They’re all still arguing against me!

Ever since I ferociously asserted that god was not only dead, but never existed and never will exist, and that no amount of hand-waving speculation will convince me otherwise, those thuggish provisionalists have been gunning for me. Jerry Coyne tried, and now Greta Christina pounds on me, trying to convince me I’m wrong. They’re not succeeding.

I’m merely being honest here. I read Greta Christina’s list of events that would convince her, and I have to say that none of them would sway me. They’d convince me that there are unexplainable phenomena and beings greater than myself, but I already believe that with no problem and without budging from atheism. I’ve already dealt with the 900 foot tall Jesus fallacy (it’s not a prior conclusion of religious thought), and while finding amazingly detailed scientific information in a holy book would be impressive, evidence of beings in the past who were smarter than me isn’t evidence of a god. Also, they haven’t because they didn’t, so postulating circumstances that have been shown not to have occurred is only persuasive in the most abstract and imaginary way possible. I suppose you could postulate that I would be rich if my fabulously wealthy great-aunt had left me her billions in her will, except of course that I didn’t have a fabulously wealthy great-aunt.

Sorry, guys, you’ve failed. Your arguments haven’t even touched my premises.

But wait! There’s another challenger, that sneaky, devious, underhanded, philosophizing gadfly, John Wilkins. I don’t think he’s even trying to address what I was arguing, and he’s snuck in an interesting possibility. He calls it the Greek Panthon test, and he’s basically defining “god” as something with the possibility of existence, unlike the usual ethereal all-pervasive omniscient omnipotent eternal entity that we’ve been indoctrinated to accept as the only true kind of god in our culture. His definition is simple: If it would be a god in the Greek Pantheon, then it’s a god. So capricious, cranky beings with human-like qualities but just a little more oomph and privilege than your average vanilla human, creatures with something that would look to us like super-powers, are all gods.

So angels and saints are all gods, and Christianity becomes a polytheistic religion. Batman is a god. The Easter Bunny is a god. Babe Ruth is probably a god now. Tiger Woods might be a god, but I think the convention is that deifications tend to happen after some isolation from mundane testability, i.e. death.

So I think I’d concede that if you provide a sufficiently trivial definition of a god (but only trivial in the sense that it is probably the most common and most universal understanding of what a god is, anyway!), then you would be able to come up with evidence that would convince me of the existence of that specific being. The requirements for this being, though, would have to be sufficiently loose and achievable that you’d also end up redefining most atheists as polytheists, and you’d probably also piss off all the believers who would be even more peeved at the lumpers who diminish the exclusivity of their pantheon than they are with the atheists who simply say their pantheon is false.

Atheists can be stupid, too

This is the worst case of atheist buttery I’ve ever seen. I’m left with this terribly greasy, bloated feeling after going through it, and I think my arteries were clogging up just reading it. This fellow Malcolm Knox is an atheist who happily sends his kids off to the Catholic church, which is just fine (his wife is Catholic)…but he’s got to rattle off ten terrible, awful, stupid excuses for why he has to do it. It’s embarrassing how pathetic his reasoning is. And my SIWOTI syndrome compels me to take each one apart.

  1. In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins counselled her against belief based on “tradition, authority or revelation”. Because children, he writes, are “suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them”. If this is true, surely it applies to atheism as much as to belief. To keep my children out of church would be to impose my unbelief upon them by the exact mechanism that Dawkins warns against.

    False dichotomy. Not sending kids off to be indoctrinated in church does not imply that you are instead sitting them down and preaching atheism at them. If they want to go, let them; if they don’t, let ’em stay home. That is not imposing beliefs on them, quite the opposite, it is giving them the freedom to choose.

  2. Imagine growing up in a world where the most imposing monuments of architecture are unknown places. Do atheists really want their children to think of churches as fearsome compounds of weirdness?

    Yes.

    And seriously, you can explain to them what a building is for without sending them to sit in it for a few hours every week. With that attitude, he’s going to have to troop the kids off to every little architectural oddity for instruction.

  3. I don’t believe Jesus raised Lazarus, or walked on water, or fed the masses with those loaves and fishes. I don’t believe in the seven-day Creation, the Flood, the burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea. Yet I cannot imagine feeling at home in Australia without knowing those stories.

    So buy a book of Bible stories. They’re cheap and common. Really, it doesn’t take tedious weekly instruction to get the gist of the major stories in the Bible.

    Unless your kids are really stupid. I’m beginning to think Mr Knox has little respect for his children, since they apparently have to be repetitively hammered with Genesis before they’ll recognize Noah’s Ark.

  4. When (not if) my children rebel, it would have more meaning if they knew what they were rebelling against. I mean rebellion in the broadest sense: artistic creativity, inventing secret languages, striking out for independence. I mean rebellion in the sense that I rebel against Hitchens’s 300-page anti-religion harangue, God Is Not Great, even though I agree with every word. There’s something particularly bullying about singing in the choir being preached to.

    So you send your kids off to literally sing in the choir being preached to? This makes no sense. Maybe it would be of benefit to the children to rebel against something rational and interesting; is he really pretending that he’s sending them to church so they’ll someday have an easy mark to flail against?

  5. So they may come home with unanswerable questions. Who made God? Why can St Mary save some sick people and not others? I send my children to church not to find the answers – they won’t – but to come home with more questions. With unanswerable questions, they can puncture the infantile myth of their father’s omniscience.

    Hey, how about having them come home with difficult, interesting questions? Like what are neutrinos, how are traits stored on chromosomes, and daddy, can we dissect the roadkill in front of the house? I think it’s great to encourage kids to ask questions, but why settle for stupid questions?

  6. There is one basic distinction for which I admire the Catholic Church. As the coverage of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation showed, even if you reject the mumbo-jumbo of miracles, there is much to be gained from the example of selflessness.

    I grew up going to church. There were nice people there. But they did not have a monopoly on selflessness, and it is offensive for Mr Knox to be perpetuationg the myth that they do.

  7. Without it, they can never be tolerant, only indifferent. As Hitchens reminds us, churches have been bastions of religious exclusivity and intolerance. But the great crimes of the 20th century were alliances of the fundamentalist few and the indifferent many.

    Wait, what? I thought you just said they were bastions of selflessness.

    And once again, Knox plays the false dichotomy card. Not going to church every week is not synonymous with complete ignorance of and indifference to religion.

  8. Religion is not synonymous with ethics. The content of NSW’s proposed schools ethics classes has been robustly debated. But to substitute ethics for scripture is akin to replacing food with vitamin pills. Biblical parables, or teachings from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other religion, may contain ethical lessons. They may not. But they do much else besides.

    What? Mr Knox does not say. There’s just something in those old superstitions he wants taught, which is not an argument.

  9. Kids don’t get indoctrinated that easily. If children’s minds were putty, they would emerge into adulthood caring for the underdog, distrusting materialism, cherishing the environment and standing up against the corrupt. These (Judeo-Christian) precepts are embedded in pretty much all of the children’s film, television and literature I’ve ever seen. Do children grow up to embrace those beliefs? The evidence suggests otherwise.

    See #4. When it’s convenient, Mr Knox argues that kids will rebel against what they’re taught; when it suits him, he claims that they ignore what they’re taught. Which is it?

    Also, he has a pollyannaish view of film, tv, and literature. Maybe he should take the kids to see the latest Saw film instead of Veggie Tales.

  10. Because I had to. When my son finished his first Communion classes after two months of Sundays, he was in a celebratory mood. “Yay, now I don’t have to go to church any more!” “Not so fast,” I said. “There’s still confirmation.” He wasn’t too pleased. “But you don’t have to go to church every Sunday.” I replied: “I did when I was your age.” Did it do me any good? Possibly. It didn’t make me a believer, but it left me with some knowledge of what I was unbelieving in.

    “I had to suffer when I was your age, so you get to be miserable, too”. Wow. Give that man a parenting award!

None of these were reasonable arguments for sending your kids to church every week. Not one. These are feeble exercises in rationalizing an irrational decision.

And his conclusion is even worse.

At worst, Sundays in church give hours of boredom in which the young mind can roam. Kids don’t get much of a chance to get bored. As the filmmaker Peter Weir once said, the creative mind should actively seek boredom. My children’s schooling is more engaging than mine and their leisure hours are filled with more varied activity. A little boredom now and then, sitting in church while they’re thinking about something else, can send them off to new places inside the lozenges of those stained-glass windows. The boredom of that Sunday hour, if boredom is the worst of it, might be more precious than it seems.

So lock your kids in a closet for a few hours every week.

No, boredom is not a virtue. There’s a difference between boredom and having leisure time…and an even greater difference between leisure and compulsory silence and immobility.

How about this: instead of church, give the poor kids two hours of free time on Sunday morning — no chores, no forced activity — and turn them loose in a room full of books and toys. And don’t sermonize at them, but tell them that they can talk to mommy and daddy all they want, and you’ll listen.

Jeez, but this Knox fellow seems like a sucky father.

Where are the women at? Again?

The Ms magazine blog has an awful little article on the New Atheists that completely misses the point. It’s about the sexes and atheism, of course, but it has little to say except to whine that the New Atheism is just like the old religion, and gosh, look at all those Old White Guys in the fore. Yes, we know; the visible leadership of atheism right now is largely male, but it’s not because they pushed aside the women. The New Atheism is really dominated right now by senior academic types, which means that we are the lucky survivors of the old all-pervasive sexism that we’re seeing so well-represented in the senior cohort now, but it’s shifting, have no fear — the next generation is going to be where the women in charge, as I can see by looking at the younger faces behind this movement now.

So don’t blame the Old White Guys, and don’t regard their gender and age as a debit. What we need to do is promote more equality, and make a positive case for freethought. The Ms article could have explored that by talking to some of the many people involved, and could have even talked to the many prominent female atheists out there, and said something about the direction we’re going, rather than where we come from. It chose not to do that, and instead invented a myth of sexist complacency.

Sadly, there’s little indication that atheists are receptive to the suggestion that they might benefit from diversifying in color or gender.

What a crock. We want to expand, we want to be more welcoming to a wider demographic than only Old White Guys, and I’ve seen it happening: you should have been to atheist meetings 15 years ago. It’s what gives me considerable hope for the future, that I’m seeing increasing numbers of women and minorities and especially young people participating. I still see a lot of grey beards in my audiences, but we don’t want them to go away, and we are advocating greater diversity.

But I’m an Old White Guy myself. The best way for me to make my point is to sit down and let the underrepresented speak. Jen McCreight takes that Ms article apart, and lists all those activist atheist women Ms forgot to consult. Ian Cromwell has a series of videos on race and atheism.

You know, these diverse voices are there — you just have to listen. I’m disappointed that someone at Ms magazine hasn’t learned that yet, and chooses again to perpetuate the idea that all that matters are the Old White Guys.

NO RELATION!

Kevin Myers is some wackalooney Irish commentator who, as far as I know and as fervently as I hope, is no recent relation to this Myers — the only thing I can commend him on is that he manages to spell his last name correctly. Oh, we do have one other thing in common: we’re both atheists. He’s an idiot atheist, though, so I wash my hands of him. He recently made this admission while also acknowledging his flaming hypocrisy.

Now what follows is quite hypocritical. For, on the one hand, I simply don’t believe in God, because I am intellectually unable to; but on the other, I prefer a society which generally respects and reveres a god, and the organised system of pieties and rules that a god-based religion generates. The alternative seems to be a secular-dementia that makes godlike figures of such as Rooney [some football star I know nothing about –pzm]. I would have once said that there was little worse than the vulgar basilica at Knock, and the debased and semi-hysterical cult surrounding it — but surely, it doesn’t compare in sheer bloody awfulness with the frenzied adoration generated by soccer or television celebrity-worship.

How condescending. He’s too smart to be anything but an atheist; but all the little people out there, the dull dumb mob, why…they need religion so that they’ll obediently maintain his life in the style to which he is accustomed. There are plenty of idiot atheists like that, and they’re usually conservative/libertarian assholes. Personally, I would rather not live in a society of pious rules-followers; I want everyone’s intelligence respected and nurtured and encouraged to flower. My ideal society is one that is getting better and discovering new ideas and bringing everyone along, not just some smug elite that thinks they’re better than everyone else.

The credulousness that has caused people to turn to a god is so universal that it must be in our DNA. In other words, it is an evolved characteristic, which has proved beneficial to those who have possessed it. Groups of primitive man who didn’t believe in a god simply perished. Clearly, possessing this belief — presumably because it helped to create a moral order — conferred a decisive survival-advantage which non-believing groups fatally lacked.

So, mankind will always need its gods: that’s in our genes.

But wait, Kevin…are you not human? Did you fail to inherit this precious strand of DNA? Do you consider yourself unfit, doomed to die as a detriment to society?

There is no evidence that humans without god-belief died because of it. There is no evidence that atheism is genetically determined. There is no reason to believe that those of us who do not hold in faith are somehow biologically special — I certainly don’t regard myself as unusual, and consider my youthful departure from religion to be a consequence of early experience and education in science. I also don’t look at believers and figure they’re all crippled from birth.

It’s simply idiotic to declare that humanity will always believe in gods because of a genetic predisposition while noting that some of us don’t believe and also feel no stress or loss because of our disbelief — apparently it’s not in our genes.

Mr Myers (oh, how it pains me to use that name in this context!) has another peculiarity: he’s a self-loathing atheist who also thinks, along with the Pope and a host of other deluded souls, that secularism has been the great evil of the 20th century.

And no one ever suggested that gods were always good: look at the Aztecs, feeding their children to their ferocious deity: the Ashanti much the same. And in our post-religious culture, we have seen, in all their splendour, the celebrities whom people worship in the absence of a creator-god in their firmament: Madonna, or Lindsay Lohan, or Piers Morgan, or Simon Cowell — or even Wayne Rooney.

And they’re the good ones, before we come to the great secular gods of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot. They all triumphed in political cultures of obligatory godlessness. Remember — there have, in fact, been few societies which made godlessness mandatory: and without exception, they soon degenerated into orgies of murder. And maybe that’s what happened to the early hominids: those who didn’t have a god, in other words, those who didn’t fear consequence, rapidly disappeared in a welter of homicidal bloodshed.

Repeat after me: Hitler was not an atheist. He was a crazy Catholic. None of these people, horrible as they were, killed in the name of secularism or atheism, but in the name of specific ideologies…and they also tended to set up cults of personality. I know nothing about this Wayne Rooney with whom Mr Myers is obsessed, but I don’t think he’s a major figure in 21st century atheism, and for all I know he’s a devout Presbyterian; it doesn’t seem to matter to Kevin Myers. Madonna is a weird New Agey kabbalist and former Catholic…again, not an atheist. I don’t know what Lindsay Lohan’s religious beliefs are, but I doubt that all of her fans (does she have any any more?), or even a majority of her fans, are unchurched.

Maybe he should look a little deeper into his own assertions. He claims that societies that have made “godlessness mandatory” have collapsed. It could be that it isn’t the “godlessness” part that has been destructive, but the “mandatory” part, and that tyrannies that try to dictate the beliefs of citizens, no matter what those beliefs are, are going to fall apart in internal strife.

Not that I expect Kevin Myers to ever think that deeply about his own ideas. He seems to be content with his hypocrisy and self-contradiction.

Hey, if atheist views are so likely to disintegrate healthy social values, shouldn’t he be quarantining himself, and voluntarily hiding his unfit self so that he can continue to reap the benefits of a godly society?