Why I am an atheist – Hazuki Azuma

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

I get email

There is a shifting pattern of spam email that I get. A while back, it was practically non-stop gay porn; I commented on this a while back, and laughed it off, which apparently annoyed the people who’d been sending it to me. I think they expected me to be stressed and conflicted and angry at getting photographs of muscular young men with large penises, but really…it doesn’t bother me at all. So lately the supply of hunky naked men posing in my in-box has all but dried up.

Instead, my previous criticisms have prompted a flood of commercial spam from middle eastern sites, and the malicious spammers have switched to signing me up for right-wing newsletters. It’s as if they think I don’t know how to use the delete key, or how to create spam filters. Usually they’re destroyed on sight, but one caught my eye — it was talking about a new theory of evolution.

You might be wondering what the old theories of evolution are. One is creationism, the biblical story; another is intelligent design creationism; and the third is the scientific theory of evolution, which he also calls the “particle-clang theory”, that it’s all about particles randomly banging together. According to this email, all three of those are wrong, and the true answer is something completely different. Are you ready for it?

The answer may be found in a fourth alternative, a transdimensional theory that says we weren’t exactly dropped off; but that we walked in from another dimension. We know from watching the Morph sensation that I have written about extensively on my site www.stuartwilde.com that this world is not always solid.

When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it. You can put your hand up in it and your hand will dematerialize. It sounds extraordinary but we have seen that phenomena more than a thousand times. I’ve also seen humans completely dematerialize in front of my eyes and not reappear for ten minutes or more. I’ve done it myself with others watching. This phenomenon of dematerialization has now been seen by me and others over a thousand times, since I first discovered it in the spring of 2001. So we have become convinced.

One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize, when a golden ring of light formed on the lawn. It appeared from nowhere. There was no obvious source to the light or any beam shining down from above. It was just there. So I told my mate to walk out and stand in the ring of gold, and he did that and ‘blip’ he was gone. He came back into view a while later, but when he was gone, he was totally out of sight. I could clearly see the distant trees through the area where he had been standing.

The other dimensions I write about, that Paul Dirac postulated (1930) exist as antiparticle worlds, and seem to our perception to be placed at arm’s length to us. They are close, not out in space a million miles away. So if a human can dematerialize and walk out of here, then it might also be possible, that at some point in ancient history, humans walked into this 3-D world from another more rarefied dimension close at hand, the walk-in theory might be possible. It’s certainly food for thought.

Are Humans Older than our Universe?

The problem with all the other theories of origins of man is that they look at the earth and humans as solid. Once you realize that the planet’s solidity is an illusion and that it also exists in a non-solid, hazy-wave, transdimensional form, then it is perfectly feasible that a human could walk out of a multi-dimensional, non-solid, close-by hyperspace into the 3-D earth plane and become solid flesh and blood once he or she got here.

Then particle-clang looks silly as the origins of our humanity and all of life on earth could well have begun in an eternal, twenty-six dimensional hyperspace that might have existed for trillions upon trillions of eons, before this universe came into being, just 13.8 billions years ago. It is probable that no modern scientist has ever seen the dematerialization of the human body so the Fourth Alternative would never have occurred to them.

Humans and the animals could be very old, much older than our universe. It is also very possible that our Universe is just one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of universes, that various human species have evolved in, over timeframes that are so astronomical in length, they boggle the mind.

© Stuart Wilde 2009 – www.stuartwilde.com

Here below is a P.S. about the origins of man that I saw in the Mirror World as a vision.

The Origins of Man in the Mirror World-Aluna
Stuart Wilde

The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna. In the Aluna, there is a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found the mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that had been previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find others, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.

What is fascinating is that the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who wrote Food of the Gods, knew about the mushroom activation of human consciousness theory, but he did not consider the Fourth Alternative I have suggested, the walk-in theory discussed above.

He also believed humans evolved from a primitive state akin to automatons, but he did not say where those primitive beings came from, but he did suggest that they then took the mushrooms, and so they developed the self-aware consciousness that we know today.

I have no idea how we will ever prove the walk-in theory, because by its very nature it left no trace of what happened, but as creationism and evolutionism are mathematically ludicrous and open to question, it might be an idea to consider the possibility of walk-ins.

A sophisticated form of the intelligent design theory might be right in the end, as it doesn’t preclude walk-ins, and when dealing with other dimensions in hyper-space, one isn’t constrained by the tightness of a few billion years, that particle-clang theory asks us to believe in.

I reckon we walked in here just as the animals and the insects did, and that life is trillions-upon-trillions of eons older than our rather new universe.

Totally dingleberries with a big red clown nose on.

What always gets me about these loons isn’t their grand wacky theories of everything that explain absolutely nothing, but the casual asides: “I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize”. Right. OK. I would love to meet this guy, see him standing in front of me in all his lumpy solidity, and ask him to dematerialize for me. I suspect he has a nice patter of prepared excuses for why he can’t just do it right then.

(Also on Sb)

Alain de Botton is right about one thing

At the end of this video, he suggests that both sides will be out to shoot him. Yes, they will…well, I’m wielding a great heavy two-handed sword, but I’ll accept the general equivalence in intent of pointy sharp nasty weaponry and projectile-flinging guns. In this TED presentation, he advocates just adapting religion to atheism, something he calls Atheism 2.0, but which is actually just Religion 0.0 again.

This is not what the New Atheism is about. It’s the antithesis of what we’re after. We’ve had a few thousand years of the godly shuffle: here’s a temple to Zeus, he’s out so we swap in Jupiter; he’s not exciting, let’s try Isis; now Mithras; Jehovah; Jesus; Mohammed; back to Catholicism; on to Protestantism; oh, you’re atheists, eh, here’s a fine altar, hardly been used, we’ll just rededicate it to your god Athe then. New gods same as the old gods, right?

Wrong. It’s that the whole structure of religious thought is wrong, that we’ve been spending these few thousand years digging the same old pit, deeper and deeper, maybe putting a little more gilt on the shovel and roofing it over with ever fancier architecture, but now we’re saying maybe it’s time to climb out of the hole and do something different. I don’t want a new label, I want whole new modes of thought.

de Botton wants to pick and choose from religion and keep the good parts for atheism, which is a nice idea, but he seems to be totally lacking in sense and discrimination in what the virtues of religion are. And then, unfortunately for him, he picks a few examples of something he thinks religion got right, and one of them is education. Fuck me.

He suggests looking at how churches teach the ‘facts’ of their faith, and is quite enthusiastic about the importance of repetition. Repeat things five times, he says, and then you’ll master it; he just suggests replacing God and Jesus with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Has de Botton ever been anywhere near a classroom?

Let me give an example from my teaching; I’m familiar with what he proposes. For instance, I teach genetics, and one of the big concepts there is linkage and mapping. I’ve stood up and lectured on Sturtevant’s original mapping experiments; I’ve given the class the numbers from his observations, and had them do the calculations themselves; I’ve then had students come up to the whiteboard and show everyone how it is done; and then I’ve gone through it again on the board, step by step. The students nod and smile, they understand, give ’em these numbers and they can trot through the calculations without hesitation.

Then on the test I give them the same problem, but I change the names of the alleles, swap in a zebrafish for a fruit fly, and half the class is totally stumped. “But you didn’t teach us how to do that problem,” they whine.

Repetition doesn’t work. It’s great for memorizing dogma, but it’s awful for mastering concepts. Students don’t understand, they just learn to robotically reiterate.

What I do is very different. I give them the Sturtevant data and we work through that problem, sure, but then we try other angles. Here’s data on the recombination frequency between pairs of loci; assemble them into a map. Here’s a triple-point cross, and the phenotypes of the flies we get back; calculate a map. Here’s a problem; work it out in groups. Here’s a problem; teach your partner how to solve it. Here’s a map; work backwards and predict the frequencies of phenotypes of a cross. You invent a problem, give it to me, and let’s see if I can get the right answer. Here’s how the problem is solved in flies, and fish, and nematodes, and humans, and tissue culture. Here’s how we do it with molecular biology techniques rather than genetics. What if the traits are all sex-linked? What if this locus interacts epistatically with that other locus? What if the two alleles at this locus are codominant?

The whole purpose of what we do in the science classroom is to get the students to understand that you can’t master the concept by rote memorization. You have to understand how someone came up with the idea in the first place, and you have to appreciate how understanding the concept gives you the mental toolkit to grasp novel instances of related phenomena. I could just show them a fly gene map and tell them to memorize it, I suppose, and teach them this idea that genes have locations on the chromosome, and leave it at that, but then they haven’t really learned anything deep, and haven’t learned how to integrate new observations into the concept. They’re also going to be totally unprepared for going off to grad school, reading McClintock’s papers, and learning that sometimes genes don’t have fixed locations on the chromosome.

So you can imagine how appalled I was listening to de Botton tell us that one thing society could benefit from adapting from religion is their approach to education. That’s simply insane. If you want to improve people’s understanding, we should model learning more on those secular, progressive, well-honed methods you find in good college classrooms, not church. Church is where you go to learn how to hammer dogma into people’s heads.

That is not what the New Atheism wants. Apparently, it’s what Atheism 2.0 wants, though.

His approach to art is about as horrifying — “religions…have no trouble telling us what art is about, art is about two things in all the major faiths; firstly, it’s trying to remind you of what there is to love, and secondly it’s trying to remind you of what there is to fear and hate…it’s propaganda”. To de Botton, that is a virtue. He suggests that museums ought to adopt the approaches of the churches, and organize their art by themes and tell everyone exactly what it all means. Jebus. Can you imagine a van Gogh hanging on the wall, with a little checklist next to it telling you what it is supposed to mean, and everyone dutifully reading the museum’s imperative and making sure they’ve got exactly the right interpretation? Some excited little girl makes the mistake of looking at the painting not the placard and telling her mother, “Look at the light and color shining through the confusion!” and the guard has to tap his stick on the wall and tell her, “No, it says CONFORM and OBEY or suffer. Can’t you read?”

Worst TED talk ever — well, it’s competitive with that horrible drivel from Elaine Morgan, anyway. de Botton is one of those superficial atheists who hasn’t quite thought things through and has such a blinkered optimistic perspective on religion that he thinks faith provides what reason does not.

Australian hospitality

I’m looking forward to the Global Atheist Convention (have you registered yet?). I had a grand time the last time I was in Australia, the organizers have been helpful and obliging, they were responsive to the few security concerns that came up, and they’ve been accommodating — my wife Mary is joining me in Melbourne this time around. And now they’ve gone above and beyond, and the fun people of Australia are providing chew toys for us while we’re there.

Carl Wieland’s organization, Creation Ministries International, is declaring themselves pleased to have the GAC in their country — they claim it will “stimulate Christian evangelism”. I remember well their huge representation at the 2010 convention: it was one quaintly bearded guy, his wife, and their daughters, weebling about outside the convention center with a sign. It was laughable. That year they also sent out an offer to debate some of the atheists — they were salivating at the prospect of nabbing Richard Dawkins — on creationism. The organizers flatly rejected them. Then they reached out to individuals — I gave them a visual response. The snubbing was vicious and unhesitating, so they aren’t going to try that again, I guess.

Instead, they’re publishing a rag called the Regal Standard, a 12-page propaganda paper, and asking people to buy them and give them away to the heathens. Yeah, that’s gonna work. I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a copy while I’m there.

I’m also not going to have a formal debate with these loons, but I do look forward to a few casual conversations with the sad, deluded few who will probably make brief and pathetic appearances outside the convention center. It’s always fun to travel to exotic lands, meet strange, wacky people, and gnaw on their goofy ideas for a bit. Keeps the fangs sniny and makes for a good laugh and always seems to end up on youtube.

This is getting ridiculous

All right, this is getting ridiculous. Now Rhys Morgan is getting hassled by his school because he put Jesus & Mo on his facebook page. What started it seems to have been an idiot whining at length that Morgan can’t mock Islam, presumably complained to school administrators, and now the school is threatening to expel him over it.

Listen, loons: there’s a difference between a person and an idea. We have to be able to criticize bad ideas freely, because we hope to change them and make them better. You get to criticize atheism; we get to criticize religion; that’s central to the debate. You don’t get to unilaterally declare your crap exempt from ridicule or disagreement, much as you’d like to.

I understand why you’d like to though, because damn is that Mohammed/Jesus/Buddha/Xenu crap crazy.