Touched a Nerve...

My they are testy over at God is for Suckers.net (actually gods4suckers.net). As they so presciently forecast, I guess I must comment on the names they called me, let's just say Bozo was the nice one. The literary veins stood out on their foreheads as they denied being a religion, and the most rational comment, repeated ad nauseum, was where is the proof?

For adults not to understand the difference between empiricism and Naturalism, is, well it's excusable in most instances. In the case of the Defenders of Atheism, it is inexcusable, just as is their complete ignorance of the most significant Atheist in the Enlightenment. OK, it is Friedrich Nietzsche, inventor of the Irrationalist Faith, and its version of the Atheist Saviour, at least in his own mind. I said very little that Nietzsche didn't say 120 years before me. Read "Beyond Good and Evil".

As for being just "good" folk, Richard Dawkins has a little to say about that. Here is a telling retort, an answer to a question placed in the debate between Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins, Nov 5, 2006 and found in its entirety on atheism-analyzed.net .

" [Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, asks...] "What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?
DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

The cultural Atheist guru ( I won't call him the pope) claims that there is no good or evil. This rattles down the chute with implications. The Main Atheist Dude denies good and evil. The Main Atheist Dude has elsewhere declared all evil to be the spawn of religion. And it is evil to teach children in your home that there might be more to reality than the Main Atheist Dude will admit. Ok he actually said that it is child abuse to teach religion to your child. One must presume that he feels that child abuse is, well, not good... maybe even evil, since he wants to remove the child from the home and teach it Naturalism.

I say Naturalism as an opening to point out that the folks at gods4suckers.net don't know the difference (Oh, yes, I've said that before) between Naturalism and empiricism. So now I will enlighten however many of the psychologically damaged gods4suckersites show up around here.

We must start here. Empiricism is a process for developing knowledge of natural phenomena; it voluntarily self-limits to ONLY natural phenomena since that is what it can apprehend, measure, and theorize about. Empiricism, the process, says nothing about any other realms of reality. NOTHING.

Naturalism, however, is not a process, it is a philosophy that declares the limit of reality to be the physical phenomena that Empiricism can study. Repeat, Naturalism is a philosophy of specifically LIMITED REALITY. And here we must demand, where is the proof for that limitation? Where is the evidence? What about transcendents such as math and logic and rational things like thought and rational universal physical laws, those entities that are the basis for empiricism, but not testable, not even touchable, by empiricism? These are locked out of Naturalism, but not out of empiricism, which uses these transcendentals without attempting to understand them.

So Naturalism, the philosophy of limited reality, is a lost cause; not available to it are the transcendentals. It has accidentally limited itself right out of rationality. Sorry guys, that's the way it is when you try to worship at the altar of empiricism: empiricism has no altar.

Atheism is Naturalist (faux rationalist), except in those (Nietzschean) cases where it is antirational (as in postmodernism).

Sorry to have upset you guys, take a deep breath and read it again. We'll talk if you want. Or I could just listen to you call me names, if it makes you feel better.