Real Spiritual Exercises for Atheists

Several years ago, I had a very strange dinner with Paul Nelson, who tried to convince me that my materialist view of biology was totally wrong and was missing all the important stuff. To do that, he performed a little demonstration for me. He flexed his arm at me.

“Look at that,” he said, “My mind is doing that.” He didn’t give me a nice spooky “woOOOoooo”, but he should have — it would have been perfectly appropriate. I don’t think he was on drugs, either.

But I’ve seen this phenomenon many times. Take some woo-inclined individual, put their brain to work on some incompletely understood process, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll come back to you utterly convinced that mundane physical events are ultimately confirming evidence for whatever metaphysical nonsense is poisonously wafting about in their heads. And now we have a wonderful example of this kind of sloppy stupid bullshit right here on freethoughtblogs.

I have no idea why Daniel Fincke is indulging this Eric Steinhart character, but he’s had a number of guest posts lately that are raving mad rationalizations for ‘spirituality’, whatever the hell that is. Here’s an example.

Spiritual exercises typically involve mental preparation for performance through visualization or emotional preparation for performance through arousal regulation. Visualization involves working with mental imagery while arousal regulation involves conscious control of physiological and emotional arousal (it involves neocortical control of the limbic system and autonomic nervous system).

Of course these are real phenomena. Like Paul Nelson bending his arm, you can consciously control many aspects of your mental state (but not all; ask anyone in the throes of depression — you can’t just will yourself out of everything), and there are behaviors and ways of thinking that you can do to shift the way your brain is working.

But that paragraph above is a perfect example of bullshitting to justify crap. Notice the scientific justification of “neocortical control of the limbic system and autonomic nervous system” — sure, that’s the core of your brain that is involved in arousal, and we know that from scientific experiments and observations. But look what he does: he calls these spiritual exercises.

They are not. They are physiological exercises. They do not manipulate “spirit”, they change the physical state of the brain. But these glib pseudoscientific quacks just love to borrow the language of science and slap the label of “spiritual” or “Wiccan” or “transcendental meditation” or “Buddhist” onto them. It’s intellectual theft, plain and simple: it’s woo-meisters doing their damnedest to appropriate natural phenomena to their cause. It’s the same thing as when Pat Robertson ascribes a natural disaster to the wrath of a divine being — he’s pointing to reality and claiming it for the kingdom of irrational supernaturalism.

I can do the same thing. Next time you encounter one of these kooks, I want you to stop and contemplate what they are doing. I want you to fan the rage, that is, channel your inner being to stimulate your amygdala. Feel the anger grow. Concentrate on your arm; make it rise. Flex the elbow (Amazing! How are you doing that?) and then…reach out and slap ’em upside the head.

If they complain, just tell them you were practicing your Myersian spiritual exercises. I think I’m going to have to start a whole school teaching these skills, so I can get paid for it.

Why I am an atheist – Tom J

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

Why I am an atheist – K. Davidson

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

So this is what skepticism has come to?

Jebus. After reading Ben Radford’s reply to the criticisms of his awful article denying sexism in the toy store, I feel even more repelled. It was ludicrous. It was ridiculous. It was pretentious.

Here’s Radford claiming the high ground.

So when I insisted that Riley was wrong in her claim that girls are forced or “tricked” into buying or liking pink items or princesses, my purpose was not to be pedantic, but instead to keep the discussion grounded and rooted in objective evidence.

[Read more…]

We still haven’t explained pink

There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense.

First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls, and therefore it was only natural to sustain the distinction.

The choice of blue for infants has its roots in superstition. In ancient times the color blue (long associated with the heavens) was thought to ward off evil spirits. Even today the tradition continues; in many parts of the world people paint their doorways and window frames blue. Originally [“Originally”? Like in Homo erectus, or are we going back to australopithecines?] only boys were swaddled in blue [apparently, no one cared if girls were possessed by evil spirits. By the way, what color were they swaddled in, “originally”?], and girls were later assigned the color pink for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. But the color distinction between the two genders dates back millennia [Oops. See below].

But what about pink toys for girls? It’s an interesting question, and there are several answers. One obvious reason is that dolls are by far the most popular toys for girls [And boys like fire trucks and little red sports cars and setting things on fire, so they ought to like red]. What color are most dolls? Pink, or roughly Caucasian skin-toned [Girls should favor beige, then]. There are, of course, dolls of varying skin tones and ethnicities (the popular Bratz dolls, for example, have a range of skin tones). But since most girls play with dolls, and most dolls are pink (a green- or blue-skinned doll would look creepy [And brown would be just horrible]), it makes perfect sense that most girls’ toys are pink [So their ovens and cooking utensils and cleaning tools and cosmetics all match their dolls’ complexions? That doesn’t make sense, that’s just weird].

Eh, what? The color distinction goes back millennia? Since when was 70 years equal to millennia?

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

Pink for girls is a convention of the baby boomer generation. We’ve only had a couple of generations since, and I don’t think there has been much selection pressure to generate a sex difference.

But let’s be charitable here. Maybe there actually is a sex difference in how men and women perceive the colors blue and pink; that we dress baby girls in pink isn’t causal, but a consequence of a bias in how men and women see the world. Maybe, just maybe, these color preferences are a byproduct of a more significant evolutionary bias. At least, if you’re an evpsych proponent you’d like to imagine so. Which leads us to Radford’s citation of an amazing evolutionary hypothesis from Time magazine.

According to a new study in the Aug. 21 [2007] issue of Current Biology, women may be biologically programmed to prefer the color pink—or, at least, redder shades of blue—more than men…. [Researchers] speculate that the color preference and women’s ability to better discriminate red from green could have evolved due to sex-specific divisions of labor: while men hunted, women gathered, and they had to be able to spot ripe berries and fruits. Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”

Really? I read that and thought it had to be some invention of the journalist at Time, so I had to go find the original article, and no, that was taken straight from the paper itself. What disappointing tripe.

It is therefore plausible that, in specializing for gathering, the female brain honed the trichromatic adaptations,
and these underpin the female preference for objects ‘redder’ than the background. As a gatherer, the female would also need to be more aware of color information than the hunter. This requirement would emerge as greater certainty and more stability in female color preference, which we find. An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and ‘empathizers’.

I weep for all the African children who died or failed to reproduce because the enhanced red sensitivity of their mothers’ brains was insufficient to compensate for the reduced contrast caused by the color of their skin; I pity the poor African adults who bumble about romantically, unable to read potential partners’ social-sexual signals as well as their European peers. It’s also sad that even European males are less able, and have less need, to read their fellow human beings’ emotional states.

The utility of being able to evaluate when fruit is ripe isn’t in question, and I can see where that is a likely factor in the evolution of our color vision. But both males and females have that ability; there’s no reason to think that females have been selected for a slightly stronger preference for red, and that there’s some deep biological cause for this preference that is found in women, but not their sons.

But hey, I’ve got the paper from Hurlbert and Ling, so let’s look at the data.

They do find a robust difference between the sexes in their study. It’s a simple experiment in which subjects are shown pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen, and they are asked to select which of the two colors they like best. Do this many times, and you get a profile of favored colors. And what do you find? Most people like blue shades, but women tend to like a little more red in their colored rectangles.

Now hang on, you might say — those data are all from British subjects, and there’s no way to sort out the accumulated cultural biases from the biology. Maybe those British women had been brought up by baby boomers who told them from babyhood on that pink was the color for girls, and so all we’re seeing here is a reflection of that bias. To correct for that, the researchers sought out native Han Chinese who were recent immigrants to the UK, and tested them separately. And look! They also show a consistent difference, with Chinese women showing more preference for reds than Chinese men!

From this, they somehow conclude that the differences are biological. If that’s true, though, they missed another major conclusion: compare the color preferences of Chinese men, in the bottom graph, to UK women, in the top graph.

One obviously must conclude that Chinese men have experienced a long history of selection for the ability to make finely tuned distinctions in the ripeness of fruit, to detect delicate blushes in the cheeks of their lovers, and to diagnose childhood diseases at the first flush. I’m impressed.

Oh, wait — there’s another possibility. Could it be that color preferences are actually affected by one’s culture? The researchers even admit this!

Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience. In China, red is the color of ‘good luck’, and our Chinese subpopulation gives stronger weighting for reddish colors than the British.

I see absolutely no evidence in the paper that the differences are innate, but lots of evidence that color preferences are plastic and responsive to environmental influences. Even the title of the paper looks wrong: it claims to find “biological components”, but nothing in the methodology or the results exhibits any way to separate biological components from environmental responsiveness.

It’s a fine collection of data, filtered by an unjustifiable evolutionary interpretation, processed yet again by a credulous journalist in a mass market magazine, and then regurgitated without question by Ben Radford. Sorry, guy, it’s bad science, and all you saw was the implausible unacceptable bit.

Hurlbert AC, Ling Y (2007) Biological components of sex differences in color preference. Curr Biol. 17(16):R623-5.

(Also on FtB)

Wouldn’t you know Ben Goldacre already addressed this paper back in 2007?

Radford doubles down. Ugh.

Why I am an atheist – James Stuby

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

Why I am an atheist – Gribble the Munchkin

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

Nice list

I guess R. Joseph Hoffman is trolling for attention again. Joey — or is it Joe? Joseph seems so fussy. Maybe R.? — R., then, is so disappointed in those dissolute insult-mongering New Atheists that he has scribbled up another sloppy, incoherent, lazy whine in which engages in prolonged insult-mongering, nothing more. It’s an astonishing demonstration of projection and an absolute lack of self-awareness: the post is little more than a clumsy list of the atheists who piss off R., with bombastic, affected explanations for why they are so stupid. It’s a rather useful guide, though, to who’s cool in the atheist movement; I’m flattered that he despises me so, and included me in the list.

Here’s R.’s list, with his tumid awkward insults pared down to a single summary sentence:

Dawkins: Unabashed science-thumper.

Dennett: Sloppy.

Harris: Singularly incoherent.

Hitchens: The only true intellectual of the group.

Headlights:

Coyne: How can he be such a scientist when the U of Chicago has one of the most venerable divinity schools in the country?

Myers: Moral nihilist who once destroyed a cracker.

Sidelights:

Christina: Radical feminist and lesbian who sees everything as a weird sexual joke.

Benson: Runs a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.

MacDonald: Another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers.

Rosenhouse: Doesn’t like anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism.

Now you know who to turn to for the intelligent and interesting commentary on religion. Keep in mind, though, that R. is a brilliant fellow who thinks Dawkins’ entire argument was devastated by this Terry Eagleton quote:

“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?”

The knob-polishers and filigree-painters of religion and theology are not at all relevant to the fundamental question of whether a god exists or not — but they make useful distractions for the pompous, pretentious buffoons who try to hide the fact that there is no elephant in the room with learned discussions about what color he paints his toenails.

I get email

You found an odd-shaped rock? You think it looks like a fossilized organ? Don’t send a picture to me: go get some basic education in biology and geology, because I think you look like an idiot.

Yeah, some demented guy just sent me a bunch of photos of a “mineralized brain”. Judge for yourself.

That’s a subset. He also sent me these photos in much higher resolution. Why? Because he’s an ignorant nudnik. These things look nothing like the brain of any creature that has ever existed, unless maybe it’s the lopsided lumpy non-functional excrescence found inside the crania of creationists.

(Also on Sb)