at Genesis 1:1 and continuing all the way through, page by page. I admit I skimmed over the begats and I just never could quite finish Revelations. It was just too weird to me. It made no sense at all to a 16 year old in the mid-1960s, before everything got all psychedelic. But I read everything else.

Then I thought about it. I thought about all the Bible stories that I’d never heard of, and with damned good reason. I thought about God the Father who will send his children to hell. He will do this even to those who had never really hurt anyone in their entire lives, while murderers and rapists went to heaven if they just confessed their sins and repented. I knew my Daddy could never send me to hell, no matter what I did. I thought about the injustice of God punishing us for being who he made us to be. I thought about the genocide of peoples whose only real crime was being on the wrong land at the wrong time and all the other crimes authorized by God.

After about 3 weeks, I told my mother. “I don’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense.”

She just shrugged and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out eventually.” Actually she figured it out. She is an atheist today.

My reasons for being an atheist have become more sophisticated over time, but it began as an overpowering sense of the unfairness inherent in the Christian doctrine. A measure of my lack of sophistication at the time is that it never occurred to me that maybe another religion was the right one, which is fortunate in way, as it saved me a lot of time searching through other beliefs.

These days I tend to concentrate on the lack of evidence for a supernatural being, and the utter lack of evidence that becoming a “good” Christian, or indeed, any other religion, makes you a more moral person. But my atheism is still grounded on that sense of unfairness.

Barbara Meissner
United States

Meissner makes these points:

1. God is unfair. Evilgod.

2. There is a lack of evidence for a supernatural being.

3. Becoming a Christian (or any religion) doesn’t make you a more moral person (Good without God).

Summary: Christian background; at 16 read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"; rejected God due to evilgod being unfair; also no evidence for supernatural being.

General Amnesty

2011-12-28T08:34:00.000-06:00

Anyone who wishes to comment here, may do so, including those previously removed from this blog. Please understand that the Rules of the Blog still pertain, and that civil behavior is expected and will be insisted upon.

Ten Fallacies of Atheism:

2011-12-27T23:29:00.000-06:00

1. False: “I can know that there is no cause for material existence which is greater than anything found in material existence.” (Category Error).

2. False: “I can know that there is no existence beyond the mass/energy, space/time existence to which we humans are limited.” (Category Error).

3. False: “Science has no limits and is therefore the only source of knowledge.” (Failure to comprehend Material limitations of science, and the other types of knowledge commonly in use).

4. It is false to reject [P] yet claim that you have no belief concerning [P]. (Claim doesn’t match action/reality).

5. It is false to reject logical claims of first cause deductions based solely on rejection of ecclesiasticism. (Fallacy of Guilt by Association, and Black and White Fallacy).

6. False: “Theists must show material evidence that there is non-material existence.” (Category Error).

7. False: “Atheism is based on evidence and logic but needs neither for support in order to reject the existence of non-material dimensions because Atheism need not adhere to the Burden of Rebuttal.” (Special Pleading).

8. False: “Atheism is not a religion, despite having religious content, beliefs concerning deity, and the propensity to evangelize, and demand that government be limited to their worldview regarding religion.

9. False: Atheism has no ethic or morality attached to it, yet claim that “Atheists are good without God”. (internally contradictory: non-coherent).

10. False: “Since there are demonstrable myths, then all references to non-material existence are declared to be myths by association” (Fallacy of Guilt by Association).

It Has Come To This: All You Need To Know About California.

2011-12-27T17:53:00.002-06:00

Los Angeles voters will decide whether porn stars should be made to wear condoms. The initiative would provide for inspectors to ensure compliance.

One legal opinion declares that the government has the power to make the porn stars wear condoms. There is a concern that such restrictions might be an abrogation of the First Amendment free speech protection.

Addendum: Link fixed

From PZ's Place: m h, unknown country, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-27T17:28:00.000-06:00

What keeps me an atheist is the fact that science explains the world so well and still allows me to question the world without having any boundaries. Even if there is a concept in science that is universally accepted as a truth, no one will threaten my life and my family would not distance themselves from me because I don’t accept it. What made me an atheist, however, is something completely different. I grew up in a war-torn country where questioning religion was a death sentence. As I was growing up, I was taught that religiosity is a virtue and, in the dangerous world that I was living in, religion will help me survive. I accepted it. Despite this, my parents had enough foresight to encourage me to study math and science despite it being essentially useless where I was growing up. The conflict between science and religion didn’t really hit me as a child, because every scientific fact I parroted to my parents was somehow in agreement with what God said.

What did bother me, though, was what I was seeing around me. It was a war. People were taking advantage of each other. I met terrible people who, through their exploitation of the religious beliefs of others, managed to steal and kill their way to the top. But, they weren’t seen as criminals. They were extolled for their knowledge of the holy books and their piety. They built places of worship. They promised eternal life in God’s kingdom. And, despite what everyone knew about them, that was enough to make them “good” people. The community would absorb their every word. People would volunteer to send themselves to their deaths for them. People would kiss their hands. This dissonance was hard to ignore for me. I had a hard time labeling a nice, giving neighbor who doesn’t pray as a “bad person” while war profiteers and murderers were labeled as “good people.” I stopped praying. I tuned out the sermons. I lost myself in science.

I learned about the birth of the Universe, the wonder of development, the amazing degree to which evolution explained differences in animals and the creation of mountains through plate tectonics. It made so much sense. It made my world a more beautiful place. The mountains that I grew up around were so much more of a wonder to me when I realize that there is a more amazing process in creating them than “God did it.” One day, looking at a photo of those mountains, I realized that I had stopped believing in God. It completely freed me. A rush of thoughts came to me. I suddenly realized that the best people are those who care for others, not because of a command of God, but because they just plain want the world to be a better place. I realized that so many people have wasted their lives and destroyed their environment for themselves and their children because they believed that “this world” doesn’t matter. So many lives lost, so much effort wasted, all because people wanted to be with God, rather than make the world the live in a better place. The wonder of the world around them was and continues to be completely lost to them.
m h
unknown

m h makes these points:

1. Science keeps him/her an Atheist.

2. Science explains the world better than “God did it”.

3. Science has no boundaries.

4. “Religion” (branch undefined) has boundaries.

5. Over-reaching the limits of that religion can result in serious repercussions including death.

6. Evil people (war profiteers and murderers) use religious power to reach positions of political power; can convince people toward religious suicide.

7. “Religion” makes people not care about the earth, and destroy their environment.

8. The “best people” want to make the world a better place.

Summary: No age given; Religious background: severe religious domination (possibly Islam) and war; science has better explanations for the earth than “God did it”; rejection of religion results in freedom and the ability to see that religion destroys and the best people want to make the world better.

From PZ's Place: Anurag, Canada, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-26T18:54:00.000-06:00

I can remember back to when I was around 7 years old, and I was sitting in Hindi class (in Jaipur, India). We were learning antonyms in Hindi. The word ‘Aastik’ came up – a person who believes in God, the antonym to which is ‘Nastik’. That was my first realization that it was even possible to be a non-believer.

I had always assumed that God was omnipresent – watching me at all times and making sure I didn’t do anything bad. Back then, I was even scared of having any bad thoughts, as I believed God could read my mind.

On my way back home after that day in school, I distinctly remember asking my dad, how someone can be a non-believer, how is it possible that they don’t acknowledge the existence of God? I don’t remember what he replied.

The home I grew up in wasn’t too religious. However, God did creep unknowingly into every sphere of my daily life. Every evening after sunset, we weren’t allowed to turn on any lights in the house before a short prayer to God. We had to respect books, pens, pencils or anything that we use in school as they helped us get knowledge, which was equivalent to God. So dropping a book or a pencil was as good as disrespecting God, and if you ever did – you had to quickly pick it up and touch it to your forehead and then kiss it, or you risked getting shunned by the knowledge God. My parents weren’t strict about it, but we were expected to pray to God before we ate, before we slept and after shower in the morning. I don’t even remember what my beliefs were at that point. It wasn’t so much about religion, or Hinduism, or any particular God, it was just that I accepted the existence of God.

A few years later we moved to Kuwait. I had developed a keen interest in Astronomy, and so on my birthday, our family friends gifted me Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I remember the first thing I turned to when I started reading the book – the few colored pages in the middle of the book with photos. Photos of nebulas, galaxies, planets and the one that has been etched in my brain from the first time I saw it – two human footprints side by side, one is from Tanzania 3.6 million years ago and the other from the Moon. I remember being mesmerized by the book and just lost in the thoughts about the Universe, its size, its age… From that point, it wasn’t too long before my belief in God was gone.

My parents weren’t too hard on me, as I continued most of the practices I had developed since I was a child and they believed I was just going through a phase. That was right around the time we got our first computer and access to the internet. I remember spending hours surfing Astronomy websites, reading freely available lectures on Black-holes, Einstein, Physics…creating backup of my favorite astronomy photos on floppy drives… I still have my collection J

I remember when the Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars in ’97, for some odd reason, I felt, here it is, the concrete proof God doesn’t exist. I’m still not sure why. But from then on, my reasons for being an Atheist just grew. I took a lot of pleasure every-time I learned that a famous scientist was also an Atheist and debated religion every chance I got with an attitude of almost pity towards others who were still prisoners of religion.

Not until my university years did I become less militant and actually developed an interest in studying world religions. I also became a politics junkie. The more I read; I realized that by being so confident that only my views were right, I wasn’t much different from anyone else who is religious and confident they are the ones who are right. So I’m slightly more tolerant of other’s religion now.

I realize now that the skepticism that grew out of reading Cosmos has shaped my life since then, as repeatedly it has pushed me towards accepting the authority of a scientist or a scientific book/journal, more than that of my parents, my priest or any religious text.

Anurag
Canada

It appears that Anurag makes just one point:

”… the skepticism that grew out of reading Cosmos has shaped my life since then, as repeatedly it has pushed me towards accepting the authority of a scientist or a scientific book/journal, more than that of my parents, my priest or any religious text.”

Summary: From the teen years, Scientism and Appeal to the Authority of scientists (primarily Sagan) are the reasons for leaving religion (Hindi).

Train Your Kids As Atheists

2011-12-26T13:04:00.001-06:00

Over at skepticmoney there is a list of suggestions regarding educating your kids into Atheism. I guess the idea is that kids might not fall into Atheism merely by not mentioning deities to them. Maybe they would pick it up at school or friends. So a positive program is needed.

The list goes like this (very condensed, with my comments appended):

11. (He goes backwards, no comments on that, please). Introduce the kids to Atheist blogs. [They need to learn expletives and ridicule from the pros].

10. Teach them science. [Uncontroversial unless he really means Scientism.]

9. Watch Science shows on TV. [They will be presented as absolute truth, too.]

8. Encourage questions; use the Socratic Method [except give Materialist answers instead of Socratic method of more questions.]

7. Learn about mythology. Also uncontroversial [unless one uses it as a Fallacy of Guilt by Association.]

6. Watch anti-christian movies, like Agora and Religulous. [make sure you don’t mix in any Christian movies, not that there are that many]

5 Listen to a comedy recording by Julia Sweeny who makes fun of Christianity.

4. Learn magic tricks. Uncontroversial [unless magic is erroneously equated with other things which are not provable.]

3. Teach them about optical illusions. Uncontroversial [unless falsely equated with other things which are not provable.]

2. Lots of Atheist and FreeThought stuff on YouTube.

1. Books, from evolution to Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris.

I pointed out that there were no logic books or logic training in this agenda. That’s when the Atheists came out to play. One actually denies the value of logic (it's just language which is riddled with incomprehensibility). And another one says that truth is not "absolute truth".

There's much more entertainment there, too.

A Morning With Atheists

2011-12-26T12:27:00.000-06:00

I briefly entertained an argument session over here at skepticmoney. In a short time I annoyed the resident Atheists, and along with the standard errors in argumentation, I was called “a typical godbot”, “insufferable”, “pedant”, “twisting logic” (without any further explanation of what was twisted), “haven’t reached the seventh grade level”, “fuckwit”, “fucking waste of brain cells,” “too scared to face the real world,” and charged with Gishing after answering a request for Atheist logical errors with a list of ten, which apparently overloaded their mental systems.

I very rarely comment on Atheist blogs; But sometimes it is interesting to see if they have any new defamations to use on me.

From PZ's Place: Bernhard Funk, Germany, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-25T23:09:00.000-06:00

My story is similiar to Nick Martin’s: I grew up in Germany in a traditional Catholic family. As a child I went to church (1-2 times a week) and I was also an altar boy. Nothing uncommon when you grow up in a rural area. Between the age of ca. 10-12 I was so devoted that my family suspected I would become a priest (though I myself never had this idea).

In my environment there was, though it was quite traditional and convervative, never any anti-science sentiment. Like Nick, I later on had no problems to be fully convinced of the sientific method. One of my child-time heroes was Hoimar von Ditfurth, a German scientist who hosted a very good popular science TV-show (btw- his daughter was one of the founders of the German Green Party). I read most of his books. You may compare him to Carl Sagan, except that Ditfurth was convinced that there is a transcendent reality. Since this youth hero of mine (hey, one of his books is titled ‘In the beginning there was Hydrogen’) had no problem going the scientific and the ‘believe’-route at the same time it was of course also not a problem for me. Evolution was real, the big bang was real, and so was God. Aliens, homeopathy, aura-reading and all this crap was crap.
From my mid-twenties on I slowly drifted away from this belief and started to call myself an ‘agnostic’. I would flatter myself if I would say that this was the result of rational analyzis. It was more a gut feeling, more kindled by the large gap between claim and reality that I noticed with church (both Catholic as well as any other denomination or religion).

My conversion to the dark side is almost a twin of Nick Martin’s: Somewhere in the internet I stumbled across the name ‘PZ Myers’ (don’t remember the exact circumstances, but i’m pretty sure that it was in connection with some discussion on pseudo-science). His fervent insistence to apply the same scepticsm that one takes for granted in science to all belief/explanation systems (like religion) started a chain reaction. Actually his word fell on prepared soil. It lead to other names: Dawkins, Hitchens, Benett. Harris. Stenger. The (German) Giordano-Bruno-Foundation. I re-read Bertrand Russel and Schleichert (How to discuss with fundamentalist without loosing your sanity) and recognized the rhetoric tricks used by religion. I suddenly discovered that I was an agnostic no more. I was an atheist. Not an atheis by gut feeling. But by conviction. And I can take a rational stand on this every time. I can argue about it. I can back it. Something I was never able to do before, neither as a believer nor as an self-proclaimed agnostic. It is a matter of reason.

Bernhard Funk
Germany

Funk makes these points:

1. Catholic as a youth, but without antiscience sentiment.

2. In mid-20’s drifted into agnosticism due to claim/reality gap in the church.

3. Discovered PZ and “scientific skepticism”; led to Dawkins et. al.

4. Religion uses rhetorical “tricks”.

5. Is now “convicted” as an Atheist, which he can argue and back up.

6. It is a matter of reason: takes a “rational stand”.

Summary: In mid-20s an agnostic, which became Atheist after reading PZ’s blog with respect to “scientific skepticism”. Influenced by Dawkins, et. al.

From PZ's Place: Jessica, Australia, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-25T22:55:00.000-06:00

Basically, I am an atheist because for me, the idea of a God, a ‘higher power’ or even just the universe being conscious and deliberate raises more questions than it answers. We all have the flaw of believing that because a question can be phrased, it can be answered. We ask ‘Why?’ and at first God seems like an easy answer, until you realise that you can always ask “But why?” one more time. Instead of torturing themselves asking ‘Why?’ to infinity, lots of people stop asking the question just after inserting God into the equation. I stop just before, because for me, the idea of a creator, or conscious universe adds nothing to my understanding or enjoyment of life, so it seems like an unnecessary step.

I haven’t always been this way. While I never followed religion as such, I certainly had my moments of “What does the universe have planned for me?”

I have been told that there were arguments over what I should be christened as it was expected that I should be Catholic because that’s what my father was (is that a convention? The children get christened what the father is? I don’t know.), but my mother had a vehement dislike of Catholicism, not only because of the beliefs, but also because she had had conflicts with Catholics in the past. I don’t think my parents would have bothered at all but for this social pressure, so it was decided that I would be Anglican, so I was christened (by a priest who later turned out to be a pedophile), and never went to church again until school. I spent my first two years of primary school at a Catholic school, because that’s where my cousins went. We had mass every Friday, and I remember sitting on the seat in church, swinging my legs, picking my nose, wriggling around thinking “Why does everyone keep saying stuff back to that weird guy up the front and why are we sitting down and standing up and singing and this sucks lets go outside and play.” I believed in God because I was told he was real, but for some reason I kind of thought that he was everyone else’s God, and that it didn’t apply to me. I changed to a normal public school afterwards because the Catholic fees were too high, and apart from some scripture classes and Anglican Sunday school (which I only wanted to go to to get the nice biscuits at afternoon tea), I never had anything to do with the church again. What sealed the deal for good with me not really believing in a deity was my innocent 6 or 7 year old cousin saying “If god put us here, who put God there?”. At the time, I believed in God as I said because that’s what I had been told, so I kind of just thought she was naive to ask (how wrong I was!), but it definitely got me thinking. While I don’t know what her beliefs are now, I certainly have to thank her for planting the seed.

The belief system I had after that was generally less “god says do it or you’ll go to hell” and more “karma, the universe, energy, spirits and ghosts and meant to be, that’s just their path, its for a higher reason which we’ll understand after we die” type stuff. I simultaneously believed in an afterlife as well as reincarnation, and had to do some crazy mental gymnastics for that to make sense to me. I had some superstitions, like if you hear the same song or something 3 times in a row, its significant somehow. I believed in ghosts and tarot cards, and that “the universe’ cared what I did and thought and that what I did now would be setting the tone for my soul’s afterlife. I believed that the universe had lessons and plans for us all, and I used to desperately search for some good reason why the universe wanted my life the way it was. I spent a lot of time confused as to why certain situations would come up over and over again, believing that the universe thought I hadn’t learned a certain lesson properly the first time or whatever. The thing that used to cause me the most trouble in my beliefs was not being able to come up with a good reason why the universe would care what I did. I got a lot of explanations of “its part of a bigger plan” but I could never understand why the universe needed or planned anything. Pretty much the non-deity version of asking “Does God ever wonder why hes there?”, really.

I honestly can’t remember why, but one day I just started researching religion and atheism and how it relates to politics and morality and things. I wish I could remember what made me look it up. Knowing how my interests get started, I probably read one line in a newspaper or something and sparked it off. I came across lots of atheist blogs which I still read regularly, and it really made me bother to sit and think seriously about why I do the things I do. I began to see that a lot of beliefs and attitudes that I had didn’t stand up to reason. It was a bit of a struggle at times. I came up with all the same questions that all theists must wonder about atheists, and for once, I had to answer them for myself instead of assuming the universe or God or whatever would take of it for me. I remember, with a bit of shame, reading a post on Hemant’s blog, The Friendly Atheist, about a woman saying that because atheists don’t believe in an afterlife, they must be amoral and just do whatever they want, and at the time, it seemed reasonable. I wondered, “I know now that I don’t believe I will be punished after my death, so why don’t I want to go out and steal and kill and do whatever I want?” It took a lot of reflection for me to realise why I’m not an evil person. If theists don’t commit evil (which we know some do, but just humour me) to avoid hell after death, then I don’t commit evil because I don’t want to be in hell now. Simple as that. I believe that we are capable of a happy, well functioning society without reference to any eternal punishment or reward, and I resent the hell out of the idea that me wanting to live in a nice world is somehow a less moral motivation than “God said don’t”.

As for my destiny or whatever, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that the universe doesn’t give two shits about anyone. I don’t believe that finding meaning in something that happens to you means that a higher power intended it that way. I believe it is up to us to give our own lives meaning and purpose, because we are ultimately in control. I don’t mean to say we are gods unto ourselves or anything, because we are at the mercy of nature and always have been, just that it is our job to try to understand our world in order to make the best of it, not to accept that it is part of a plan and we are mere pawns. Some people find it extremely off putting and lonely to think that we are really of no importance in something bigger, but I have actually found it quite liberating. Being an atheist has made me take more responsibility for the quality of my own life. Knowing that I exist in this amazing universe against extreme odds absolutely floors me at times, and knowing that this is my only chance has made me more proactive than I ever used to be.

Jessica
Australia

Jessica makes these points:

1. Brushed up against religion very loosely as a child, then after roughly 7 y.o., no religion in her life.

2. Asking “why” one more time can go to infinity.

3. Idea of a creator or conscious universe adds nothing to her understanding or enjoyment of life.

4. “Who created god” was a turning point.

5. Engaged in many types of spirituality.

6. No reason found for universe to care. “Doesn’t give two shits about anyone”.

7. Researched religion and Atheism; her beliefs didn’t stand up to reason.

8. Good without God. Resents the idea that her ideas about behavior are not moral.

9. Doesn’t believe in meaning from a higher source.

10. Is “liberated” by thought that we are of no importance in something bigger.

Summary: Briefly Theist/pantheist, then at 7 years old, no religion; then spiritualist until she decided that the universe doesn’t care about her. Researched religion and Atheism, found that her beliefs (spirituality?) didn’t stand to reason. Good w/o god, makes her own meaning, is “liberated” because we are of no importance.

T'was the Night...

2011-12-24T08:30:00.000-06:00

T’was the night before EX-mus,
and all through the land,
There was secular silence
T’was all that Atheists could stand.

They’d had such sour stomachs
When’ere they had viewed
Crèches with babies,
It got them all stewed.

“It’s De-Constitutional!”
They wailed and they bellowed
“It’s written there somewhere
No religion allowed!”

“We know that it’s in there,
Our judges so ruled;
We’ve never really read it,
We went to government school.“

Even if it’s not there
It should be y’know,
It’s a health issue for us
Gives us the drizzles: go, go, go, go.

We Atheists say
Atheism holds sway!
Our beliefs are the ones
The government shall obey.

Not yours: only ours!
We can dominate you.
We can sue you and sue you
And sue, sue, sue, sue!.

We’ll break you with lawsuits
We have the cash;
We have judges and lawyers
Our suits will be rash…
And your beliefs we will trash!

A baby in a feed trough:
That’s intolerant!
We won’t tolerate it
We won’t and we shan’t!

It sickens us literally
To think someone thinks
Different from us
And we think that that stinks.

We’re tolerant and you’re not
And we won’t tolerate
Anything which goes counter
To our own tolerance dictate.”

So they sued and they sued.
The crèches were removed
Their opposition silenced
Their tolerance: proved.

With the government fully Atheist
They thought, Well, what now?
We should remove all religion
From our laws, but how?

Let’s pass new laws with
thousands of pages, unread!
We can cancel old notions
With blizzards of bullshit instead!

And so it became the land of lawsuits.
The land of secular threats and angst,
And tolerance of only that
Which relieves Atheist’s stomach pangst.

And so to all
On this Ex-mus eve,
Be silent and hide quietly
What you believe.

It gives Atheists the collywobbles
And we just can’t have that!
So whatever you believe,
Keep it under your hat.
(At least until Ramadan,
The gov't will celebrate that!)

From PZ's Place: Ethan Mittel, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-23T11:14:00.000-06:00

While growing up, I shared almost no similarities with all the other children in Kansas. I was never what one might call a religious child. I never went to church, I never prayed, I never read the Bible, and I never really cared about Heaven or Hell. Back when I was a child, the only things I cared about were watching cartoons and playing video games. I was in pursuit of fun, and I saw church as the most boring thing in existence. To sit for hours on end listening to an old man speak about the works of people who died long ago was like torture to me.

Another reason I never went to church is because my parents were too busy to care about going to church. They worked long and hard, and time spent in church is time spent not doing something productive, or in my case, not playing video games or watching TV. Also, why give a tenth of your paycheck to the church when you could use it to purchase something that has tangible value?

I didn’t seriously think about religion until I turned 14, which was also when I discovered the infinite depths of the internet. I can’t really remember how it happened, but I think it happened while I was searching for the lyrics to several death metal songs I was listening to at the time. I was just clicking on links at random when I stumbled upon a website called No Beliefs. As a person of great inquiry who always wanted to learn more, I decided to read every inch of it. It was there that I learned the true history of the Old Testament, that its stories were cobbled together from several separate myths in the region; it was there that I learned the history of the New Testament, and of how it was written long after Jesus’ supposed death; and it was there that I learned of the Bible’s dark and disgusting nature, a side of the Bible many Christians refuse to address.

After several hours of reading, I learned of not just the absurdities – light being created before any source of light, snakes that can talk, ten billion species of lands animals being packed into a tiny boat, bats classified as birds, whales classified as fish, pi classified as a round number – but the atrocities as well. I learned of the verses that depict God either committing or condoning countless atrocities, including burning his creations alive (Numbers 16:32-35), slaughtering the firstborn (Exodus 12:29-30), sending down pestilence (I Chronicles 21), slaughtering those with black skin (II Chronicles 14), murdering tens of thousands of men without a single shred of shame or remorse (I Samuel 6:19), and the wholesale extermination of the innocent (throughout the Bible really, but specifically in verses Deuteronomy 2:34, Ezekiel 9:5-6, Joshua 6:21, and countless others).

It became quite evident to me that the Bible is not the supreme, flawless, absolute word of an all-loving God as many people in Kansas claim it is. Instead, it is the blood-stained parchment of angry, ignorant, hateful men from ancient times who used the religious stories and appeals to divine authority for political expediency. However, it was not just Christianity that was alone in this fraud.

After learning of the unholy nature of their supposedly holy books, I saw all religions in a contemptible light. It was clear to me that religion is nothing more than a tool crafted by the powerful that is used primarily for social control. It fetters the mind, cripples critical thought, and silences the voice of freedom. It teaches you to submit, obey, conform. It turns ignorance and blind obedience into divine virtues and it demonizes dissent and free thought. Religion aims to keep man in perpetual darkness. Like a concrete wall, it hinders all progress, be it social, technological, or scientific. Indeed, without religion, the world would be a more advanced place than it is today.

I will never let my mind be imprisoned. I will never surrender myself to the contemptible entity that is religion. I will never be a member of an institution that gleefully contributes to mankind’s self-destruction. I stand for reason. I stand for progress. I stand for enlightenment. I stand for that which will lift the veil of lies from mankind’s blinded eyes. After observing all the evidence, I came to the realization that there was only one position that made any logical sense: atheism. With that, I declared to myself, “I am an atheist.”

I knew I was an atheist, but I had to keep it a secret from everyone. After all, atheists are the most hated minority in America, and if people were aware of my atheism, I would be ostracized, beaten up, or worse. And so, throughout most of high school, I kept my lips sealed. Luckily for me, matters of religion rarely came up for discussion. Near the end of senior year, I casually made the comment that I didn’t believe in god. One girl simply asked me, “What will happen to you when you die?” To this I gleefully responded, “I’ll be buried in the ground and be eaten by worms.” That was it. No one ever asked me religious questions ever again, but they still got along well with me.

Such wasn’t the case with my gifted class. Gifted class is basically a special class where the school’s smartest kids do special activities and high-level assignments, and although many of the students in this class were the best and brightest of the school, they still haven’t rejected the ridiculous idea that the earth is only six thousand years old. When I told them that I am an atheist, they were genuinely shocked. They could not comprehend the notion that a kind young man such as myself did not believe in god. Even my gifted teacher seemed to believe that my atheism was nothing more than a phase, and that I would grow out of it as soon as I graduated from high school. The only gifted student who didn’t seem to care that I was an atheist was a prospective comedian from Canada.

I eventually graduated from high school and contrary to what my gifted teacher seemed to believe, I did not stop being an atheist, and I am still an atheist today. Unlike most people in Kansas, I don’t base my views of the world on absurd fantasies and wishful thinking. My views are based on logic and scientific evidence. I am not a puppet controlled by invisible hands. I am the master of my own destiny. Most people are still shocked when I tell them I’m an atheist. When they ask me why I don’t believe in god, I simply reply, “For the same reason you don’t believe in Allah.” When the people of Kansas understand why they reject all the other gods – from Abaangui to Zywie – they will understand why I reject their god.
Ethan Mittel
United States

Mittel makes these points:
1. He had no religious background.

2. His childhood was consumed by cartoons and video games.

3. He never went to church but somehow was bored in church.

4. At the age of 14 he was listening to death metal, and in that pursuit found a website which educated him on evilbible and evilgod.

5. He became an Atheist, kept it a secret because: ” After all, atheists are the most hated minority in America, and if people were aware of my atheism, I would be ostracized, beaten up, or worse”

6. Yet when he outed himself in his senior year, he was accepted.: ”they still got along well with me”

7. “Still an Atheist today”, he makes these comments:

” I will never let my mind be imprisoned. I will never surrender myself to the contemptible entity that is religion. I will never be a member of an institution that gleefully contributes to mankind’s self-destruction. I stand for reason. I stand for progress. I stand for enlightenment. I stand for that which will lift the veil of lies from mankind’s blinded eyes. After observing all the evidence, I came to the realization that there was only one position that made any logical sense: atheism. With that, I declared to myself, “I am an atheist.”

Presumably the evidence is that presented in the website declaring evilbible and evilgod.

Summary:
Childhood: secular, cartoons, video games, death metal music.

Revelation: a website promoting evilbible and evilgod, stumbled across at the age of 14 while searching for death metal tunes.

Conversion: before highschool, roughly around the age of 14.

Reasons: evilbible; evilgod; same reason "you" don't believe in Allah.

Persecution: fearful of it, but experienced the opposite.

Stance: Reason, progress, enlightenment; the rest of mankind is "blinded".

Current age: Given the video games in childhood, probably 20's to early 30's tops.

From PZ's Place: Natasha K, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-23T10:39:00.000-06:00

I suppose my journey to atheism started with spirituality. When I was a kid, I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in Seattle. We had both a Solstice and a Christmas pageant, celebrated Easter and the Equinox. My parents sought not to force an ideology upon me, but to expose me to many traditions so that I could piece together my own collage of beliefs. I remember one day, standing in my living room, when someone inquired as to my religion. Bewildered, I said “I don’t know…” and turned to my mother, who replied “Good.” When my sisters were born, though, our house and traditions were suddenly too small.

We moved to a cohousing community about half an hour away when I was nine or ten, and my father moved back to Seattle soon afterward. He was and is a very scientifically minded person, fascinated with the acquisition of any kind of knowledge he can get his hands on, and I believe his transition to atheism came soon after my parents split. I began attending a New Thought church with my mother (and later my stepfather). In this place, I was taught that god is just a word for some spiritual thingy that makes up everything, a person’s natural state is perfection, that our thoughts affect what happens to us, and that heaven and hell are merely states of mind. After a while, though, I became disenchanted with that fat box of joy. They started asking people to tithe after every service. They acquired a new TV spot, associated themselves with Deepak Chopra, and built a new “celebration hall” with the money they constantly milked their audience for…. The average wealth of the people attending rose visibly, and not because the church was making anyone richer. Our old holding-hands-during songs tradition was abolished without a word. Not to mention the fact that we were building ugly new buildings instead of, say, helping people through devastating world crises. Attached to my previous participation in the music program and to the friends I’d made there, I dangled on for a little while before I gave up.

As I began my college career last year, I discovered my fascination with anthropology and psychology; the reasons people are how we are, and how we perceive the world around us. And in the light of my recent split from the New Thought movement, and the insight I was being given into humanity, I turned my questioning nature upon my own beliefs. I’d read Pharyngula before, and was already better versed in biology and the scientific method than most people my age, but had held tightly to my vague, earthy spirituality. Under closer scrutiny, I was shocked at my conclusion:

None of the important values I was holding onto and associated with spirituality- self-fulfilling prophecy (a well-known psychological phenomenon), respect for life, empathy, getting to know oneself- needed to be assigned to any sort of supernatural being or force. There was just no reason I had to believe something quite frankly silly to be a whole, happy person living on a fascinating speck in a vast and astounding universe.

So I did. And now I’m an atheist.
Natasha K
United States

Natasha K makes these points:
1. Her background as a child is “spirituality”, an unguided amalgam of “traditions” to which she was exposed and expected to form her own belief system.

2. She was then exposed to “New Thought” and Deepak Chopra.

3. She is now a sophomore in college, where she has been influenced by sociology and psychology, which answer questions concerning her values, which eliminated the need for spirituality.

4. She doesn’t need spirituality to be a “whole, happy person”.

Summary: rejected ecclesiastic spirituality in favor of sociology and psychology by her sophomore year in college. (Note: this is the second "Natasha K" to submit)

Honesty

2011-12-22T17:18:00.001-06:00

Honesty is a Precious Thing.

Not only do I value honesty, I presuppose it in people. While I know that is an error, I still commit it. Honesty is a subset of truth, and truth is a subset of the absolutes. For Atheism there are no absolutes, so by the time we get back down the chain from absolutes to honesty, there is none in the MaterialWorld of Atheism.

Now honesty might necessarily be feigned as a pragmatic effort to convince others of trustworthiness. So it not only is not a characteristic that is valued under Atheism, it is a tool to be exploited, used as far as it will go to the Atheist’s advantage.

Atheism is largely pragmatic. The main Atheist claim regarding morality is just that: behaving in a certain way is pragmatic and that is morality for the Atheist. The term for this is Consequentialism, where any goal which one desires should be pursued with whatever tactics are required to achieve it. Atheists might protest that this is a distortion, yet that in itself is a tactic being used.

The issue of honesty vs. Consequentialist pragmatism is why Atheists are not seen as trustworthy. There is no such thing as honesty which is attached to the concept of Atheism. That includes intellectual honesty.

Intellectual honesty requires humbling oneself before logic first, and material factoids last. But there is a strain of Atheism that refuses humility as an abrogation of “free thought”, which is just thoughts without anchors in anything meaningful. Free Thought, Atheism, and Philosophical Materialism are the keys to total freedom, unencumbered by the need for humility in the face of anything which is undeniable, such as incorrigible truth.

Thus logic becomes not a disciplined refection of a path to rationality, it becomes a malleable weapon which is to be tuned to the needs of the wielder. The Atheist assertion of “logic” is thus tautological, not actual: they define whatever they say to be “logical”. There is no urge to study logic as a discipline, nor to follow actual logical procedures. Whenever a fallacy in their “logic” is pointed to, they pull out as many Red Herrings as necessary to divert the conversation. I say this as a general principle because inductively, that is the case; there might be exceptions, and I hope to come across them in order to find out how they justify the logical chasms in their worldviews. But so far, not much luck.

There is no feasible Atheist defense against this observation. “Good without God” is transparently a relativist matching of a temporary “ethics” statement to whatever behavior the Atheist is currently fond of. Any possible Atheist protest of “personal integrity” is transparently just another tactic in the pragmatist’s toolbox. In fact, no matter what an Atheist says, it can be seen as a “tactic”, toward some objective, some agenda, which only s/he sees and knows. There is no possible way to encounter Atheists without suspicion, unless one is naïve to this characteristic.

So I should not be caught off guard while in discussions with Atheists. There is no reason to suppose that their arguments are sincere, that their facts match any actuality, or that their approach to their fallacies will help them learn anything. Atheists in general do not intend to learn anything, especially logic, which they have already redefined to be whatever they say. On the contrary, Atheists seem to have another objective, which is to preserve their total freedom so as not to have to be humble in the face of truths which they are powerless to change. In other words, "free" thoughts without grounding in anything but agenda.

So, there are no truths in AtheistWorld, and there is no truthfulness. So there cannot be any honesty, or for that matter, dishonesty. And that characteristic makes every Atheist suspect.

I, personally, value honesty. But it cannot be presupposed in people.

I need to take more care.

ADDENDUM:
This issue extends to the concept of “absurdity” also. Logical absurdity is a specific thing; it refers to a proposition which is logically non-coherent, or cannot be shown to be coherent, and this is found using Reductio Ad Absurdum, which takes the converse and hopes to show that it is contradictory (absurd). If the converse of a proposition is absurd, then the proposition itself is not. Clearly, logically inconsistent premises or logically unsubstantiable claims fit this category of determination of logical validity, including those propositions or premises which fail Boolean categorization.

The convenient but ungrounded and transient nature of the logic of Atheism is subject to producing statements which are logically absurd, but which seem perfectly logical under the transient processes of non-absolutist Atheism. In fact, linear logical discipline fails the transient processes of non-absolutist Atheism, and appears – I am instructed – absurd to the Atheist.

This is a serious fork in the ability to communicate, a dichotomy between those who choose logical dictates to rule their processes, vs. those who eschew any absolutist control over their free thought. For this reason, I have in the past taken the conversation to a point where an obvious fallacy is in play, and then stopped the conversation from progressing beyond that fallacy, and insisting on its recognition. This has produced considerable tension and sometimes behavior which resulted in banishment. But it is the right thing to do. No conversation should proceed when it is based on a fallacy or is logically absurd. Kindly remind me of that next time.

From PZ's Place: Rodriguez, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-22T11:18:00.000-06:00

My path to atheism was paved with history books.

I was interested in my native Catholicism, so I read Elaine Pagels on the origins of Christianity. Starting from her books, I was led to the similarities between Catholicism and ancient Egyptian beliefs. It could not have been chance that those people, who were not Catholic, believed in the same things as me. It couldn’t be unless those beliefs and mine were the same in some way: they are the legacy of that time and people to me. That was the biggest and most crucial step.

Then, I read up on Santeria. It’s part of my native culture too, but I didn’t consider it an option to believe in. Given the way Santeria was presented to me in my childhood, it was the opposite. Santeria was never a live option, in exactly the same way that dog-headed and falcon-headed gods were not. Yet the parallels to Catholicism were too obvious. I noticed another obvious thing. In some Catholic circles, Santeria is viewed with extreme contempt. I noticed that contempt, and I noticed how much racism was tied up in that contempt. It bothered me.

Santeria is a New World religion and it may be a syncretic religion; it may be the combination of Catholicism and certain Yoruba and other African religious practices. In that view, the saints and orishas represent the same underlying principles. Or maybe, it’s not syncretic at all. On this view, the saints that are associated with the orishas are a dodge and a defense mechanism. That dodge enables an older, persecuted religion to survive in secret in a new environment, even if in a changed form, and even if some believers eventually forget the dodge. Funny about that, how that process is similar to what happened to those Egyptian ideas from so long ago.

Either syncretic or not, Santeria’s history has played out in the last 500 years, and there are clear historical records to be read. Sorry Osiris, Horus and Isis; sorry Chango, Yemaya and Cachita; sorry Santa Barbara, Regla, and Caridad del Cobre, but I just can’t believe in you.

It didn’t take much imagination to extend that same logic to Jesus and Mary and Genesis and Yaweh and all that.

Rodriguez
United States

Rodriguez makes one point: Similarities and parallels in diverse ecclesiasticisms show that they are all false.

From PZ's Place, Holly, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-21T15:02:00.000-06:00

I am an atheist because, if I am to be an honest person, it is the only way I am able to be.

When I was struggling with trying to be Christian in my early 20′s, other Christians who knew I was struggling would tell me to “have faith” and “it will come with time” if I just believe. I was subtly told that I was over-thinking the whole question. (What does it mean to “over-think”?) I tried to be open to God, but I couldn’t stop “over-thinking”. I pleaded with God to reveal himself to me and wondered what was wrong with me that he never did. I wasn’t even asking for much of a sign–I didn’t want a burning bush or a miracle, I just wanted a feeling like so many Christians I knew claimed they had–a feeling of knowing the “truth” and knowing that God was there with me.

I never got such a feeling and I slowly came around to the idea that maybe there was nothing wrong with me. Maybe the reason I wasn’t picking up God’s signal was not because I was a poor receptor but because he wasn’t actually there. The moment I let myself think that, I was on a very quick path to atheism. My “eureka” moment was not “God does not exist” but rather, “I don’t have to believe in God.” It seems obvious to me now, but at the time it was a real revelation (so to speak). I started to see faith for what it is: not the noble, humble position as it is touted, but a lie to oneself–deliberate deceit self-imposed in order to believe in something that’s not true.

I’ve recently become not only an atheist, but an “out” atheist. I talk about it with the religious members of my family. I say it outright if someone asks me if I belong to a church. I updated my facebook “philosophy” to read “atheist” (this was surprisingly difficult for me for whatever reason). I’ve even told a handful of my students when they’ve asked. This newfound zeal came about this year when my husband and I started looking for resources on raising our 3-year-old daughter without religion. We want to raise her to not be afraid–of being different, of being creative, of being smart, of being rational. And so I had to stop and examine how I was living my life and I saw that I had been hiding. I didn’t believe, but I sometimes pretended I did to avoid conflict. I was noncommittal or weakly compromising at best and untruthful at worst, and I don’t want to raise my daughter to think that’s OK.

I became an atheist to be honest with myself and so I had to come out as an atheist to be honest with others.

We teach by example, so I’m working to be an example worth learning from.
Holly
United States

Holly makes this point: In her early 20’s, she couldn’t feel God, and came to understand that she didn’t have to believe because God wasn’t there.

From PZ's Place, Fester60613, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-20T19:00:00.000-06:00

I am an atheist because the gods presented to me in my youth are:

• All loving – while providing the perfect vehicle of hatred and bigotry for their followers.

• Omniscient – except when the intervention of a God is desperately needed.

• Benevolent – while children suffer and die, while women are humiliated and tortured and slain in barbarous fashions simply because they are women.

• Conflicted – “Heal the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry” but also “kill them all – men, women, children, animals and trees.”

• Afflicted by Munchausen by proxy syndrome – “I’ll kill my son so you will love me more.”

• Misogynistic

• Used by the international criminal Pope Benedict XVI to assist in the cover up of an international conspiracy to sexually abuse children.

• Unworthy of my praise, my devotion, and my worship.

And other reasons too numerous to mention.

Fester60613
United States

Summary: Fester60613 has made his points above, all of which seem to hinge on evilgod, presumably that of the Bible/Catholicism.

Again I have been accused of lying.

2011-12-19T22:33:00.001-06:00

”It is not an Ad Hominem to say someone is lying, when you consider them to be lying.”
Jotunn.

Again I am accused of lying. What I have actually said is that there is no logic found in the Why I Am An Atheist papers which PZ is publishing. This is a lie? Of course not. What it is, is discomfiting to those whose Atheist image depends on the contrary being true. It has to be called a lie, in order that the image of Atheism be kept unbesmirched by analyzing these published reasons: those WIAAA writings really are devoid of any logical basis, despite their frequent claims of logic and rationality. They are merely anecdotes? Did PZ ask for logic-free anecdotes? Of course not. The “anecdote” excuse is just that, an excuse for attacking the analyst on the basis of being a liar, merely for not accepting the Atheists’ excuses for the WIAAA Atheists.

We seem to have hit a nerve. Atheists are circling the wagons. Their worldview is being opened for public viewing via the writings of their own people: Atheists writing about their Atheism to other Atheists.

Yes, this will be damaging to Atheist claims. Yes, I expect more attacks on me personally for pointing out the painfully obvious. Such attacks are an explicit indication of an ideology at work, defending itself from actual data.

”It was explained the context in which these stories were requested. Posting the definition of why and selecting "reason" while ignoring the subsequent "cause, or purpose, with what intent, justification, or motive:" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/why) just makes your case worse. In my view. It really does come off as dishonest.”

I’m not terribly surprised. The criticism has morphed as time moves on. The original complaint was my use of the word “why”, when PZ apparently asked for “reasons”. When that complaint was shown unjustified, then it turned to “context”. I imagine that next the complaint will concern violation of the meta-narrative in the back of PZ’s mind. But Atheists cannot so easily escape from this crippling shot to their own foot; no amount of complaining about wrong intent or mixed signals or whatever, can change that the reasons being given by dozens to hundreds of Atheists are in no manner based on logic. These writers ignore logic as the reason for choosing Atheism, while claiming they have it in the abstract. For them, logic is neither the “cause, nor purpose, nor intent, nor justification, nor motive".

Here’s the latest note from PZ regarding these submissions:

I’m still getting submissions, and I’m still getting asked how to make a submission. It’s easy! Write an essay of whatever length moves you on why you are an atheist, format it simply (just text is best, don’t get fancy on me so I have to fuss with it), and email it to pzmyers@gmail.com, and I’ll toss it into my special WIAAA folder.
Emphasis added.

And WIAAA stands for "Why I Am An Atheist". It's that simple.

No mention of “anecdotes-only”, or to “beware of logic”, or "give only your emotional justifications": just “why”. What are your reasons? That is the actual context: ”Why Are You An Atheist? It’s not some mysterious philosophical question: it is asking WHY? Give your REASONS.

And that is just what the WIAAA writers are doing: giving their reasons.

The attacks on me are merely acts of desperation, devoid of actual charges other than violating the ideologically-based personal interpretations by the would-be defenders, hoping to save Atheism from itself. But those WIAAA writers speak for themselves, and defending them requires that their omissions be covered over, somehow explained away: a task of reinterpretation that was not deemed necessary by the original WIAAA authors, and not authorized by them.

As for my 40 years of Atheism, I recognize myself in these “reasons” being given in WIAAA. Being trained in formal logic and using it in my profession, I led myself to believe that I also was logical in my worldview. However, after examining my worldview using the First Principles and the known disciplines of logical procedure, I found that my reasons for Atheism were actually emotionally based and not logical at all. Further analysis of Atheist positions showed consistent violations of logical principles while at the same time claiming logic and rationality as their own.

Atheists in general claim that both logic and rationality are their domain, and that they are the masters thereof. Yet they steadfastly and quite consistently refuse to acknowledge their own logical errors, or to restrict themselves to any procedure other than that which they create for themselves to post hoc justify their ideology. The idea that this is logical refutes their claims of logic as being the realm of Atheism.

Theism makes some specific claims, none of which include the possibility of physical evidence, nor the ecclesiastic interpretations taken by “religious experts”, nor are they susceptible to the charges of evil this or that. For the most part, Theism is not even rejected outright by the Atheists in the “Why I Am An Atheist” (WIAAA) series. What is rejected usually is ecclesiasticism, which is mistaken for Theism. The rejection is not based on logic, but is emotional, with the resulting commonly developed hatred of ecclesiasticism and the blanket condemnation of generalized “religion”. Theism is commonly secondarily rejected merely because in the minds of many of these WIAAA folks, the deity is merely loosely appended to the evil ecclesiasts, and is given no more thought than that. God is rejected as the baby thrown out with the bathwater. When attempting to justify this guilt by association error, all sorts of rationalizations are created in order to spackle over the rational error, including that the deity must be evil if the ecclesiasts are so evil. (Whether the ecclesiasts are really evil or not is a separate topic: the willful delusions to which Atheists are subject.)

As many of these now-published Atheists have pointed out, there is an exhilarating freedom from all absolutes which accompanies Atheism. Exceptions might temporarily be grasped at for relativist purposes, but that is the exception. And that Atheist freedom carries over to include denying any absolutes which might constrain this freedom; this necessarily pertains to those absolutes which ground logic, as well. Free thought it is called. But the rub is this: if logical arguments cannot be grounded, absolutely, then they cannot be “true” in any sense: they are either circular, or openly infinitely regressive. So they are without any merit, other than being just another opinion.

Someone said that no generalizations can be made regarding Atheists, and that I am lying by making claims regarding Atheism as a general principle. But they are unable to refute the position that,
(1) Atheism has no attached principles, either ethical or logical attached to it, or that:

(2) Atheism, in general, is de facto Materialist, having rejected any and all non-material existence merely by asserting skepticism, or that:

(3) Atheism cannot be proven valid using Materialist requirements, or logical argumentation, or that:

(4) no one, not even another Atheist, can know what a random Atheist’s principles, if any, might be.

These are generalizations which are valid. This charge of lying is just as false as the others.

”However, I personally find it unlikely that someone who was an atheist for 40 years can so grossly misinterpret these stories as being without reasonable justification.”

Is emotional justification “reasonable”? Is rejection of [A] because it is associated somehow with [B], “reasonable” justification? My interpretation is that these reasons fail logic, I have shown why, and that has not been refuted. However, what seems reasonable to Atheists seems to include the non-logical and the fallacious.

Let’s examine these points brought out by Martin, points to which you attribute logic in your attempted defense of the Atheists who are contributing to WIAAA:

1. Religious claims conflict with observable reality.

There is nothing about Theism which is observable by using the processes demanded by Philosophical Materialism: empirical hypothesis, deduction, experimentation, replication, non-falsifiability. Such demands are Category Errors. The term, “Religious claims”, refers to ecclesiasticism, not to Theism, a second Category Error. And the term “religion” is a generalization without specifics to even discuss.

2. Religious claims on morality conflict with our innate ideas of right and wrong.

“Religious claims” are, again, ecclesiasticism, not Theism. And, again, it is a generalization without specifics. And innate ideas of right and wrong are all contingent under Atheism, which comes with no attached ethic, and is therefore situational rather than consistent. So it is inevitable that even one Atheist will likely conflict with another when it comes to ethical pronouncements. Innate ideas of right and wrong are intuitions, and intuitions are generally rejected as reliable sources by Atheo-Materialists. So why the Atheist exception for morals? And which Atheist has the moral authority to make1 moral declarations for everyone?

3. There is no evidence for the existence of a deity.

Demanding physical evidence for a non-physical entity is a Category Error.

4. We have alternate systems of discovery which has consistently outperformed theism. (Also, I can't think of a single thing that theism "discovered")

Theism doesn’t claim “discovery”; Theism is a deduction based on observations. Theism is probabilistic and makes no claims which are considered certainty (Ecclesiasticism might do that in some cases, but not Theism). The Atheist demands on Theism are irrational, being internally contradictory. In general, Atheists misrepresent Theism, and use that misrepresentation as a target (aka Straw Man).

When Atheists misrepresent Theism, are they liars? Under many conditions of Atheist thought, the conditions they place on others do not apply to themselves. So I suspect that Atheists can misrepresent without allowing that they, themselves, are liars. That is one of the conveniences of relativism.

It appears to me that the Atheist "frustration" is not so much with the alleged misrepresentation of the Atheist “Why I Am An Atheist” papers, as it is frustration that the WIAAA representation actually is correct and is being revealed to the world by the Atheists themselves. This frustration with what is to be revealed via analysis of WIAAA writings leads Atheists scrambling to save face to call me a liar as a pre-emptive strike.

Here is my position: these WIAAA submissions, none of them so far, indicate any logic behind their choice. That is a fact. If you cannot deal with it, I can handle that. However, I will not tolerate being called a liar, or any other name calling. You cannot discredit the obvious truth with Ad Hominem character attacks. I will not be influenced by such tactics. And I will continue to deal with those who make character accusations on this blog.

ADDENDUM:
I am also accused of being too snarky, which offends Atheist sensibilities. Snarky is an undefinable attitude which I take to mean that Atheists are not used to having their confrontational attitudes met with an ability to refute their positions with strength, rather than immediate capitulation. I must reply that strength of reply will remain a characteristic here. If Atheists are offended by having the illogic of their position illuminated, that is not a reason to stop doing it.

From PZ's Place, August Pamplona, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-19T10:56:00.000-06:00

At some point I really thought about it and realized there’s no evidence for a god or gods.
August Pamplona
United States

Summary: No evidence for God or gods.

From PZ's Place, Marty Heath, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-19T10:54:00.000-06:00

I was raised Roman Catholic, sent to 12 years of Catholic school. I was an altar boy for 4 years, and the reader of scripture at Sunday mass for 4 more. Usually at this point in the story, people ask if I was molested by a priest, and that’s why I’m an atheist. I was not, but the question stands as a good barometer of the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church.

Religious education is a standing part of the curriculum in Catholic school, and always, I was a child who asked questions. Why can’t we eat meat on Friday? How do we know the Bible is true? Why do we think the Pope is infallible? Do unbaptised children go to hell? Where does the Bible mention limbo?

The answers were always the same. “It’s a matter of faith”, the priest would say. “Either you believe it or you don’t”. As I grew up, the questions continued, and became more pointed. What evidence is there of transubstantiation? The Bible doesn’t mention birth control, why is its use a sin? If people who have not been exposed to the Christian faith don’t go to hell, but people who have been exposed, but don’t believe, do go to Hell, should we evangelize to them? What can a professed lifelong virgin teach us about sexual relationships and marriage? “A matter of faith. Believe it or not”.

At some point around age 17, I realized that if that was all they had, if that was their best argument, then the truth was, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a word of it. When I accepted that as the truth, it was like a weight lifted from my shoulders. There’s really no reason to worry about eternal damnation–the whole story is bullshit.

Over time, it has become increasingly clear to me that the whole notion of substitutionary atonement is not only unbelievable, but intrinsically immoral. No amount of suffering by an innocent can ever assuage the responsibility of the guilty. The “get out of hell free” card is just too easy, the application too random, and the evidence too lacking to merit respect. A diety that would create such a system is a monster, and not worthy of our worship.

Morality is a code of behaviour that gives you the best chance of living a happy, satisfying life. Science is the tool for understanding the world as it really is. We’re all going to die some day, so make the most of this opportunity and help others who are in the same boat as you. The ways we are all alike are far more important than the trivialities that make us different.

Being an atheist in America today is not a popular position, but it does carry the substantial comfort of being true.
Marty Heath
United States

Heath makes these points:
(1) When he asked questions he got no real answers from Catholicism except “it’s a matter of faith”.

(2) Substitutionary atonement is intrinsically immoral; the deity which created it is a monster.

(3) Morality is for having a happy, satisfying life.

(4) Science.

Summary: At 17, Heath became an anti-Catholic, anti-ecclesiast. He rejects substitutionary atonement as immoral, and God as a monster. He creates a morality. He believes in science. He thinks Atheism is true.

From PZ's Place, Niki M., USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-19T10:51:00.000-06:00

I am an atheist because it just makes sense. As a kid, I loved to read. I read anything that had words. I read street signs and fairy tales and the all of the Bible and those naughty magazines and raunchy novels that the grown-ups thought they hid well. I suppose being so voracious, it was easy for me to associate the Blue Fairy and Santa Claus and Jesus as fictional characters, with the downside being that even the grown-ups believed in Jesus. I mean, catching my dad rolling in our Christmas bicycles solved the “Is Santa real?” question pretty solidly, but going into church and playing Mary holding a little brown baby doll and calling it our Lord for an audience of proud faces was downright confusing. How was it different than playing Wendy of Peter Pan for a school play? It was fun, but no one really believed that you could fly with happy thoughts and fairy dust.

I didn’t get it then. I really didn’t. Most churches had brown haired, blue eyed Saviors pictures on the wall, while our African Methodist Episcopal church hung a dark skinned bushy-haired Jesus picture and they were supposed to be the same? Oh, wait, that wasn’t right. According to my pastor and family, them white folks had it wrong and co-opted Jesus to look like them. We were right. But wait, wasn’t he supposedly born in the Middle East? I learned quickly what questions I was allowed to ask at risk of getting yelled out, threatened with hell or outright punished for being a “smart-mouth.”

Before I even had a name for what I believed, I kept my questions to myself as I learned about dinosaurs (that weren’t mentioned in Noah’s story), and reproduction (that, at least for humans, requires sex), and other things that didn’t quite go with what I was told was the Truth According to God’s Word (and don’t get me started on the stuff that didn’t go well with how I understood reality). To my mind then, it was just adults playing at pretend, so I pretended with them. I pretended devotion at church and joined the kid’s choir and ushered and read scriptures and holiday speeches, my fear of displeasing my family greater than any love I could have for some deity.

I wish I could talk to that little girl and reassure her that someday, it will be okay to ask the questions, and the word you were looking for is “atheist”. I almost wish I had the desire to have children of my own so that I could teach them that it’s okay to ask questions, to say “I don’t know”, and to find things out on their own. Also, that I would love them no matter what they believed.

Even if they were little “smart-mouths”.
Niki M.
United States

Niki M. makes these points:

(1) Questions about the conflicts between religion and “common sense” were not allowed.

(2) Some things, e.g. dinosaurs and sex (reality), don’t square with the Bible.

(3) Always thought that adults were playing make-believe, not engaged in actual belief; so she didn’t believe.

Summary: Never believed despite religious upbringing; religious conflicts with common sense led to non-belief.

From PZ's Place, Kausik Datta, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-19T10:48:00.000-06:00

I am an academic researcher in Immunology and Infectious Disease; I have a general passion for science and scientific thought, and value science education tremendously.

Until the beginning of 2003, I was a believer. The belief was not taught, but came naturally to me as a consequence of the environment I grew up in. I was born to and raised by parents who practise the Hindu religion. As a matter of fact, to my parents, the Hindu religion (I avoid the term ‘Hinduism’) was not at all about the kind of teeth-gnashing, attention-clamoring, intemperate, uncivil hooliganism that has become the face of Hindu-ism in modern India. To them, it was a philosophy; a unifying theme of ‘One god – many manifestations’ – that easily included the god-heads of other religions of the world; a kind, understanding, all-embracing way of life, that taught temperance, the value of life and love, and worship through discharge of duties to the fellow human being. It was such a basic and deep understanding that they never stood much on ceremonies and rituals. Growing up in this environment, I never really felt any clash between my spirituality and my science, because I felt that the two belonged to two completely different non-intersecting planes.

It was in the past eight years or so that I acutely became aware of a disconnect. I am not ashamed to admit that this possibly resulted from three major life events: (a) getting married to a wonderful woman who is a non-believer, (b) both of us moving to the US, and (c) being introduced to PZ Myers’ Pharyngula by my wife – the last two events being of seminal importance. In the US, I was far away from the overly-pervasive faith- and belief-laden environment of home – which helped. My eyes were opened to the contemporary world. The Pharyngula posts, relentless discussions, my introduction to the erudite, reasoned writings of Dawkins and Hitchens – all contributed equally to shape the way I see the world now, by making me aware, pushing me to question my beliefs, burning away my brain-fog of wishy-washy spirituality, and administering a healthy dose of rationality and skepticism. In fact, it wouldn’t perhaps be inappropriate to consider myself a “Born Again” Atheist, given how utterly radically I was transformed.

What an awakening it was! Not aware of anything more than undercurrents of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism at home, I saw and learnt to recognize the horrible face and full import of religious fundamentalism and all the cesspits of human detritus that accompany it, such as hatred, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. I found it grossly offensive to my sense of what is right. I saw people killing and being killed in the name of religion; I found a growing sentiment of ‘my religion is the best; the rest are all hogwash’. I watched with horror religious observances taking such precedence in people’s lives that they oftentimes forgot, or started ignoring, the basic, fundamental qualities that make us human, including logic and reason. I was shocked and amazed to find the so-called religious leaders tout faith as the panacea to all problems, when clearly blind, unreasoning faith was inciting more hatred and mindless violence in many parts of the world. All very different from the concept of faith I had grown up with. It shook the foundations of my beliefs, and I started deconstructing religion with reason. Soon it all came away unraveled.

I thought, “This cannot be right! If there is a God who cares, this is not the kind of madness that should be pervading mankind!” More and more I looked around, I couldn’t find any evidence for the existence of any god, only the very human quality of post hoc rationalizations leading to flawed arguments for the assumed presence of a deity. Nothing beyond figments of very human and very limited imagination, it occurred to me. I also realized that religion had nothing to do with a higher power or divinity. Instead, it was fraught with the basest human inequities, craze for power, greed, lust, subjugation through fear and guilt. The rest was all myths built by humans around this core to give it a lasting aura of respectability and prestige. And this was not unique to any particular religion; all of them, Hinduism, Judeo-Christianity, Islam, even lesser-known religions of the world, were full of hypocrisy and glaring inconsistencies. I came to understand that morality and ethics, in order to be viable guidelines for a way of life, did not really need the crutches of religion and observances; on their own, they could survive as eminently sound, logical and reasonable practices to build a life around.

It did not take me long thereafter, to renounce any contact with religion. What helped steel my resolve was a sense of betrayal by my parents, my country, my upbringing, my shielded existence until this point. Nothing in my prior 30 years of life had prepared me for this reality; nothing had truly opened my eyes and inculcated any questioning attitude. Nothing ever goaded me to see the now-obvious disconnect between my science education and the quavering tendrils of my erstwhile faith. I felt ashamed, small and inadequate.

My denouncing make-believe gods and coming out as an atheist must have pained my parents, although they were gracious enough to leave me to my thoughts, rather than try to impose theirs on mine. But even today, my mother keeps trying to reignite that spark of faith in me. But never again. More and more I look at the world today, atrocities fomented (and sanctioned) by the religions and committed by the religious zealots come to the fore. To find nothing wrong with religion is living in a state of active denial, a practice many of the so-called ‘religious moderates’ indulge in – and that includes my parents. They feel that people who incite violence and hatred in the name of religion are not the truly religious; the truly religious would focus on the messages of peace, non-violence, brotherhood, love and duty, central to most religions. Note that these lofty ideals are occasionally embraced by the religions when it suits their purpose. And to think that those ideals represent the whole idea of religious practices is, at best, delusional thinking, and represents the No True Scotsmen fallacy.

I am often asked by friends and family why I choose to denounce religion so stridently (Yes, I am a Gnu Atheist!), why I can’t simply ignore the perversions of religion, and let everyone choose what they want to believe in – even if I don’t believe in religion or any god. I found out long ago that I cannot change anybody else, except myself. As a working scientist, I deal with empirical evidence. There is no evidence for existence of a god, any god, but there is plenty of evidence that the responsibility for much of the plight of human beings in today’s world devolves directly on religious belief and blind adherence to dogma. That is the core problem. Religion cannot submit itself to logical enquiry; it demands blind acceptance, ‘faith’ and unthinking acquiescence to utterly ridiculous, often outdated, and superstitious belief systems and traditions.

The nature of religious belief is so insidious, that it needs to pervade, to spread like a cancer away from its source. An astonishing majority of the population of believers is deeply busy in trying to disseminate their odious doctrine to others, and none-too-gently, too! It is more often ‘My religion is better than yours, so convert or die’ kind of treatment, or it is done on the sly – ‘Want medical care? Come to Jesus’ kind of way.
Religious indoctrination has progressed to such ludicrous levels that the ‘faithful’ often pull out the ‘religious belief’ card at every possible instance to explain their intransigence and imperviousness to common sense. They are trying – very actively – to spread their brand of stupidity to education, healthcare, politics, and other walks of life. If this is not actively countered, it will end up destroying our basic humanity.
Kausik Datta
United States

In this lengthy piece there seems to be just two thoughts: first, religions promote all sorts of evil in the world. Running second is the “disconnect between science and religion” idea.

Summary: Datta took to Atheism as an adult; reasons include: religions are evil, and the disconnect between science and religion. Influenced heavily by PZ, Dawkins, et. al.

Comments are Moderated

2011-12-19T09:32:00.001-06:00

There are some things which cannot and should not be tolerated on a blog intended for civil discourse. I do not tolerate name-calling, for one thing. While I was gone there was a period where several Atheists showed their true selves. Calling me a liar and stupid is not civil discourse. I had had hope that the arguments being placed before I left would produce some sort of results which could be logically acceptable; but it apparently was too much to ask.

I will close this segment by addressing the issues of my "lying"; the Atheist accusers will not be allowed to respond because they have already made their case; after my response, the issue will be closed.

First the issue of me "lying" about PZ's request for emails from Atheists concerning the reasons for their Atheism: When I write "Why I am an Atheist", it is the same as "here are the reasons that I am an Atheist". The definition of "why" is this:

why,adv. 1. for what reason, cause, or purpose; with what motive; used interrogatively...

Along with this, the issue of the Atheist's responses being merely anecdotes rather than logical responses, thereby excusing the Atheists for the lack of logic in their positions, has been brought as an accusation also. Should the Atheists not be held to their reasons? In many cases the Atheist has declared devotion to logic and rationality as an abstraction without so much as a clue as to what that actually entails in terms of disciplined adherence to an external standard. If logic is claimed, then one should be expected to have logical reasons. And in fact, many more of the responses detail emotional reasons for their Atheism, without any discussion of the need for, or use of, logic, and no apparent thought for logic at all.

The second accusation is that I have lied and am too stupid to understand the complexities of the Atheist argument. This is the response to the logical faults and fallacies which I demonstrated to the argument being made. When logic is violated wilfully there is little anyone can respond to except the violations. If an argument does succeed in adhering to logical requirements, then one could proceed to ask what the probability of its being true might be. But if it contains violations of logical procedures, then there is nothing else to discuss, but those violations.

Now, it is entirely possible that I did not understand the series of words in the same sense in which the writer intended them to be understood. But words and sentences are the currency of intellectual transaction. When they can be seen, on their face, to contain errors, then what else can be done?

The default position for Atheists who are cornered seems always to be to resort to airs of superiority and ridicule, yet in the total absence of material or logical proof.

The final insults have been made. These two will have to complain about me elsewhere; their comments will no longer be accepted here.

UPDATE:

PZ has made this request update:

Why are you an atheist?

December 17, 2011 at 8:35 am PZ Myers

I’m still getting submissions, and I’m still getting asked how to make a submission. It’s easy! Write an essay of whatever length moves you on why you are an atheist, format it simply (just text is best, don’t get fancy on me so I have to fuss with it), and email it to pzmyers@gmail.com, and I’ll toss it into my special WIAAA folder.

Then be patient.

[Emphasis added]

From PZ's Place, Steve Beck, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-15T15:29:00.000-06:00

I had the good fortune to be born into a family of secular Jews who did not believe in god or go to temple. I never believed myself, and I am puzzled to this day why anyone would believe such nonsense. Some years ago, I began to wonder whether there was any chance religious people were on to something, so I read a lot of objective books and articles on religion and atheism, and I did not find a shred of evidence for god, and saw that religion was a pathetic tangle of lies and wishful thinking. After my initial bout of reading, I became hooked, and I love to read about atheism, and I read you and Jerry Coyne every day. I am still mystified, however, why any sane person could believe such rot.
Steve Beck
United States

Beck makes these points:

1. Background is Atheist. He never believed.

2. Read “objective” books on religion and Atheism.

3. No shred of evidence found in his reading.

4. Religion is a “tangle of lies and wishful thinking”.

5. Loves to read about Atheism.

Summary: Family is Atheist; always was Atheist; found no evidence for god through reading; religion is false;

From PZ's Place, Alexandra Noronha, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-15T15:20:00.000-06:00

I attended Catholic schools and believed Christian doctrine to be the rich history of our culture full of stories meant to help us learn morality that we appreciated for their utility, but were aware of the fact that it was not factual. We talked about God as a being that unified our community, but the idea that he actually existed? No one actually believes that, right?

In fact, it wasn’t until I was 15 years old, a sophomore in Catholic high school, that I realized that my interpretation of Christian doctrine was different, and that it was so different that it even had a name: atheism. In my sophomore year religion class we started to learn the differences between Catholicism and other Christian sects, one of the major distinctions being that Catholics believe in transubstantiation. Somehow this was literally the first time that I realized that Christians actually took this shit seriously. It took me 10 years of Catholic school to actually invest enough energy in my religion classes, which I always thought just served the purpose of being necessary downtime for our brains, to realize that I was supposed to take it seriously. Catholics believe that they literally cannibalize Jesus once a week? Are you shitting me?

I’d always know I was an atheist, I just didn’t know that everyone else wasn’t also atheist. Culturally I was Catholic, and always will be, so guilt ensued that tormented me for years for the fact that I couldn’t believe. I’d always heard that faith was a gift, why didn’t I have that gift? And why did my classmates and teachers ridicule me when I came out with the fact that I didn’t have the gift?

I didn’t want to find god, I knew atheism was the correct state, but I went through years of guilt and self-loathing for the fact that I am not, and cannot be, a believer. What is so wrong with me that I can’t think like other people? It was an awful few years for me emotionally; Catholic guilt is serious business. Only in the past year or so have I realized that there are other people who think like I do, and in fact, the fact that I am so naturally resistant to indoctrination, and can’t delude myself into believe in a god, is what has made me a successful scientist. Thank God for the internet and vocal atheists! You have blessed me with the peace, confidence, and security in my intellectual ability that the Church had taken away from me by trying to give me faith.

Alexandra Noronha
United States

Noronha makes these points:

1. Always was an Atheist, but culturally a Catholic.

2. At 15 years old, realized that Catholicism believed absurdities.

3. Didn’t want to find god, but had Catholic guilt regarding not having the “gift” of faith.

Summary: Always an Atheist; resistant to Catholicism; realized Atheism described beliefs; didn’t want to find god; struggled with guilt.

From PZ's Place, Mike Bermudez, Fnord, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-13T23:08:00.000-06:00

I perhaps had it easier than most. Actually, I’m quite sure I did. While my father took me to a Roman Catholic church when I was little- at least from the ages 7 to 10 -I never paid attention. Quite frankly at the latter stages, I was quite uncomfortable with the whole thing. Bored out of my mind for one and having to dress up in cloths that I never cared to wear. In fact, one time I asked my dad if I could bring a book on dinosaurs to read. You know, in case I got bored.

I later figured that my father was doing this solely at the behest of my grandparents. I’m not sure why he stopped going and thus my not going, but it was quite nice. The nightly prayers stopped too- what a bore those were.

My mom on the other hand had become Buddhist or perhaps had been for some time- I’m not sure. She would take me to weekly meetings and would have me sit with her at our home alter. Not only was I already bored with religion in general, but now it’s in a different language. Oh joy.

The weekly meetings were much more fun than the Catholic church. There were kids to play with, I could read whatever I brought with me, sometimes if it was held at someone’s house, they might have dogs for me to pet! Oh and I often had to do my homework. Never seemed to escape that. This too stopped being a common occurrence. Again I’m not too sure when, although I believe I was in the 6th grade. It was also around this time that I started to slowly learn about religion, but it wouldn’t be until High School that I really got into it.

My “indoctrination” into mocking religion came in the form of “No-God.com”. If you’ve never been and wish for a 90s flash-back, I highly recommend it. This website had a great mix of humor and facts. Very dark and twisted humor. Perfect for a high school student engrossed in all things Metal and GWAR.

GWAR, along with Marilyn Manson, led to some new websites and interesting people/ideas. The “Church of the Sub Genius” is one of them as well as the “Church of Satan”. Satanism is just as boring to me as Christianity, although at the time was certainly something fun to heat people up with in a hurry. Aside from cheesy websites and religions, I didn’t much pay attention to it all. In fact, I’m not sure I was too familiar with the term “Atheist” at the time. I believe my standard reply to the question of my religious affiliation was: “I don’t have time for any of that.”

After discovering Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and PZ Myers, it became quite clear to me that Atheism was here to stay in my life. Not only that, but it helped me gain confidence in what I believed in and a confidence to be open and expressive about it. I feel very free about life and much more excited about the natural beauty of the world because of it.
Mike Bermudez
Fnord

Not really raised in theism, Bermudez was influenced by website No-God.com while in high school. He wasn't serious until influenced by Dawkins, Hitchens, and PZ.

Summary: No serious religious upbringing; as teenager was influenced by a website, and then by Dawkins et. al.

From PZ's Place, Fralan, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-13T22:59:00.000-06:00

I am the confident and comfortable atheist I am today for three main
reasons, among others. These are just common sense notions that
leveled the Catholic faith I was brought up in when I was 14.

1. I do not wish to live in perpetual fear. Christian philosophy,
specifically Catholic philosophy, dictates that everyone WILL suffer
for eternity. You are born that way, you have no chance of escape from
the vile disgusting thing that is you. Only by completely throwing
your life away to a divine tyrant and unquestioningly spreading his
will, whether you agree or not, is the way to not suffer. Being angry:
damnation. Asking questions: damnation. Being born: Damnation.
Religion removes the point of life by making you miserable and
submissive. Religion relies on this loathing of oneself to get what it
wants: obedience and money.

2. I live in reality. Religion lies straight to the faces of millions
and they believe it. Why? Because it’s what the magic desert
scribblings say. So there. Once again they rely on straight fear to
keep people in line, and it is only this fear that keeps them
believing. They simply ignore inconsistencies as trivial because these
inconsistencies prove errors. Everyone knows that dinosaurs died out
65 million years ago. The bible says that the earth is 6,000 years
old, but people still just ignore it.

3. Religion is self-righteous and egotistic. Countless millions have died
because religion told them that their way was correct, as opposed to
someone’s slightly different way. Crusades, witch hunts, jihad, the
Holocaust, and scores of other events are justified only to the
killers because they’re just acting under a direct order from god,
given by man, of course.

Religion is a brutal prison warden on people’s lives. They stop at
nothing to maintain control and recruit new members. Permanent
psychological damage? They don’t care. It tries to destroy
independence, coexistence, and confidence in the name of an
oversensitive, jealous, maniacal, dictator in the sky, and they do no
one any good.

Fralan
United States

Fralan goes on a rant. Religion is perpetual fear. Religion is self-righteous and egotistical. Religion lies and kills countless millions. Religion stops at nothing,"to maintain control and recruit new members. Permanent psychological damage? They don’t care. It tries to destroy independence, coexistence, and confidence in the name of an oversensitive, jealous, maniacal, dictator in the sky, and they do no one any good."

Summary: Raised Catholic, Atheist at 14, he attributes every evil to "religion".

From PZ's Place, “Big Ugly” Jim Martin, Canada, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-13T22:49:00.000-06:00

I struggled with my faith for a long time, but it was a religious program that ultimately shattered it. It was a Sunday in the early afternoon, and these guys were talking about the story of Samson, and how he was God’s avenging fist against the Philistines. The story never sat well with me, because Samson really comes off like a prick to me. Sure, he’s killing the enemies of God, but they weren’t his enemies until he gave them his ridiculous and impossible riddle to solve. He then, to continue his tantrum, burns the crops of the innocent people who didn’t actually have anything to do with threats to his wife, then murders 3000 more people, and that’s just the start of the story. He didn’t seem to me to be motivated by God so much as an incurable and disgusting rage that just happened to work out good for the Jews.

That got me thinking about all of the stories, and none of them really makes any sense. I don’t mean in the “it seems nonsensical to have a talking snake tempting Adam and Eve” sort of logistical sense, I mean that almost all of the stories can be explained easiliy away as the stories of an uneducated people who were largely living in slavery and dreaming of the time when their God was going to fix everything for them. And I get that. They are the stories you tell at the end of the day when your life feels like crap, and you just want to have something to believe in that keeps you going and offers some hope. The Lovely Lady and I talk at night about our future, how we’re going to take over the world and make everything better. Some of it is legitimate planning (not to take over the world, but how to get to where we want to be) and some of it is pipe dreaming.

That afternoon, watching that show, I recognized the Bible for what it is. It’s a collection of pipe dreams from a broken people wishing for something better. In a sense, that’s very beautiful, so long as you avoid the angel rapists, the instructions on slavery, the murder of homosexuals, the wrath of God, the ridiculous fables of floods, the horrifying letters to early Christians admonishing them for every last mistake they made, the brutality of the crucifiction, and pricks like Samson. Oh, and you need a pretty big stomach for swallowing all the suspension of disbelief you need to employ to accept a resurrection, miraculous healings, manna from heaven, talking snakes, guys murdering armies with no better weapon than a donkey’s face bits, repopulating the entire world from a small stock of animals and people, people surviving a lion’s den, and a loving God murdering the first born of Egypt.

Suddenly, I felt very, very foolish. I accepted my atheism that day, and I became a loudmouthed atheist at the same moment. I wanted the people I loved to see how foolish they were being, buying into all of this rubbish. I couldn’t help it, and still can’t. I’m proud to be an atheist and I want to unshackle the minds of everyone I know. It’s just who I am.
“Big Ugly” Jim Martin
Canada

Martin was influenced by a TV program, which showed him that the Bible could be explained away using a different story. He then realized the “evilbible” required suspension of disbelief (a favorite Atheist term on the web). He became an Atheist evangelist, because the Bible is rubbish.

Summary: At age unknown, he was influenced by a TV program to realize that the Bible is explainable as slave dreams, and is rubbish; he later realized that the Bible is also evil.

From PZ's Place, Matthew Prorok, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

2011-12-10T09:43:00.000-06:00

Interestingly, one of my friends just pointed me to a question from a pastor he knows, who was asking “why are you not a Christian?” I wrote this up, and felt it would be good to send along.

If you’d like to know why I’m an atheist, its because I am also a skeptic. Atheism is in a way an application of skepticism; I only believe that which has convincing evidence, and there is no convincing evidence for the existence of a divine being. The god proposed by every major religion is a supernatural god; even religions like Buddhism that do not promote a god do promote the supernatural in various ways. But through science, the study of the world around us, the observation of reality, we see absolutely no evidence of the supernatural. Everything fits, everything follows the rules. There is no E that does not equal mc^2, no F that does not have an equivalent MA. The universe appears exactly as it should if the only forces at work were those of the elementary particles of matter responding to the laws of nature. Its possible that there is a god of some kind, but its highly unlikely, and there is no evidence that any god affects reality in any way.

Why I am not a Christian is a little more specific. I was raised as a Christian, going to church every Sunday at the United Church of Christ. But as I grew older, and learned more about the religion I was following, it simply stopped making sense. Every time the Bible, and therefore god, made verifiable statements about the nature of reality, and even most of the time when it made statements of historical fact, it got it wrong. And very importantly, the god being described didn’t actually seem very loving. He demands worship and obedience, he demands that we bow before him, and tells us that we’re sinful creatures that must beg his forgiveness for not being perfect, despite the fact that supposedly he created us. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” He set the default state for the afterlife as eternal torture; how could a god who willingly sent most of his supposedly beloved children to hell be good? If there is a god, and an afterlife, and that god sits in judgement, then here is how I see it. If god is just and kind, then he will judge me on my works, not whether I believed in him. If god judges me on whether I believed in him without any evidence, then he is not just and kind, and thus isn’t worthy of worship anyway.

Matthew Prorok
United States

Prorok makes these points:

1. Skepticism/Scientism. No scientific evidence for non-material existence. Bible has errors.
2. Evil God. God of the Bible doesn’t meet Prorok’s standards for a decent God. Hell is not a good thing to believe in. Prorok sets his own standards, based somewhat on Dawkins “philosophy”.

Summary: No age given; Skepticism/Scientism; Evil God.

From PZ's Place: Lucas Parker, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-09T22:55:00.000-06:00

I grew up in poor neighborhoods around people who didn’t value critical thinking and like most people from her generation, my mother had grown up with a smattering of religion. She was a regular Sunday church-goer when I was a boy and she would dress me up and cart me off to sit on the wooden pew, daydreaming about action and adventure while a boring man droned on in monotone from the front of the room. About halfway through the monologue, we small children were brought downstairs into “Sunday school,” a place that I only remember for its truly extensive set of Legos. For all that I wasn’t predisposed to pay much attention to religion, I was as surrounded by it as any other kid. My parents were moderately religious. My grandparents were definitely religious. All of my aunts and uncles were religious. My peers and their parents; my schoolteachers; my bus drivers; my babysitters; friends; acquaintances; playmates; bullies; pretty much everybody I knew was at least a little bit religious and most definitely believed in God. People talked about it all the time. This was 1985, a very WASPy time for my hometown of Everett, Washington.

I was six years old and I was in trouble. I didn’t understand the scope of my dilemma at the time, but I was finding it more and more difficult to believe in God. Every night at bedtime, left to my thoughts, I would obsess about it. I would try to force myself to believe, to have faith in something that I couldn’t see or feel. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about it for fear of what they might say or do. One night, it just happened: despite all of the pressure from pretty much everyone I ever interacted with, I finally had to admit to myself that I did not and could not believe in God, Jesus or the rest of it. At first I felt a terrible guilt, but as that washed over me I began to feel a little bit liberated. The only way to really have faith is to obsess over it, since it has no momentum of its own and is entirely the creation of the imagination. Now, my six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.

This certainly wasn’t the end of my exploration into religion and faith, as my teen years were as full of attempts to identify as anybody’s, but this was certainly the first time that I’d been that honest with myself and in the end, better represented my actual stance on the matter than my later youthful meandering. I had never heard the word “atheist” before and so I didn’t know that there was a name for how I felt and thought. I felt very alone, a feeling that has been a theme throughout my life probably because of that very event. But there was certainly no going back.

Lucas Parker
United States

Parker makes these points:

1. Despite a somewhat religious background and environment, he found by the age of 6 years old that he couldn’t believe in something which he “couldn’t see or feel”.

2. Religion is entirely the creation of the imagination. It involves obsession.

3. Disbelief set him free: “Without God, Jesus or the rest of it” his “six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.”

Summary: Parker adopted disbelief at the age of 6 years old. He needed to see or feel something to believe it. Disbelief set him free from obsession and fear of judgment by an “oppressive deity”.

From PZ's Place: Ogvorbis, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-09T22:20:00.000-06:00

I have been asked, “Why are you an atheist?” This question has not been asked in a rude or aggressive manner, it has been (I think) an honest request for information. The short answer is, “I see nothing in the universe which cannot be explained naturally.” Fine. But how did I arrive at that idea?

The first source for this idea is my father (who (I think) is a deist and an active member of a Unitarian Church (he was even a church elder for a year (and has given a couple of ‘sermons’))). After a stretch in the Marines (between Korea and Vietnam (smart man)), he used his GI Bill to study geology at Tufts University. Then he joined the National Park Service and became an interpreter (same job I have).

One of the perks of growing up in the park service was, well, growing up in the park service. I lived at Death Valley for three years, and Grand Canyon for five (both places are heaven for a geologist). We were also able to travel widely throughout the southwest and every vacation (at least once per trip, usually once per day) he launched into ‘lecture mode’ (I do this to my family, too). His running commentary (whether driving or backpacking) on the geology immersed me at an early age in the idea that, even if the explanation is hidden, there is a logical explanation for natural phenomena.

I, like most kids, went through a dinosaur stage. Unfortunately, this was back in the days when the library books still focused on the ‘failures’ of dinosaurs — big, slow, dumb, lethargic, etc. I switched to history, but I still read extensively in palaeontology and evolutionary biology. The books that I read have reinforced the same lessons that my father taught me: natural events have natural explanations.
Even though I went from theist, to deist, to universal deist over a period of some 40 years, I never doubted the idea of natural explanations. I have, over the years, had many, many, many run-ins with theists who were (are) neck-deep in the shit of belief.

At Grand Canyon, we had an assembly at the school. A story-teller came in and was brilliant. The last story that he told was a very beautiful (well, I was in fourth (?) grade at the time and I still remember the story fondly) retelling of Genesis. His imagery, his timing, his vocabulary, was perfect. After the show, as we walked back to class, I mentioned that the last story was a fun myth. Oops, I stepped in the shit of belief (first time I can remember getting my feet dirty in that particular type of shit). He told me that that is what actually happened; that’s how the earth was created. I laughed and lost a friend. Of course, he laughed his ass off when one of the Hopi students explained his creation myth. Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.

In Maryland, in middle school (Marylandese for Junior High), one of our biology units focused on biology. There was a neat demonstration of ‘survival of the fittest’ (and I know that survival of the fittest is a very limited description of evolution) using red, yellow, blue and green toothpicks. We were to scattered them on the ground and then the other three people in the group would, in a short time, pick up the toothpicks one at a time. The idea was that the yellow and red toothpicks would be picked up quickly (a detrimental mutation), and the green and blue would be harder to find. One of the girls in my group said, “We get to be God. Let’s make the red ones survive ’cause I like that colour.” I tried to explain that evolution does not work that way. I got shouted down by my group (and the three around us). It was a good lesson for me, on more than one level.

Then there was the biology teacher who stated, at the beginning of class, “The state says I have to cover evolution. It’s in chapter XX in your textbook. I know evolution is a lie to destroy humanity. If you want to risk your soul and read about it you may, but it will not be talked about again in my classroom. There. I covered evolution.” There were only three of us in the class who, within a week, had read that chapter.

There was a very aggressive Christian on my paper route and he tried, every time I collected money, to convert me. When he found out I ‘believed’ in evolution, he laughed and said that it was all based on a pig tooth found in Nebraska. I was unprepared at the time (I was, like, 13?) to argue that the case of Niobrara man actually shows how well science works: one man made a mistake, other palaeontologists and anthropologists found the error, and it was corrected. In the 1920s.

These are just three of the many, many run-ins I have had with theists (oddly, they have all been Christians (must be a coincidence)). Every run in has only reinforced the lessons of my father.

I am an atheist because I trust in the natural error correction mechanisms of the scientific method. I am an atheist because the natural explanation, being the only explanation which is in any way provable, is the most logical (not necessarily the simplest). I am an atheist because, thanks in large part to my childhood experiences, I see nothing in the natural world, solar system, galaxy or universe which cannot be explained through natural processes.

So I am a naturalistic atheist, not a philosophical atheist, right? Well, that brings up the second reason I became an atheist: my study of history (well, I guess history is philosophy, right?).

I started college as a computer science/computer engineering/mathematics major. I was good at the math. I understood the math. I hated the math. I couldn’t picture what the numbers were saying. So I decided to switch to something I enjoy (I would worry about a career later) and became a history major.

In my study of history, I have noticed that no war has existed independent of the idea, “God is with US!!” Never mind that both sides make the same claim. Whether it is the “Gott mit unns!” of Gustav II Adolf, or “Jesu-Maria” of Tilly’s imperial troops at Breitenfeld, both sides professed that god had a personal interest in their victory (at least Gustav’s Finnish cavalry were honest about it: their battle cry was “Haakaa Paalle” — Hack them Down!). The Spanish Armada had god on their side (not to mention mediocre ships, few long range guns, no fresh water, and not enough ammunition).

Throughout history, priests (of every religion) have blessed the troops going off to battle and asked the god(s) for aid. The Athenians asked Athena for victory. The Romans asked for help from Mars. Young men going Viking got help from Odin. The Aztecs fought the flower wars to provide food for the gods. The list goes on, ad nauseum.

If the Spartans defeat Athens, does that mean Athena was weak? Or does it mean that the Athenian economic colonialism was a poor economic model? Were the German gods more powerful than the Roman ones in the forests of Germany? Did the Aztecs defeat the Spanish because their gods were so well fed? Or did the Spanish have the advantage because they ate their god?

Even the Communist states asked for help from their ‘god’ — the god of economic and social inevitability through the socialist dialectic (I view communism as a religion because it asks for its adherents to believe in impossibilities — the elimination of greed and government).

The more that I studied history, the more I realized that ‘god’ was just another tool used by the politico-military structure to give heart to the ordinary soldier. Whether the generals and kings believed that god was on their side or not is immaterial. It was still just another bunch of propaganda shoved down the throats to make the victims more willing to kill.

Natural philosophy (geology, palaeontology, evolution) convinced me that there is no evidence for god. The study of history has reinforced that conviction while also making me areligious. When I look at the religious wars of history (and even wars (such as the Hundred Years War) between peoples of the same religion (all Christians) becomes a religious war (you aren’t doing it right, so I kill you!)) I realize that, no matter why religion developed, it becomes yet another tool in the box to convince one set of peons to kill another set of peons.

So, Dr. Myers, you asked for a short piece titled “Why I Am an Atheist.” So I failed the short part, but this really is, to the best of my recollection, why I am an atheist.
Ogvorbis
United States

Ogvorbis makes these points:

1. Science shows that there is no physical evidence for God. Natural events have natural causes; therefore Genesis is wrong and Christianity is wrong. Belief is “shit”.

2. History shows that all wars, including Communist wars, were due to beliefs in God or god(s).

Summary: Raised in Scientistic environment; rejected deity while in school; adopted Scientism and rejected Creationism; studied history: all historical wars are based on religion, even the Communist wars.

From PZ's Place: Jabu M, Botswana, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-07T08:49:00.000-06:00

Growing up in Zimbabwe presented many challenges. Calling anyone “middle class” was a joke – you were either filthy rich, struggled to make ends meet or were so poor words could not begin to describe it. My family was part of that second group – we lived comfortably, but only just. I’m an ex-fourth generation Seventh-day Adventist, which, considering that Adventism has been in Zimbabwe for about four generations is really something. One thing I can truly thank my parents for is that they never compromised on my education. My brothers and I always went to private school, even if it meant we had to cut back on a few luxuries to do so. I was also always very inquisitive, very much a nerd and had a deep love for science that my mother encouraged. I read a lot of books, particularly about physics, astronomy and dinosaurs so questions were inevitable. I was an introspective child, though, so I tended to keep those questions to myself and try to figure things out on my own.

At twelve I was baptised into the church. I think this was the turning point at which I began to come to terms with reality, because it forced me to examine what I believed and why I believed it, where previously I could just drift along and pretend there was no conflict between my faith and my aspirations to be a scientist. It wasn’t an easy journey, but less than eight months later, I came to the conclusion that God as envisioned by any Earthly religion does not exist. I still thought a higher being of some kind was possible, and so became somewhat of an agnostic.

The biggest problem I had at this stage of my life was that I had nothing concrete to fill the gap my faith left behind. One practical upshot of my country and my family’s financial state was that I had no access to the solid facts I needed – I had no access to the internet and what little I did know came from the now too vague books I could access from the kids’ section of the library. I was growing ever more hungry for knowledge, and would gobble up any little morsel I could get, regardless of quality. In time, this led me to a brush with pseudoscience no better than the faith I had recently forsaken.

Rifling through some old books at my grandmother’s house, I found a bunch by a certain fellow called Erich von Daniken. They had the words “stars” and “space” in them , so reading was a no-brainer. What I read had me instantly hooked. Soon, I was proclaiming to all my friends how aliens had visited us in ages past and imparted us with intelligence. I was rattling off every single piece of “evidence” E vD presented – the Piri Reis map, the Ica stones, the Nasca lines, Puma Punku – with the utmost confidence that I’d finally found the truth. E vD did an excellent job of pretending to have that which I had been looking for all along – good, solid facts. His book “Miracles of the Gods” also fit in with the pseudo-mystical approach I had taken, and this led into a brief but retrospectively embarrassing flirtation with the Law of Attraction.

It was this phase, in which I wholeheartedly accepted such nonsense as is contained in “The Secret” and “What the Bleep Do We Know” that led to me taking another deep look at my beliefs. I noticed that all my “positive thinking” and meditating on the things I desired was getting me nowhere, and I started really thinking about how this actually worked. I realised that all this talk of “qantum-this” and “quantum-that” was simply a different term for the magic I used to believe in when I was still Christian. It did not take long for the rest of my belief in the supernatural to disappear, and eventually any concession of the possibility of the existence of a deity went down the drain as well.

I remember the first time I ever referred to myself as an atheist. I had just moved to a new school in Botswana. We were in a class Guidance and Counselling session and the counsellor asked me what religion I belonged to. Right there and then, I realised – much as I had once reviled those who were so “close-minded” as to outright deny the existence of a god, I had become one of them. With newfound conviction in my voice, I proudly answered, “I’m atheist.” This was early in 2009, and I was 16, going on 17.

Perhaps not very oddly enough, I still lent some credence to Erich von Daniken’s hypotheses. I would think to myself, “Okay, maybe he got the metaphysics wrong, but some of his facts must be right.” I was also very critical of vocal atheists, even once writing a letter bashing Richard Dawkins over his hope that creating a cross between a human and chimp would end religion to the South African edition of Popular Mechanics. The Internet changed both these things, however. The Skeptic’s Dictionary in particular demolished von Daniken’s hypotheses, while reading of all the abuses to freedom that religion continues to perpetrate underscored the importance of activism to me.

I take a pragmatic view of the circuitous route I took to becoming rational: if it weren’t for it I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t have experienced first hand how harmful and limiting believing in lies can be, and wouldn’t be so passionate about eliminating them. It’s not my lack of belief in gods that I count as my most important trait, though. I value being a rationalist because I choose to think, a skeptic because I choose to question, a humanist because I have compassion for my fellow man and have an unbridled love for the cosmos that drives me to achieve my dream of becoming an astrophysicist. It is from this dream that I draw the deepest meaning for my life: that of discovery, and questing to understand the universe we live in.

Jabu M
Botswana

Jabu M makes these points:

(1) Conflict between his religion (Seventh Day Adventist) and science.

(2) God as defined by earthly religions can’t exist (his age: nearly 13). Became agnostic.

(3) A skirmish with Eric Von Daniken and “psuedo mysticism” caused an evaluation of his beliefs. Declared Atheism at nearly 17.

(4) Influenced by internet and Skeptic’s Dictionary.

(5) Read about abuses to freedom by religion.

(6) Final declaration: I value being a rationalist because I choose to think, a skeptic because I choose to question, a humanist because I have compassion for my fellow man and have an unbridled love for the cosmos that drives me to achieve my dream of becoming an astrophysicist.

Summary:
Agnostic at 13; Atheist at 17. Reasons include: God of earthly religions can’t exist; religion conflicts with science; psuedo science and mysticism were similar to religion; he values science; religious abuse of freedom.

From PZ's Place: Michael Baizley, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-07T08:01:00.000-06:00

Between making a couple videos on the Creation Museum following the 2009 trip to the Creation Museum with the SSA and running the largest atheism group on Facebook with 10,000 members, I believe I have question to answer: why I am an atheist.

I suppose it begins with nothing short of nature itself. I grew up in the hills of Kentucky. I shan’t hesitate to say that the hills of Kentucky are a lovely place – in stark contrast to everything else in Kentucky, which is pretty much the exact opposite of lovely. I spent plenty of time in the wilderness, observing the various forms of life, taking in the smells and the sounds, laying down and watching the sky. It was always regrettable when I had to put down the science books as a young child to attend the churches, which never felt quite right to me. Regardless of what I was told, something was critically wrong with the things they said. The loving Jesus message was nice, but the not-so-loving message of hell seemed a drastic affront to the idea of love.

The explanation that a loving Lord would punish people like me, who had done no other wrong than existing or doubting, seemed contrived, to say the least.

My parents were loyal southern Baptists and still are. One morning in my youth, prior to the age of ten, I was looking out our sliding doors, taking in the amazing sights of a Sunday morning. The birds could be heard loudly chirping, deer could be heard walking the hills, the sun was just about to break free from the hills and show itself to everyone. My admiration of nature’s overwhelming beauty was thoroughly broken when my father leaned a hand against the glass and mentioned some jazz about the beauty of god’s creation. Of course, something about the beauty of god’s creation seemed off. In my time, I had found dead birds, miscellaneous animal carcasses in the woods, and seen with my own eyes bugs fighting it out as a matter of life and death.

God’s creation, while beautiful, also struck me at times as particularly brutal and outright dangerous, depending on what you are. As a human, you don’t have many problems – bears and snakes – but as an animal or insect, you had a great many problems day by day. The contrast of such striking beauty with suck striking brutality was not, and is not, lost on me. Quite the opposite: there was more brutality than beauty, and the beauty was often a superficial facade which seemed to protect us from the reality of the other creatures in god’s creation.

Increasing scientific knowledge did nothing to quell my views on god’s creation. Seeing as my favorite star was eight thousand light years away, knowing that a light year is how far light travels in a year, knowing that my favorite star was at least eight thousand years old – and most likely far, far older – only made this doubt of god’s creation grow. Especially in a world where creationists and fundamentalists, a great part of the United States population (40%, as late), tend to believe the world is six thousand years old. If my favorite star were eight thousand light years away, and the oldest known sources of light were over thirteen billion light years away, what was the rationale for believing that the world were six thousand years old?

Only a book written by bronze age goat herders.

Noah’s ark I viewed as especially unlikely. Knowing the vast amount of species that exist, knowing that there were many more than I could ever know about, one hundred plus year old man and his family were unlikely to collect them all, build a boat the size of the Titanic that could last forty days on the water or hold all of these animals, how likely was this event to have occurred? Not at all, I came to realize very quickly.

So by twelve, the seeds of doubt had been well sewn. Before too long, I was headfirst into scientific research on every major topic I could cover. I saw vast amount of evidence for the science, and with that, less and less for creationism. By thirteen, I was an atheist in every aspect but title. It took two additional years to come out of the closet, but in the six years since (I’m twenty one at present), I have learned much more than I could have dreamed about how the universe works. Much more than my peers, much more than my family. I grew to realize that creationism held one back from reality as it was, and I grew to loathe it more and more as I went. I suppose, though I leave people to themselves, generally, I have become a stern anti-theist.

9/11 and the hysteria surrounding it certainly didn’t help keep me on the so-called ‘righteous’ path, and I wouldn’t have life any other way. There is no amount of ignorance that could satisfy my sheer lust for knowledge, and ever more of it.

While I learned much about willful ignorance from the Creation Museum, I can’t help but wonder how this life, a life of unknowing, is satisfying for anyone who has a great lust for knowledge, information, science, and truth. I cannot look at creationists with a sense of hatred, dislike, or what have you, but I do look at them and their kind with a great feeling of sadness and pity. I pity creationists. They deserve it.

In addition, my whole life I’ve had one key struggle that was in drastic opposition to my faith and the faith of my parents. My whole life, I have been well aware that I didn’t feel like the other boys I knew. That when I looked in the mirror, I was different. That I was wrong. My body was wrong. Some of my greatest early Christianity struggles, going back as far as I can remember, took place as the result of my feelings that I should have been born as the opposite sex.

As a male to female transsexual, I always pondered how I were supposed to be a Christian and live a life directly opposed to the gospels. How was I supposed to live happily as a female if the Bible condemns something such as the simple act of wearing the opposite gender’s clothes? I wouldn’t think it far out in the least that a good bit of my Biblical skepticism came from knowing that the way I felt was condemned, yet I never made a choice, nor asked for anything like what I had received from my earliest memories on. It had always been there, known to me, accepted by me, yet condemned by the religion I was raised into and by the people I had grown to love.

I still struggle with transsexuality, though on the basis of my family’s beliefs being in direct contrast to it. I will not be stopped by the faith of my fathers, but the pain caused by them is indeed very considerable. I hold religion itself in contempt for marginalizing people like me. My growing sympathy with homosexuals didn’t help their case, either. I figured out that if I felt this way naturally, so did the homosexuals, who were so demonized and hated… and that is simply unforgivable.

So why am I an atheist?

Nature. Science. Reality. Skepticism. Transsexualism. Lust for knowledge. A critical mind. No satisfaction in ignorance.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Michael Baizley
United States

Baizley makes several points:

(1) Anti-Creationism. All the aspects of literalism seem to factor in here. Science provides better answers.

(2) Cruelty of nature.

(3) Anti-biblical: ”“Only a book written by bronze age goat herders.”

(4) Religion (9/11) is wrong.

(5) Transsexuals are marginalized.

Summary:
Atheist at 13; now 21. Reasons: Knowledge is from science; Creationism is wrong; Bible is wrong; religion is wrong (9/11); his transsexuality causes him contempt for religion. No mention of God or deity, except regarding “God’s creation": rejected.

I Will Be Offline For A Day Or Two...

2011-12-06T08:14:00.001-06:00

I will be on the road. If I come across a computer, I'll be back on, but only briefly, so I can't answer long, protracted comments. But keep your thoughts coming, because... I will be back.

UPDATE: I postponed departure for a day due to freezing drizzle and snow (unforecasted for our area). Maybe you noticed that I was still here?

From PZ's Place: David Spero, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

2011-12-05T16:14:00.000-06:00

Dave Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, posted recently over at Open Salon a copy of a letter he received from an atheist friend. The friend wrote the letter to his own 11-year-old daughter, who was “very upset about her father’s non-belief” — particularly his refusal to pray for her (something apparently advocated by the friend’s wife, who is a Christian).

I won’t comment on a family situation I know next to nothing about, but it did remind me of the very issue that began the unraveling of my own faith: prayer. About 20 years ago, I was on a path to ministry. I was in the middle of co-founding a fellowship organization on my college campus and had just finished drafting the group’s constitution (as required by the school to be an official student organization and thus receive activity funds) when I had a moment of clarity while praying for guidance. Yes, I appreciate the irony.

The path I was on would have led me to fervent proselytizing. I was 19 years old, post-Catholic and in training to present the Word to non-believers. I studied the Bible with an ordained mentor and doggedly researched apologetics. I was going to provide irrefutable answers in defense of Christ in debate.

But there were no irrefutable answers.

I decided to keep on it — after all, I was just getting started and I had faith more would be revealed as I continued in my studies. But each revelation was more suspect than the last. Every question I had was answered with circular reasoning (e.g., why believe in the Bible as the inspired word of God? Because the Bible says so.). Finally, while praying to understand God’s will, a giant hole ripped in the fabric of my belief: Who am I praying to? Why? Why does God require me to pray when he is supposedly omniscient? What does that say about the nature of the god I’m praying to?

The God I believed in was supposed to be perfect. Too perfect, in fact, for mortal minds to fathom. Ultimate love. True goodness. Omniscient. Omnipotent. Omnipresent. The whole nine yards and then some. Whenever something about God didn’t make sense to me, I countered myself by saying my definition of God must simply be too narrow. But because of that, God soon became just an infinitely broad but paper-thin abstraction. It was then a very small step to the realization that the concept of a personal God was absurd. Eventually, I came to understand the fallacy of the “God of the Gaps“. There was no chance I’d turn to another religion; it was clear they’d all fail the litmus test instantly.

I claimed to be an agnostic throughout my 20s. I left open the door to the idea of a higher power but, again, was pretty sure the matter was too complex to be comprehended. It wasn’t until my 30s that I faced the issue head on and realized I had been making the same weak excuses.

A sequence of events and introspection ultimately left nowhere for my intellect to hide. Once I allowed myself to practice skepticism honestly, the absurdities appeared everywhere I looked. There was no God. And it quickly became clear that many of civilization’s messes — either directly or indirectly — were catalyzed by some form of religion. My eyes were opened, and I was faced with one big question: Now what? It didn’t take long to understand that the only sane response to an insane world was to roll up my sleeves and try to make it a better place. All alternative responses were (and remain) unacceptable. Ultimately, I discovered my ideals matched those of organized Humanism.

So yes, you could say that prayer accidentally provided me with guidance. It was exactly the spark I needed to put me on the right path.

David Spero
United States

Spero makes several points:

(1) At the age of 19 he found that there were no irrefutable answers for the defense of Christ.
(2) Arguments were all circular.
(3) His concept of God became too broad and thin. Omni-everything.
(4) God of the Gaps.
(5) During his 20’s he was agnostic
(6) Under skepticism,
(a) absurdities abounded;
(b) religion responsible for many of civilization’s messes;
(7) Developed his own ethic which he found corresponded with Humanism.

Summary:
Spero was on the Christian path until at 19 he found questions he couldn't answer. During his 20's he was agnostic. Then he adopted "honest skepticism", and everything was seen as absurd. He ultimately developed his own ethic which corresponded with Humanism.