Reasons for Examining My Persuasion

Atheist Venom
Atheists frequently take great effort to ridicule anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their particular persuasion / worldview / religion. For example certain Atheist websites are designed, not to try to convince outsiders of the validity of the Atheist viewpoint, so much as to provide a venue for ridiculing those “others’.

A fine example is PZ Meyers website, called “Pharyngula”. The inside joke here is that a pharyngula stage embryo is a human at the stage of development favored by eugenists wherein the human is incredibly tiny and undeveloped in many facets. Since the pharyngula embryo has not yet developed a nervous system, it is declared to be OK to kill it; it cannot feel pain. Thus the name of the website is a cloaked joke on the “others”, who might think that a human at any stage is actually a human. (Despite the obvious logical disconnect that if PZ were knocked unconscious, he would feel no pain: thus it would be OK to kill him and sell his organs, if any were good, so long as he is unconscious when they are harvested…).

In fact PZ came out in full support of ridicule as a weapon against the “other”, in his post of late December ’07. For some reason this post did not get saved in his archive, perhaps he was ashamed of it. PZ’s site is chock full of ridicule-predators awaiting the visit of one of the “other” to show up. In fact his site comment zone is reminiscent of the action in “Lord of the Flies”.

Another website in full ridicule mode is the “God is for Suckers” website. This one is blatantly anti-“other”, and the “other” must accept the deprecation of the site’s name to even show up there. But here the real ridicule occurs when the venom squad discovers that there is a website (this one: atheism-analyzed.net ) that exposes their illogic. But unfortunately for them, I appreciated the ridicule; serious thinkers will be repulsed by the prepubescence of the nature of the attacks, and hopefully look onward for truly serious sites. So PZ is wrong, ridicule only works if the ridiculed are weak, or are not really versed in the ways of Atheism, actual logic and rational thought.

This amply illustrates one of the several reasons that I came to fully examine the Atheist persuasion: Atheists of this ilk are nasty. They call names at the drop of a hat, but squeal like pigs if they discern an attack on the weaknesses or breaches of logic within their own position.

My question (to myself) was: why are they so nasty when they claim to have the corner on logic and rationality? Why don’t they politely invite a reasoned debate? Well, let’s cut to the chase: most of the Atheists I have encountered ASSUME that they have the corner on logic and rational thought, and that this gives them a platform from which to shoot of random volleys of venom at all non-believers in their persuasion. The concept never seems to occur to them that they should try to actually learn what logic and rational thought actually are! Much less how these apply to Atheism itself. These folk are not about thought at all. Flinging their feces at visitors, however simian this activity, is what these types are all about.

By accepting the Naturalist (parasitic and fallacious) premise that the reputation of empiricism is on their side, their feeling of instantaneous eliteness is presumed to bestow upon them the right to ridicule and belittle all of the “other” who come into range.

In a nutshell, Atheists (some…or even most of them) are nasty, because they are disgusted by the non-eliteness and presumed stupidity of the “other”. They are emboldened by running in packs, which high-five each other for every epithet one of the pack hurls.

The very nastiness of these types of websites disqualifies them from being considered places of genuine carefully considered thought. So there is no reason to even consider visiting one. Any of the “other” who might be seeking answers would not find anything more rational than ridicule and venom in these packs of the maleducated.

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.