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Category: atheism (page 5 of 17)

Utilitarianism

15 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

I’m a bit of an ethical utilitarian; that is, I generally think an action is good if it has good effects. I can see some problems with it. Since we can’t always predict the effects of our actions, utilitarianism works best in retrospect. And defining ‘good’ has its own problems, but I know it when I see it.

But I like to hear the other side. So, for the second time in two days, I went to hear a Christian have a bash at a competing philosophy. I wasn’t expecting to hear how Christianity improves on utilitarianism. They never seem to do that. They just say God is wonderful. But I hoped to get a better idea of other views on ethics.

The speaker mentioned the above problems with utilitarianism, all of which I would have happily conceded. I could have done without the straw men, though. (Did you know that utilitarianism can lead to gulags and gambling, if you define ‘good’ stupidly enough?)

So what was his great idea for ethical behaviour? It’s quite an eye-opener: An action is good if god says it is. I asked him how he could know what god wants, when believers have come to many different conclusions about that. His answer: He reads the Bible and decides. That’s unlikely to lead to any ambiguity.

At the end of the presentation, I was unconvinced that his system of ethics held any advantages. Sure, he was against gambling and gulags, but a utilitarian could be against both of those things. The difference is that they’d be against it because it was bad for people, and he’d be against it because a god said so. I had a Socratic realisation that I knew one thing more than he did: I knew that my ethical system was made by humans. His system of ethics was made by humans, too, but he didn’t know that. He thought that his system of ethics was handed down by the supreme creator of the universe. I suspect that would make him less capable of compromise.

Despite the presentation, I was quite encouraged by the Christians I met. They asked some good (and in some cases, thorny) questions, including a brief touch on Euthyphro’s dilemma. Also, the ones I met were actually in the process of reading Dawkins and Dennett. Are atheists reading Eagleton and Plantinga? Ugh, no thank you. If we tried to reciprocate, the Christians would be getting the better end of that deal. Still, I respect their curiosity and willingness to check out the other side.

‘Other ways of knowing’

14 September 2011 / / 10 Comments

Today on campus, there was a Christian Union talk about atheism, entitled ‘Why I am not an atheist‘. I can’t stay away if atheism is being discussed, and while they’re usually well-read on Dawkins et al. and give a good critique of the Gnu Atheism, they don’t always apply the same critical eye to their own faith. I was hoping the speaker would explain how Christianity improves on atheism, and in this I was (inevitably) disappointed.

A guy named Rory was the presenter. He was a good speaker — enjoyable to listen to, funny at the right times. His main reasons for being a Christian and not an atheist were:

  • He had no compelling reason to doubt his ‘sense’ that a god exists. It seemed to me that if he’d been born elsewhere and -when, he’d have no compelling reason to doubt his sense that Odin or Vashti exists. Beliefs are true to the extent that they are supported by evidence, not hunches.
  • The Christian world-view ‘resonated’ with his experiences. But people who have different world-views also find that their experiences ‘resonate’, whatever that means. Our experiences don’t always mean what we think they mean.
  • He found it satisfying to have someone to thank (after thanking people). I understand that — I feel grateful to the people in my life, and once I’ve thanked them, I like to pour my effort into making things better for them through service.
  • Finally, he found it hard, within an atheistic worldview, to account for things that are wrong in the world. I don’t know why he decided to press that point. Why would he use this as a strike against atheism, when this is actually much harder to explain from a Christian perspective? In question time, I mentioned that it was very easy for atheists to explain evil in the world — people decide to do things that harm people. But it’s very difficult for believers in an all-powerful, good god to explain why bad things happen. There’s a whole branch of theology (called theodicy) dedicated to trying to explain this very thing, yet the Problem of Evil remains. But Rory couldn’t quite get why atheists would see a thing as ‘evil’ outside some kind of ‘god’ frame. Unfortunately, we had to move on before full understanding could be achieved. Rory — if you’re out there, let’s continue this, because I’d like to understand your view.

I did ask one other question, though. His last point in the presentation was that he found it naïve to think that science was the ‘only way of knowing’ something. Now, I’ve heard people say that there are other ways of knowing, and when I ask them what they are, they invariably respond with something that is… not a way of knowing.

In response, Rory mentioned Dawkins’ letter to his daughter, in which he wrote that tradition, authority, and revelation are bad reasons for believing something. But Rory thought that these were okay reasons to believe something, part of this complete scientific breakfast. He also mentioned intuition as something that was important in finding truth.

I explained that intuition was important — say, in coming up with a hypothesis — but intuition is not a way of knowing. If someone has an intuition about something, they do not know that that thing is true. It appeared that he was confusing ‘how you get an idea’ with ‘knowing that the idea is true’, which is a rather serious mistake.

So I want to say this very clearly: The way to know something is by empirical observation. That is the only way. (And even when we’ve observed something, it still might be wrong! Which is why replicable observation is so important.) There are no other ways of knowing. Not tradition — many traditions have turned out to be wrong. Not authority — authorities can be wrong. Not revelation — you don’t know the source of a supposedly supernatural revelation. It could be all in your head. Science — systematic, reproducible, empirical observation — is the only way of knowing.

If you think you have another way of knowing, leave it in comments, and we’ll have a look.

Militant atheists

11 September 2011 / / 3 Comments

Is there anything more tedious or lazy than journalists complaining that atheists are ‘just as bad’ as religionists? Especially when they write as badly as Emma Jane.

FANATICAL Christians and fundamentalist atheists are like a couple of kids bickering in the back seat during a long car drive.

As US presidential candidates make shrill demands for the teaching of creationism in schools, British pit bull atheist Richard Dawkins accuses non-evolutionists of being stupid, insane or wicked.

As US evangelical Rebecca Hagelin says there is no greater evil than gay marriage, a schoolteacher is sued for ridiculing a student’s belief in Jesus.

It raises the question of whether intransigent evangelicals and militant atheists should both be sent to the naughty corner. Not to think about what they’ve done (even though both religious and atheist regimes have clocked up appalling body counts) but to consider how much they have in common.

Ostensibly opposites, hardline proselytisers and zealous pagans are like the political Left and Right in that the further they extend into extremism, the more they begin to resemble each other.

It’s the old false equivalency that journalists are so great at. Don’t like either side? Say they’re just the same.

I’m happy to allow that ‘militant religionists’ are more the exception than the rule, but if you’re comparing worst to worst, there’s nothing on the atheist side that compares to the worst of the religious side. Committed religionists kill people, oppress women, rape children. What do ‘militant atheists’ do? Write mean things on the Internet. It’s not an apt comparison.

Or:

But what if atheists were as bad as the religious? What would that look like?

It would look like this guy:

Except that the atheist guy was kind of funny. And you can bet that after this exchange, the atheist guy just took his bullhorn back to work and stopped bothering people, and the Christian guys went bothering people somewhere else.

Would it be a bad thing to live forever?

1 September 2011 / / 11 Comments

‎”Blindly we dream of overcoming death through immortality, when all the time immortality is the most horrific of possible fates.” -Jean Baudrillard

One of the worst things about my deconversion was realising that there probably wasn’t going to be an afterlife. I’d been counting on that all my life, and as a result, I had to do some serious rethinking on my timescale. A universe without me? I’m not an eternal being? My religion had flattered me, made me feel so important, and appealed to my sense of vanity. I hated thinking that I probably wasn’t going to live forever.

I was surprised, then, to find that some people aren’t concerned about it, and don’t particularly want to live forever.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, one character is immortal, and it’s a curse.

To begin with it was fun; he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.
…

“I think I’ll take a nap,” he said, and then added, “What network areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?”

The computer beeped.

“Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box,” it said, and beeped. 

“Any movies I haven’t seen thirty thousand times already?” 

“No.” 

“Uh.” 

“There’s Angst in Space. You’ve only seen that thirty-three thousand five hundred and seventeen times.” 

“Wake me for the second reel.”

Immortality might be horrible. Really: how long can you enjoy the vitality of life? How many more times can you listen to Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’? How many times can you watch your favourite movie? Eventually you’ll have found all the things that do it for you. And habituation’s a bitch. What if I became so accustomed to the sunset, or the touch of my sweetheart through repeated exposure that I could no longer enjoy it? I’d be dead then, but still walking around.

Okay, so I can see that eternity would be a long long time, but I don’t envision a check-out date. There’s too much to learn! There’s enough for fifty lifetimes. I’m doing linguistics now. I think in the next lifetime, I’ll do maths and get really good at that. Then what? A lifetime of typography! What kind of computers will people invent? What will English be like in 500 years? And so on. Seventy years seems so short.

Even so, it’s probably a good thing that people die. Max Planck has been paraphrased to say “Science advances one funeral at a time.” And Steve Jobs has his take on it:

 
Transcript for people who don’t like watching videos.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

It’s true, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

So what do I do about it? Steve continues.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Have you made peace with mortality? Or do you rage against the dying of the light? I haven’t decided which approach I like best. I guess at this stage I’m just glad to have escaped the liars who make big, empty promises about forever.

Census ‘No Religion’ billboard from the Atheist Foundation of Australia

25 June 2011 / / 2 Comments

Hey, look what just arrived in my neighbourhood.

It’s the new “No Religion” billboards from the Atheist Foundation of Australia.

Australia’s having a census this year, complete with the religion question.

As the next Australian Census approaches (9 August 2011), the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) is preparing for one of its biggest and most important projects. The AFA is campaigning to encourage individuals and families to think about the importance and impact of their answer to this leading Census question: “What is the person’s religion?”

The AFA will be unveiling billboards across the nation in major cities stating “Census 2011: Not religious now? Mark ‘No religion’ and take religion out of politics.”

They’re addressing two distressing tendencies in the census.

One is that people just put ‘Anglican’ or whatever their religion of origin is, even if they’re non-believing. This inflates the religious numbers, and may overestimate the allocation of services to churches, insofar as the government relies on the census to make these decisions.

What is the data on religion used for?

Data on religious affiliation are used for such purposes as planning educational facilities, aged care and other social services provided by religion-based organisations; the location of church buildings; the assigning of chaplains to hospitals, prisons, armed services and universities; the allocation of time on public radio and other media; and sociological research.

The other tendency is to write down some joke religion. Don’t get me wrong; I love the FSM as much as anyone, but I advertise his message on t-shirts, not on serious documents. From the FAQ:

What happens if I write Jedi Knight?

It gets counted as ‘Not Defined’ and is not placed in the ‘No religion’ category. This takes away from the ‘No religion’ numbers and therefore advantages the religion count. It was funny to write Jedi once, now it is a serious mistake to do so.

This year I’m writing ‘Atheist’, which is a legitimate category, and can be taken together with the ‘No Religion’ and ‘Agnostic’ groups.

I’d love to see the number of ‘Nones’ in Australia grow as large as possible this year. If you’re not currently religious, consider the ‘No Religion’ box. It’s more honest and accurate.

The Modeerf Question

8 June 2011 / / 1 Comment

I’m on the docket for a ‘comedy debate‘ tomorrow. It’s about the fictional ‘Modeerf’ religion, and I’m the secular atheist of the group. Here’s the promo:

Where do we draw the line between religious freedom and the law of the land?

Between respecting diversity and double standards?

Between maintaining your culture and becoming Australian?

Come and meet migrants from the little known Modeerf religion.

They know that their practices of men going shirtless, having the holy month off work, annual cannabis burning and feeding children fermented mead are pretty unusual in an Australian context but they want similar legal exemptions and discrimination protection to other Aussie religions.

Here are my thoughts:

I’m against the Modeerf religion, just like I’m against every religion. Religions spread superstition, and we have enough of that already. I do not want to see them getting the okay to break the law for religious reasons. I don’t want to pay their taxes for them. I don’t want them meddling in civil rights issues like gay marriage. If they want to do their religious thing, they can. But the government has no business promoting them. Ideally, the government would be neutral towards religion.

But — and this is a big ‘but’ — we don’t have that kind of government. We live in a country where the government is helping to establish and promote religion, contrary to Section 116 of the Australian Constitution.

If we can’t have government neutrality toward religion, then I have a terrible, but still second-best solution: Treat all religions the same. As an atheist, I don’t see that any religion as intrinsically better or worse, more sensible or crazier than any other, so every religion should get the same advantage as every other. How about Modeerf chaplains in schools? Come to think of it, how about Muslim chaplains in schools? (Can you imagine the freak-outs on talk radio?) Should the Modeerf be allowed to fire left-handed people in their charity work, if it’s against their religion?

I think this second-best solution would still be terrible. You’d have more discrimination, and less reason. But it would at least have the advantage of being fair. (And if some religions are unwilling to accord others the privileges that they receive, it shows their paper-thin commitment to equality.) The Modeerf example doesn’t show why it’s important that every religion get the same perks. It shows why no religion should.

In doing research for this event, I ran across this statement on a web page from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

People are free to practise any religion as long as they obey the law.

Isn’t that a great ideal? I hope one day we get there.

I didn’t draw Mohammed — this time.

22 May 2011 / / Comments Off on I didn’t draw Mohammed — this time.

May 20th was ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’, part 2. It went nearly unnoticed, what with all the excitement over God’s latest mistake.

I didn’t draw Mohammed this year. For one thing, I did it last year, and I didn’t think I could improve on it. But the main reason is that the conditions are a little different this year.

I don’t have a problem with blasphemy, mockery, or confrontation. I think these tools can be valid and justifiable responses in cases where believers are making threats of violence or unreasonable demands for complicity or respect. But I do make decisions as to when I’m going to use such tools.

Last year, Muslims were making unreasonable demands that non-Muslims obey the rules of their religion, and some individuals were making specific threats of violence against Molly Norris (originator of ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’) and against the creators of South Park. Under these circumstances, I decided that it was appropriate to join a concerted effort in direct confrontation to these demands.

This year, though, the issue hasn’t been on my radar. If there have been any credible threats made, I haven’t heard of them. Good. That’s how I like it.

Maybe not much has changed since last year. Many Muslims are still hypersensitive to criticism — witness their attempts to influence the UN to outlaw criticism of Islam — and this needs to be addressed until they learn that their religious views are no more entitled to respect than anyone else’s. However, I’m content to let the cartoon issue rest until such time as believers — Muslim or otherwise — try to use coercion or threats to curtail freedom of expression. When they do, it will once again be time to protest with pen or keyboard.

Better hurry and watch this.

21 May 2011 / / Comments Off on Better hurry and watch this.

Here’s a presentation I made last week for the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society. It’s called “End of the World… Again” and it’s about the Family Radio 21 May Non-Rapture. If you’re one of the saved, you’ll need to hurry and watch it before you go up, but I guess you won’t really need it. If you’re one of the doomed souls, then you get about five months.

Unfortunately, the video didn’t come through on the feed. All you get is the sound.


The End of the World… Again (Audio) from UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society on Vimeo.

So play the audio, and while that’s going, sort through this PDF for the slides. It’s a bit more work, but what did you expect during the Tribulation?

By the way, what are we going to call this failed prophecy? How about ‘Apocalypse Not’?

UPDATE: I muffed that scripture. It didn’t say ‘Two women will be in a bed.’ It said ‘Two women shall be grinding together’. Which I suppose you could take how you wanted.

Faith Fair at UWA!

19 May 2011 / / 3 Comments

Yesterday, UWA held a Faith Fair. You could argue that any fair where you don’t know who assembled the Ferris wheel is a faith fair, but this was a real Faith Fair, and the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society was invited. What’s a university doing promoting faith, anyway? We’re supposed to be helping people learn to think better, not worse. But we wanted to provide a balance, and I think it’s cool that we were invited, even though we’re not a religion and have no faith.

Our contribution was ‘Ask an Atheist”, which consisted of a bunch of us sitting at a table, waiting for questions. In the first few hours, one guy asked us about the Illuminati, and another couple asked us directions to some other building on campus. Pleasingly, another student signed up with us. That was about it.

Pretty soon, the UWA Christian Union set up their own table next to us, and together we all sat, not being asked questions, and being completely ignored by the studentry.

Here’s a picture of all of us.

Notice the extremely large zone of no people around us.

In short, the Faith Fair was a total bust, and I couldn’t be happier. Students at UWA don’t give a fart for faith, and that’s the way I like it.

There was one interesting bit though, where we asked Scott, the president of Christian Union, about what happens to people who died before Jesus. I know different religions answer this in different ways — and the Mormons have an innovative, if resource-intensive, solution — but I wanted to hear his response.

I think Scott answered this in a thoughtful and careful way. He named a few different ideas people have had over the years — like, the Atonement applies to them retroactively, or if they were ‘good’ they get a pass, and so on — but in the end, he said plainly and honestly that they didn’t know.

“How would you find out, if you wanted to?” I asked.

The only way he could come up with was by… interpreting scripture! Of course, that approach has worked wonders over the years at providing clear, unambiguous, and well-agreed upon answers to great religious questions.

The whole conversation made me feel quite impatient and irked with religion. There’s a question there, and everyone agrees it’s a good question that really should have an answer. But there’s no agreed-upon answer, and even worse, there’s no agreed-upon way of getting an answer.

Wouldn’t that drive you mad? What if we had to work that way in the sciences? Sure there’s a lot we don’t know, but we have an established way of getting the kind of answers that people can agree on. If we had a lot of scientists from different countries and different backgrounds, and we had some scientific question that we wanted to find out about, we may not have an answer right away, but we could at least come up with a research program to work towards an answer.

With religion, you can’t even start. All the answers come from a god who never speaks directly, but has (allegedly) left a lot of mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting (and self-contradicting) holy books whose contents need to be massaged into a comprehensible answer. Even then, the various practitioners won’t agree. You start hitting insurmountable limits just about as soon as you start asking questions.

The religious metaphysical approach is a recipe for stuckness.

Hardly getting over it

8 May 2011 / / 3 Comments

I saw an LDS friend from long ago, and had an enjoyable catching-up session, talking about work and kids.

“What else are you doing?” she asked.

“Well, still blogging,” I said.

“Oh, what do you blog about?”

“Actually,” I said, “being an ex-Mormon! Among other things.”

She wasn’t put off at all — she asked a few questions about it, and then said, “So, that’s something you’re still interested in?”

My answer is still an enthusiastic yes! I don’t know why. Some people never want to talk about their deconversion at all. And other people initially do, but then they find that they run dry, they’ve said it all, and they ‘get over it’. They ‘move on’. I think there’s even some kind of expectation that ex-Mormons (maybe even ex-whatevers) will eventually ‘get over it’. If you don’t, then you’re stuck in some phase of your development. There you will stay, not progressing, until you no longer feel the need to discuss ‘it’ anymore.

Not me. It’s been over five years, and I’m still here, but I don’t see my development as arrested. It’s become another one of my interests. I still find Mormonism and issues relating to faith and un-faith fascinating. What is it that makes people believe things just because of ‘faith’? How could I have devoted years of my life to something that had no evidentiary basis? Why do we, as humans, have cognitive blind spots that keep us from examining our beliefs critically? Can we be certain that gods don’t exist? This is a fascinating area that involves psychology, philosophy, and the sciences. How could I not be interested? There’s enough here to play around with forever.

There’s another aspect. As a skeptical rationalist and as an educator, I’m against superstition and ignorance, and I intend to challenge it wherever it may appear. That includes religions. They’re still out there indoctrinating children, filling people up with sexual guilt, worming falsehoods into the educational system, and taking a hefty chunk of people’s money for the pleasure. In some cases, their members advocate violence and try to control the choices of people who don’t believe. As long as religions are operating, I want to be hoisting the banner of reason, as quixotic as that sounds.

I think I owe it to myself not to forget what I learned in my experience with religion. That means not putting it in a box and leaving it there. At this stage, I’m very pleased to not be ‘getting over it’, and I hope I never do.

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