American Atheists' Al Santelli

Al Santelli is the Georgia State Director, American Atheists, Inc. Here is an opinion written by Santelli, September 15, 2011, on American Atheists blog, atheists.org:

”The fact is that fundamentalist Christians and radical Muslims are not interested in coexisting or getting along. They have no desire for peace. They do not want to sit down with us in diplomatic efforts to iron out our differences and come to an agreement on developing an integrated society.

”They want us to die.

”Their interpretation of the Bible and Koran are such that there is no other course of action but to kill the infidel, and if anyone believes otherwise they are only fooling themselves. It is not just in the best interests of atheists to be intolerant of fundamental Christianity and radical Islam, but it is also in the best interest of mainstream believers within these faiths, as well. Moderates and even Progressives who stand in support of extremists just because there is a claim to the same deity are not doing themselves any favors. Fundamental Christians make all Christians look bad and radical Muslims make all Muslims look bad.

”The growing ranks of fundamental Christians and radical Muslims should be of concern to everyone who is not part of these two groups. Everyone. Again, bigotry, discrimination, hatred, coercion, terrorism, slavery, misogyny and everything else that is part and parcel of fundamental Christianity and radical Islam should not be tolerated and anyone who agrees with this needs to adopt extremist points of view that includes the intolerance of their very existence. The only reason these groups exist is because they are allowed to, and we, as a society, are allowing them to...

”But the underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam does not operate in the legal system. They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated. As long as they are allowed to exist, we will continue to be inundated with accounts of buses, buildings, markets and abortion clinics being blown up, rape victims being murdered for adultery, wives being beaten (sometimes to death), airplanes being flown into buildings, people being tortured and sometimes beheaded for blasphemy, people being burned for witchcraft and sorcery and all the other horrific, inhumane and insane practices that are part of fundamental Christianity and Radical Islam.

”If we don’t take a stand and, as a society, insist that these doctrines and beliefs are treated just the same as they would be if religion were not part of the equation, we will become extinct not due to natural selection, but at the hands of those who believe that the supernatural has made the selection.”

Santelli wrote a follow-on article, claiming that everyone misunderstood his call for eradication, yet saying, ”I make no apologies for my words”. He then quotes Dawkins’ famous diatribe against God as if Dawkins has been endowed with some sort of ethical god-ship himself. And he tops it off with Hitchens’ statement in which he confuses organized religion with Atheist Soviet Russia:

”Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
― Christopher Hitchens

Again, indicative of the massive Atheist assaults on humanity of the 20th century. But that is just a Tu Quoque, even though it is true; is Hitchens right? For a start, Hitchens universally condemns all “Organised reliegion” with unsupported designations, designations into categories of evil. This is typical of Atheist psychopathic rantings by those who haven’t been in a church, possibly ever, yet fully self-enabled to condemn what they have created in their minds – stalking horses to engender fear in the religiously ignorant, including themselves.

Let’s repeat part of Santelli’s diatribe, above, just for a quick analysis:

”…buses, buildings, markets and abortion clinics being blown up, rape victims being murdered for adultery, wives being beaten (sometimes to death), airplanes being flown into buildings, people being tortured and sometimes beheaded for blasphemy, people being burned for witchcraft and sorcery and all the other horrific, inhumane and insane practices that are part of fundamental Christianity…

With the exception of the murder of two (?) abortionists, not one of these things is descriptive of even the most radically fundamental Christians, or sect offshoots; and the murders were not done by groups of Christians, they were individual actions outside of any church whatsoever and without sanction of any “organized religion”. From this might we conclude that Santelli is irrational? Or perhaps merely an ideological liar? From his denial of miswriting his accusations, maybe he is both.

Moderation is...

OFF.

Twice Baked Science

Surely you’ve heard by now that the CERN scientists have produced particles traveling at faster than the speed of light, or so the experiments seem to indicate. The experiments were replicated more than 16,000 times (depending on which news report you read).

Surely the particles couldn’t get to Geneva faster than light, especially with the traffic in Geneva. But they appear to have done so, and rather than declare Einstein wrong (his math is elegant and all) they are requesting others to replicate their findings. And that is exactly the right thing to do.

There will be no grand proclamations of ideology made. This new phenomenon will be studied until it is understood completely, no matter how long that takes. And when it is understood it will either confirm Einstein’s hypothesis, or it will show the need for a better hypothesis in order to accommodate the newly discovered reality. Either way, this will be a demonstration of intellectual honesty in the physics community, one with high public visibility and the opportunity to be an example of science done right.

On an altogether different note, the declaration of a death by spontaneous combustion in Ireland shows a different side of science. When Michael Faherty died in December or 2010, the coroner, Dr. Ciaran McLoughlin, found an odd set of circumstances. Only the body had burnt, with secondary scorching on the floor and ceiling. Said the doctor,

”The fire had been confined to the sitting room. The only damage was to the body, which was totally burnt, the ceiling above him and the floor underneath him.

The conclusion that the combustion was spontaneous was predicated on the lack of obvious sources of ignition, other than the fire in the fireplace, which was ruled out.

This case apparently was investigated by only one person, who did his research and came to his conclusion, a declaration which has official finality. For purposes of science, however, one might have called in detectives, the fire officials, university investigators, until some semblance of cause was determined. The declaration of “spontaneous” combustion is merely a mystery category, an unexplained occurrence with no evidence to support its name, other than the circumstances of its flame pattern. There is no evidence surrounding either the source of ignition, spontaneous or not, or the potential flammability of Mr Faherty in his last moments.

Quote of the Day 09.22.11

"Key Issa quote: “The administration wanted to show that guns found in Mexico came from the United States.” Even if it had to send them there itself."
Via Instapundit

Addendum to “Austin Cline on C S Lewis”

[Note: This refers to the previous post on Austin Cline's review of C. S. Lewis's Miracles.]

Now that I have C. S. Lewis’s book, “Miracles”, in my possession, it is clear that Lewis did, indeed, address quantum issues, right there on pages 18 –20. Cline must have ignored or not read those pages, because he quotes page 22 where Lewis, in turn, quotes Haldane.

Even there, Cline misses the actual argument being made by Lewis. I’ll try to summarize that here, although I recommend getting the book for your own view of it.

First, Lewis says,

”All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning.”

Next,

”It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would , of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound – a proof that there are no such things as proofs – which is nonsense.”

This is Lewis’s actual argument. Then he proceeds to the quote provided by Cline:

”Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’

Presumably Haldane was conflating mind and brain.

A page later, Lewis goes on:

”Now a train of reasoning has no value as a means of finding truth unless each step in it is connected with what went before in the Ground – Consequent relation.”
[Lewis had already addressed the “because” statement in mathematics: A = C because we have already proved that they are both equal to B]
“If our B does not follow logically from our A, we think in vain. If what we think at the end of reasoning is to be true, the correct answer to the question, ‘Why do you think this?’ must begin with the Ground –Consequent because.

This represents only the beginning of Lewis’s argument, up to page 23 out of 273. There are only a few possibilities here. Either Cline didn’t read the book, or he read the book with his brain turned around backwards. I think he didn’t read the book, because he claims that Lewis did not address the probabilism of quantum theory, when it is obvious that Lewis did just that. And as an interesting serendipity here, there is an article over at Massimo Pigliucci’s blog that addresses Cline’s “Frequentism”. In short, because something is declared unmeasurable now does not mean that it is unmeasurable permanently, or even in principle. While I’m not sure about that myself, I’m sure that Scientism would take that view rather than the rigid view of Cline. So even materialists don’t necessarily agree with Cline, much less those who actually read Lewis’s book.

Comment Moderation Is...

...Turned ON for the time being.

Quote of the Day 09.20.11 Saving Money the Obama Way

“You might as well save another trillion by saying that we are not going to have a bicentennial invasion of Canada as a way to get the War of 1812 done right. There are a lot of countries that we could decide not to attack and have savings. So that’s a farce.”

– Charles Krauthammer on Fox News today.
Via Ed Driscoll

The Debate at Vox's Place Continues....

The case against gods is being made over at Vox’s blog by Dominic Salterelli.  He hypothesizes thus:

” So, to make myself absolutely crystal clear on the matter, the hypothesis is:
For any new experience or phenomenon, when man attempts to explain the phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal, the first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong.”

Based on this principle, plus the idea that gods are the concept of primitive understandings only, then the concept of gods must be wrong.

Now, even if true, does this hypothesis satisfy the criterion of evidence for the non-existence of gods?  Or is it merely a suggestion of unreliability in the acquisition of a concept in primitive times?  Does this disprove gods or God?  Or is it a strained attempt to discredit by the use of a negative proposition, which itself has no evidence which makes it conclusive?

Dominic uses the example of asking a child where babies come from: the child’s answer will be incorrect.  The premise here is that gods were created to provide explanations not otherwise available to the primitives.  Presupposed but not stated is the principle that there is no other reason for theism to exist, certainly not for moderns.  He could have just come out and said all that.  But that argument, taken directly, is obviously speculation; it cannot be proven in any sense of that word.

Moreover, it presupposes that gods do not exist and therefore could not have been the reason for conceptualizing gods.  Here’s the form:

IF [gods do / did not exist and could not have been the reason for early human concepts of deity],
THEN [concepts of deity must have been based on error].

So the argument being made is (a) entirely speculative (not evidence), (b) ignores modern reasons for theology, and (c) is circular because the conclusion is contained in the premises.

I don’t know what reasoning Vox will use to answer this hypothesis, this is merely my take.

So An Infinite Number of Mathematicians Walk Into a Bar....

Math joke from Anna, the bartender and civil engineering student: 

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one tells the bartender he wants a beer. The second one says he wants half a beer. The third one says he wants a fourth of a beer. The bartender puts two beers on the bar and says “You guys need to learn your limits.”

Via Instapundit

Commenter Removal

Another commenter has been removed from the blog.  Some commenters are merely out to jerk chains and see how long they will be tolerated.  Refusal to deal with logical criticism and adapt to logical discussions is an indicator of an individual's attitude of disruption and wastes the time of serious users of the blog.  When these people show up and have been given adequate time to adjust, but refuse to, they are removed.