Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
Heuristics for reality
This is part 2 in my response to Chris Guin. Here, I’m going to begin by setting aside some of the direct ties to religious beliefs, and talk about Chris’s general statements about how we gain knowledge about reality. Here’s the bulk of it, an explanation of why we shouldn’t be so preoccupied with Biblical contradictions in the first place:
Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works. We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world. The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.
But what if that has it mostly backwards? What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it? I think there’s good evidence that this is the case. For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make. As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time. True logic knows its own limits.
The first thing I want to do in response to this is clear up some of the confusion about what the science actually says. Chris, I don’t understand how the fact that computers take a long time to solve certain problems is relevant here. Sure, EXP ≠ P, and while that may be inconvenient it doesn’t have any great significance for the value of logic. You may be going for something more along the lines of undecidability and/or incompleteness. In that case, yes, there are some things that no algorithm can compute; there will always be some mathematical truths which are unprovable with a given set of axioms. While this is true, and while it’s also true (in the more poetic, humanities-ified version) that there are some questions in life that logic can’t answer, I don’t think this is a reason to reject the answers that logic can provide. That would be like rejecting the concept of evolution because it doesn’t answer cosmological questions about the origin of the universe, or like rejecting the principles of electricity because electricity can’t bake you a pie from scratch. Like throwing out your crescent wrench because it isn’t a soldering iron.
When you say that “the deeper one gets into physics, the less ’sense’ everything starts to make,” I assume you’re referring to quantum mechanics, and maybe also chaos theory. As a physicist myself, I have to tell you that this just isn’t true. I suspect that you’re seeing physical laws and theories that are counterintuitive to you, and erroneously classifying these as nonsensical and illogical. However, they are completely logical (and, much to my undergraduate surprise – at least in the case of quantum mechanics – can eventually become intuitive).
So, I can say with confidence that nobody well-informed on the science believes that “if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.” Quantum physics and chaos theory cast a whole lot of doubt on the determinism aspect, and the computing aspect is unrealistic whether you’re talking about complexity or computability. But (and this is my real point) so what? It’s still all based in logic. Logic with limits, sure. But logic nonetheless. And the fact that limits exist way out on the horizon is no reason to reject the repeatedly verified, reliable information we can glean from working inside those limits.
Second: what is this illogical universe that you’re talking about, Chris? You suggest that perhaps “the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language” and perhaps the universe is “complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal.” The universe might be complex? Of this I have no doubt. Logic is not inconsistent with complicated systems. Reality might be based on language? I have no idea what this means, but feel compelled to point out that while subjective connotations exist within language, we couldn’t communicate at all unless we agreed on rules of syntax and a set of definitions – in other words, some basic axioms. A completely idiosyncratic string of sounds is not a language by any normal understanding. A probabilistic universe? This is my favorite one. See above… the “regular” universe is already understood in a probabilistic way.
So let’s distill what you are really proposing. I see two main ideas in the remainders of your lists. One (for perception, consciousness, subjective, personal) is a Matrix-esque “What if the universe I experience is completely dependent on my own senses and awareness?” The other (for will, desire, maybe personal again) is basically, “If I want reality to be like this, reality is like this.” I think I’ve shown why your supposed “good evidence” for this isn’t actually. I don’t think we have any evidence that these pictures of reality might be true. But I also think that this hypothetical universe you suggest is not an illogical one. It’s simply a different set of premises, new axioms from which we might build up the rules that would govern reality. “When I close my eyes, whatever I was looking at ceases to exist,” for example, might be a new rule. Or perhaps, “If I wish for something to be true, it happens.” You haven’t done away with logic in your hypothetical world.
I hope you can see why I, having read your inaccurate generalizations of science and your unclear assertions on the nature of reality, was somewhat baffled as I reached the point in your post where you claimed that God is outside the bounds of logic:
[Logic] is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine. After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God? God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X. Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.
However, even though I don’t buy your build-up about how we should accept the possibility of a logic-free reality, I think I can be satisfied with this characterization of your God. After all, those “goofy conclusions” and “kerfuffles” resulted from contradictory passages of scripture. But you say you would reject those debates entirely in favor of a God outside of cause and effect, and while I’m not sure what exactly “outside” means, the most obvious interpretation would seem to indicate that he doesn’t cause anything. I have no idea how this could be consistent with God creating the universe, God giving Moses commandments, God sending Jesus to the people, or even God inspiring people to live good lives on a day-to-day basis in the present. God is outside of cause and effect, so nothing can be the effect of his cause.
Moreover, if we read the Bible and find that God supposedly commanded that we do X, who cares? Wherever God is, X and not-X might be the same! If the Bible says that God made a covenant with his people to protect them in exchange for their abiding by his rules, who cares? This presumes that God is okay with an initial act (rule-following) implying a resulting act (God’s protection), which may very well not be true if he exists outside of cause and effect! Any supposed sequence of events can’t be treated as truth, because God is outside of time! It is impossible to know anything about God at any time by any means, least of all by reading the Bible. In fact, it would seem that there can be no evidence, no reason to believe in this God at all.
At the very least, with this picture of God there is no reason to value what the Bible says for its own sake, no reason to suppose that the Bible says anything true. If God is not bound even by the rule that X = X and X ≠ not-X, how can you rely on the Bible or any sentence you read about God as a source of any knowledge about God whatsoever?
How to read the Bible
I had a very interesting and increasingly complex conversation about the Bible with Chris Guin in the comments of one of his blog posts back in October. What began as a discussion about the proper way for Christians to treat nonbelievers soon became more about how the Bible ought to be read and interpreted. Go check out those old comments if you are interested; I am going to respond here to Chris’s newest post about contradictions in the Bible.
Before I delve into what Chris wrote, let me reiterate/clarify my stance. I often bring up particular parts of the Bible in discussions with Christians when we’re talking about their framework of beliefs. I make the assumption—a reasonable one, I think—that the Bible is an important part of that framework. I think it’s important to have a coherent belief system, so I might cite some part of the Bible if, for example, I think a Christian is claiming or defending something that isn’t supported by the Bible.
That’s not to say that I think that Biblical teachings are, as it were, the “gospel truth.” I acknowledge that the Bible makes many clear and relatively unambiguous statements that contradict each other, so all those statements cannot possibly be true. I acknowledge that church doctrine often differs from particular passages of scripture—in fact, that entire distinct denominations have arisen because of different choices in sorting out apparent contradictions. In a theological debate setting, my goal in pointing out a Biblical passage isn’t really to convince someone of a particular version of theology, but rather to point out that it’s seemingly impossible to form a coherent theology from a text so fraught with contradictions and ambiguities. Either you are picking the parts of the Bible you like and ignoring the parts you don’t, or you are making up context and explanation where it doesn’t exist in order to argue away contradictions. In both cases, your beliefs are coming from within yourself rather than from Christian teachings, and the text that is supposedly the foundation for your religion can’t actually hold any weight on its own.
Chris, I was very impressed by your willingness in that earlier post to grapple with “the harder teachings” of “the complex, real, dissonant Jesus.” I don’t think you fall into the first category, cherry-picking which parts of the Bible to care about. I do think that in your current post, you are offering two ways of taking the latter route.
First, you write:
Some “contradictions” require a reevaluation of how one verse or the other is interpreted (or even translated – human language is not infallible, and it’s sometimes worth checking into things). Or how BOTH are interpreted. If there seems to be a contradiction, perhaps one or more of the Scriptures don’t mean what you think they mean.
Your second suggestion is that some seeming contradictions “require a larger contextual understanding” in order to be resolved. These sound like plausible ways to go about understanding a text, and in some cases may be reasonable responses. This is certainly how I would go about reading a physics textbook. I might find in my textbook two statements that I think can be used to work out a problem, but which recommend very different methods. I could study them both in more depth, and perhaps realize that one is a generalized principle and one is a simplification of that principle in a special case, so the two can be reconciled and thought of as the same concept. Or, I could study the surrounding context of those statements, and come to understand that they answer related questions in two entirely different situations—perhaps one applies to metals, and the other is about insulators. This is fine on face.
However, if the Bible plainly says “X but not Y” in one verse, and “Y but not X” in another verse, we are in a very different type of situation. No amount of reinterpretation, no amount of additional context can change the fact that there are very clear statements in the Bible on both sides of the “saved by faith alone” vs. “saved by good works” debate. In fact, the Bible includes specific statements about many different ways to get yourself saved, including statements that it is all predestined and not actually up to you at all. (I don’t think these lists I’ve linked to are perfect, but I think they’re more than sufficient to illustrate what I mean.) You yourself bring up the issue of the old and new covenants—no additional “context” could possibly smooth over the fact that in Leviticus 23 alone God tells Moses “it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations” four times, yet the New Testament is full of statements that Christians “are not under the law” and that Jesus is the mediator of a “new covenant” which is “superior to the old one” and “made the first one obsolete.”
You point out that “nowhere does God say that the Bible is comprised of the infallible and perfect words of angels, as some other holy texts claim to be.” This could hypothetically get us around some of the stickier contradictions. Maybe one of the statements is just wrong, a mistake. I would ask, though: is it possible to tell what parts are wrong? You shrug off inaccurate troop headcounts or precise timelines, and I agree, these details probably do not matter as far as theology is concerned. But what about the stuff that does matter? For example, how do you know that “the harder teachings” you are attempting to face head-on even came from Jesus himself? Or, one could ask instead, how do you know that the nicer ones did?
The bottom line: I think there are significant internal contradictions that are impossible to wriggle out of, and I see no reason to suppose that either (or if more than 2, any) face of a given contradiction is actually true. I’ve seen no reason to suppose the Bible is a reliable source of information, and therefore no grounds to believe that the teachings in the Bible are true.
I suppose I had better stop for now; this is long enough. I look forward to hearing what you think, Chris—and other readers who may want to jump in! I hope I’ve managed to keep up the civility and that I’ve explained myself clearly.
Coming soon: my responses to some of Chris’s other remarks, about epistemology, logic, and science.
How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
Not so grand a bargain
I haven’t written in a while, but I promised Z that I’d start up again. I think a good way to start is to talk about Robert Wright’s New York Times op-ed from Saturday, which bothered me in a lot of ways. The title is “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution,” and the goal is to propose a “common ground” between science/atheism and religion over evolution. Very little that he says is actually wrong, but all of it is missing the point. He proposes that the religious concede that evolution is fact. He then points out that many believe evolution is a process that is bound to yield intelligent beings with an idea of morality. He says that atheists should concede that this realization of moral sense being built into a natural process can reasonably be seen as evidence that the universe was created by a supernatural being who wanted those laws of morality to be known.
My biggest problem is with the idea of a “bargain” in the first place. I have no problem with a bargain in the sense of agreeing to disagree. I can easily reach that kind of understanding (and do) all the time with individual people. I also have no problem with (and very much support) the idea of a political compromise, where government stays out of the religion-atheism debate and guarantees the right of everyone to make the decision for themselves. I am not, however, okay with the idea of a bargain over the facts. If I claim the sky is blue, and you claim it is red, we don’t decide to just split the difference and agree that it’s purple. You don’t bargain over what is true. You debate and give logical reasons and do research and try to figure out what the real answer is. This article asks us to believe something because it’s a nice middle position. I have trouble any time I’m asked to believe something for any reason other than that it’s probably true.
Wright also makes it clear that he does not fully understand the atheist argument, which is surprising considering that he just wrote a book on the history of religious belief. He states the grand compromise he proposes this way:
Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
Of course the idea of a “higher purpose” is compatible with scientific materialism. Atheists believe in morality, after all. I am not sure why he thinks this is a concession. He makes himself a little more clear later on:
[Atheists] could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
I have never seen even the most extreme and combative atheist fail to concede this. A creator-only god is logically compatible with any scientific evidence that could ever be produced, and this is fully conceded by atheists. In fact, even a much more active god is logically compatible with all scientific evidence that could ever be produced. You want to believe God created humans in their current form? Fine. You just also have to believe that God created fossils of various early humanoid species in such a way as to create an apparent link between them and other early apes. It seems to me like a really strange thing to believe, but it’s not logically inconsistent.
The point atheists make is that, while the religious view is logically consistent, there’s no reason to favor it over the non-religious view. We have every reason to believe that logical consequences of the laws of physics govern the events we see around us. Sure, those could be explained by any one of thousands of different possible religious beliefs, but why would we choose to believe any one of these supernatural explanations over any other, let alone over the simple straightforward explanation we can see in the world every day? Atheists don’t claim to disprove religion—they just claim that given the existence of these numerous logically consistent worldviews, the one that doesn’t posit the existence of a random supernatural being without any evidence of its existence is the one that is most reasonable to hold. Wright never even references this argument, and it’s hard to convince people to change their minds when you can’t even prove you understand what they already believe.
Religion on Facebook
I’m not the biggest fan of Facebook, but I have an account because it’s an effective way to get and keep in touch with people. Like most people I know, I don’t have every field of personal info filled out. Most of those omissions are things like “Favorite TV Shows,” stuff that doesn’t really pertain to me or which would make me feel silly to have taken the time to enter. There is one field which I have a real purpose in leaving blank, though, and that is “Religious Views.”
Facebook thinks that my religious views fall in the category of “Basic Information” about myself. I guess for most people, religion is a very prominent part of their identity. And, I’ll be honest, not being religious is an important part of mine, though I don’t think it’s important in the same way. I like to write about atheist issues on this blog because I don’t think they get enough press, and this feels like my own small contribution to the cause. But I don’t talk about atheism all the time. I don’t wear clothing or jewelry that proclaims my atheism, I’m not a member of atheist clubs or activist groups, I don’t go up to people on the street and ask them if they’ve heard the Good News about atheism.
There was a push a while back for people to list “atheist” as their religious views, as part of a sort of atheist coming-out day. I just feel like that’d be listing “teetotaler” in the “Favorite Alcoholic Beverage” field. That is to say, missing the point.
For me at least, being an atheist isn’t an active thing. It’s a lack of being anything else. Because of that, I don’t feel a need to proclaim it, any more than you feel the need to announce that you haven’t shaved your head. Having a shaved head isn’t a fundamental part of being human, and no one (assuming they couldn’t see you) would assume that your head was shaved. Similarly, I don’t think being religious is something “basic” about all people, and I don’t think religiosity should be presumed. By not filling out the “Religious Views” field, I cause the line not to show up on my profile. That’s a much more accurate description of my religious beliefs than a label could ever be.
Secular, not atheist
For the third post of Atheist Week, I want to talk about a common complaint I hear and read with regard to rules that restrict things like teaching creationism (or “the controversy”) in science classrooms, or singing Christmas carols at school assemblies in December, or including an invocation at government events. Some people argue that failing to mention or include religion is equivalent to teaching children to be atheist or enforcing atheism upon the nation. Steven Novella’s recent post rebutting Michael Egnor includes an example of this. (Responding to a blogger, Egnor writes, “Perhaps Mr. Sandefur desires to indoctrinate children in atheism, perhaps he doesn’t.”)
This complaint is incredibly misguided. I think it’s fairly obvious why, so this post will be relatively short. It’s not an explanation I usually see given, though, so I think it’s still worth putting out there.
A lack of prayer or a lack of Christmas carols is not equivalent to forcing everyone to chant together, “There is no God.” It’s merely an omission of something which applies to the beliefs of some but not all. Very few people actually incorporate religion into every moment of their lives. Even people who would describe themselves as devout don’t continually sing hymns or thank God aloud in a speech before every action. Ten more minutes of the day spent not praying or not singing hymns or not talking about how awesome God is doesn’t actually make much difference.
The fact is, “secular” does not mean “atheist.” From Merriam-Webster’s:
1 a: of or relating to the worldly or temporal <secular concerns> b: not overtly or specifically religious <secular music> c: not ecclesiastical or clerical <secular courts> <secular landowners>
While it may be true that atheists aren’t interested in an alternative or supplement to the secular aspect of life, it’s clearly also the case that religious people’s lives do involve the secular aspect too. The secular is what we all have in common. Because of that, common events we all share in such as public schools and government functions should be restricted to secular activities.
Surprising as it may seem, religious values and secular values do not have to contradict each other. In the vast majority of cases, religion teaches, “X is good because God says so,” and secular reasoning says “X is good because it promotes general welfare and is socially expedient.” Secular values aren’t the negation or antithesis of religious values. Unless proponents of religion really want to argue that they absolutely don’t care at all about their (or anyone else’s) well-being in the here-and-now, they have secular concerns. Secular events allow the religious and nonreligious to be represented, but once you include religion, you make your event exclusive.
Do you have to believe?
The topic for the second installment in Atheist Week also comes via Friendly Atheist. Hemant Mehta posts a reader’s query about answering the question, “If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in?” and explains the issue like this:
There are also a lot of similar [answers] most of us tend to give: I believe in the goodness of people, I believe in nature, I believe we all find different ways to answer that question, I believe in the Golden Rule, etc.
It’s really just a bad question. Just because we don’t believe in a God doesn’t mean we don’t believe in anything. And just because someone says they do believe in God doesn’t mean we know anything else about them.
Yes, those are reasons why it’s a bad question. But my revulsion toward it is a lot deeper. I reject the premise of the question entirely.
Imagine saying to a person on a diet: You don’t eat chocolate cake? Well then, what desserts do you eat? Or, imagine saying to a person born blind: You don’t know Picasso’s work? Well then, who is your favorite painter? It would be absurd to demand these answers. It’s completely possible not to eat desserts or not to have a favorite painter, particularly if you’re a person with any sort of inclination against doing those things. I think belief is similar. When someone says, “What do you believe in?” they are saying, surely everyone must have groundless faith in something. As an atheist, I’m not the sort of person who tends to do that stuff.
In the same way that “bananas” isn’t an answer to “What time is it?”, I don’t see how you can answer this question with things like the Golden Rule, humanity, or scientific inquiry. It’s just playing a semantics game — I don’t “believe” in those things the same way someone else believes in God. I value humanity and I value science. I believe in doing good things and refraining from and/or stopping others from doing bad things, but that follows from a sort of axiomatic definition of goodness as a quality of which there ought to be more. Good things are good. There’s no faith there. If I found out that one of the moral precepts I try to follow actually does more harm than good, I would shed it and figure out a new one.
No, I think that valid answers to “What do you believe in?” (instead of the Christian God) would be things like deities of other religions, unicorns, leprechauns, the Tooth Fairy, supernatural powers. Those are things you have to “believe” in… but I don’t think anyone really has to believe in at least one thing in that set. My answer, assuming I’m brave enough to say it out loud to the person who asked, would be: “I don’t believe in anything. I look for proof, and I make my best educated guess when no perfect proof exists. Why do you think I need to believe in something in order to be complete?”
And honestly, if you asked me what I believed in, and I told you that instead of God I believed in Santa Claus, or Ouija boards, or invisible flying grapefruits… would you find any of those answers satisfying or even acceptable?
Violent fundies
We never wanted this to be an “atheist blog” or a “skeptical blog” or a “political blog,” or anything in particular like that. But I tend to go through phases in what I read and get excited about, and holding out for an assortment of post ideas sometimes means that I don’t post anything. In an effort to get back into the swing of things, I’m declaring this week Atheist Week here at It’s the Thought that Counts, and I’ll have one post on atheism and associated issues every day until I get it out of my system.
Let’s begin with a discussion of this ad from Answers in Genesis. (Thanks, Hemant… I think.)
Complete transcript of the voiceover: “If you don’t matter to God, you don’t matter to anyone.” Yep, that’s the word on the street from Answers in Genesis. (Motto: “believing it. defending it. proclaiming it.”) It’s not a new ad, but I guess it’s cropped up again.
I want to believe that the point of the ad is something like, if you don’t realize how much God loves you, you’ll feel unloved by the world and lash out with violence. I mean, I object to that message, but it’s a lot less horrible than the alternative, the easier interpretation: God hates you, so we have no problem with telling this child to shoot you in the face. (Crusades, anyone?)
I don’t take comfort in the idea that a man was gruesomely killed, in some sense by his own father, thousands of years ago in order to save me from eternal punishment and torment which his father set up for us in the first place. There’s no part of that that makes me feel particularly loved. I also resent the implication that I should be grateful and worship the people or entities responsible for such a monstrous plan, executed well before my birth and without my consent or even interest. But I thought that, at the very least, the explanation we’d associated with it was that God loves everyone, and that all you have to do to be saved is to acknowledge the love God already has for you. A weird explanation, to be sure; an emotionally scarring explanation, I think. But it was at least, at the end of the day, a desperate and sad attempt to reach out and be kind to others.
Answers in Genesis betrays the real message when they make this ad. That gun isn’t aimed at a vague someone; the child isn’t committing random acts of violence. Your impulse when viewing the ad isn’t to reach out to that boy and maybe tell him about Christ’s love so he doesn’t hurt a stranger. That gun is pointed at you. Your impulse is to be frightened for your life. AiG is saying that their God only cares about people who already worship him in the right ways, and that if God doesn’t care about you, you don’t deserve even the most basic of human courtesies from anyone else.
Fundamentalist Christians (as well as many not-so-fundamentalist ones) ask how it is possible to be moral without the rules given to you by a supernatural being and without the threat of eternal damnation as well as the promise of eternal reward. The typical atheist response is to point out that it’s the Christians who admit that without religion, they would be unable to stop themselves from stealing, raping, and murdering, yet somehow atheists manage without a problem. That’s troubling enough. But here, AiG is admitting that even their fabulous religion that teaches them to love their neighbors and turn the other cheek wouldn’t stop them from murdering us.
Do you see now why I have such a problem with the term apologetic?
Atheists and Lent
A few days ago, I saw this post referencing a year-old article about Anti-Lent. The point of the article is that when most Christians are celebrating Lent by giving up things, atheists ought to do the extreme opposite: try new things, especially things considered sinful. Honestly, I’m ashamed to have this sort of stuff on About.com where people looking for information on atheism could easily stumble across it. It plays right into the scariest and most misguided stereotypes about atheists. When I saw the article featured again, with the comment, “I love this idea!”, I decided it was time to say something.
Being an atheist is not about being anti-Christian. If you’re an atheist because you hate Christians and you want to piss them off… you should think harder about what you truly believe about the world, how it got here, and how it works. Atheism means a lack of a belief in any deities. Atheists don’t subscribe to Christian dogma wholesale, but it is possible for atheists to agree with ideas that Christians happen to have as well. It’s not as though every time a Christian says something, atheists all stand up and yell the opposite thing. (Seriously, guys, given the number of times the Bible contradicts itself, that’d be a pretty counterproductive strategy.)
If you look at a set of rules and always take the action that breaks them, your life is defined by those rules as much as someone who always chooses to follow them. If you’re so vehemently not a Christian, why give their rules so much power over your life?
Then there’s the issue of sin. Many Christians, particularly the outspoken evangelical ones, believe that atheists have turned away from God and Jesus because they want the freedom to do whatever they want, no matter how immoral. Now, we know that it’s always a Christian who ends up making the argument that without God’s rules, they’d cheat and steal and kill all willy-nilly (and therefore God is necessary for morality). Atheists are perfectly capable of being moral and upstanding citizens without the threat of eternal damnation. Nothing advocated in this list is actually that outrageous if you read it — “Test Your Clothing Comfort Zone” turns out to suggest wearing a hat or a Hawaiian shirt, not a miniskirt and thigh-highs — but a quick skim through the taglines makes it look like atheists are a bunch of promiscuous, gluttonous alcoholics. (And worse, that we are that way just to spite the Christians.) We can do better than that.
Finally, I’m irked by the false dichotomy between atheism and Christianity. It’s really between atheism and religion. In the US, it seems like Christianity is the only alternative because of demographics. It turns out that lots of religions have holidays where you fast or give up things. In fact, most religious teachings aren’t that specific to one religion… probably because religions are just a formalized version of social norms, borne out of our intuition about what good morals are.
Getting too obsessed with your material wealth can lead to emotional strain or weakened friendships. Not always, but it might happen before you notice. It’s not a bad idea to take a step back, look at your priorities, and see if you’re really getting what you want out of the life you’re living. You can think of Lent like a religious version of a New Year’s resolution. You might not make one of those every year (I know I don’t), but you also don’t start out each year intending to be worse than ever before.