atheism – Page 8 – Good Reason

Category: atheism (page 8 of 17)

Yes, she is.

29 June 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia, is an atheist. For a while there, I wasn’t sure, but she came out this morning in a radio interview.

Do you believe in God?

No, I don’t, John. I’m not a religious person.

I’ll write some more on this later, but I just wanted to light a celebratory sparkler. Isn’t it great that Australia is a country where a politician doesn’t have to pretend to believe in supernatural beings, and can still get elected as a head of government…

Erm. Maybe I should hold off on the celebration until after the elections.

Ask an atheist: What is god like?

22 June 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

I sometimes contribute to ‘Ask the Atheists‘. Here’s a recent question.

What is your concept of God in His most crucial essence?

Rather an odd question to pose to atheists, don’t you think? Someone posed the same question to Richard Dawkins once, and he said he found it absurd.

Here’s how I answered it.
= – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – =
I’d like to describe the crucial attributes of God, and I’m not going to let a little thing like not believing in him stop me.

First, I’d say that God is intelligent. (Joseph Smith said that, and went on to found one of the dumbest religions of all time.) Because God is so intelligent, he’d be far too smart to invent a dumb thing like creationism, intelligent design, or intelligent design creationism. He’d surely see through the ridiculous charlatanry known as faith healing. He’d also be too smart to need numbskull apologists to defend him using poor reasoning, logical fallacies, and doomed arguments. Maybe they should cut it out.

Apparently, he controls everything, listens to billions of prayers, and (I have heard) is responsible for all the physical processes in the universe. That means he’s a busy guy. So he’d be far too busy to care what people are doing with their naughty bits. He also wouldn’t care about gay people getting married, how low women’s hemlines or necklines are, what kind of underwear people are wearing, or any of a thousand details about food and drink, meat preparation, hair length, language use, or social customs that religious systems concern themselves with for the supposed well-being of their members.

He created the world, and everything that in it is. That includes fossils and rocks that are millions of years old. That would suggest that he wants people to believe that the earth is much older than the 6,000 – 10,000 years that Christian fundamentalists believe it is. Why do they ignore the evidence that comes from the world that their god created? And why don’t they believe the fact of evolution? If he’s the god of truth, shouldn’t they quit trying to ignore facts? Doesn’t that sound like they’re not being respectful to him?

God created a lot of women. I happen to think they’re quite nice-looking, and since I’m created in God’s image, I bet he likes the way they look too. He’d probably be offended if someone tried to cover them in yards of fabric. Or if anyone tried to mutilate their genitals. Or burn them, cut off their noses, or honour-kill them for not being sufficiently obedient.

In other words, from what I can tell of God’s crucial attributes, I think he’d be as disgusted with the attempts of humans to worship him as I am. If he existed, that is.

Sunday blasphemy: Life without gods is enjoyable and ethical

23 May 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

Ran across this quote as a Facebook status update.

Without God, life would end at the grave and our mortal experiences would have no purpose. Growth and progress would be temporary, accomplishment without value, challenges without meaning.

In other words: There must be a god. If there weren’t, it would be depressing, and depressing things just can’t be true!

Not much of an argument, is it? But you can see the self-congratulatory appeal. It tells the believer: ‘You’re not wasting your time believing. Your belief gives your life a purpose.’ Well, I suppose the author’s church gives him a purpose. Maybe he actually means that his life would be meaningless without the god that he’s based all his hopes and aspirations on.

It also lets him pity atheists — oh, how empty their lives must seem!

Well, he can save his pity. Life without gods is still full of value and meaning, even if it doesn’t last forever. In fact, I find life more precious because of its brief duration.

I’m thinking of Babette’s Feast, a wondrous film that I first saw at BYU. (I wonder if it’s still a favourite on the International Films list.) Babette, a French chef, is a long-time resident of a village full of dour Lutherans. When she announces that she’s making a feast for her friends, it sends them into turmoil — how can they enjoy the feast while renouncing the pleasures of the flesh? Maybe it’s the age I am now, but as a BYU student with false assurances of a future eternity, I thought, “What a neat film.” Now when I think of it, and of our brief time to feast, I am moved to tears. I feel that coming to accept mortality and non-existence has deepened my emotions in way that was impossible when I thought life would go forever.

Is growth and progress temporary — and therefore meaningless — if we die and cease to exist? For the individual, perhaps, but there’s more than just us, you know. There’s also humanity. The great things that people have made and left behind continue to benefit all of us. How short-sighted to claim it’s all pointless if he’s not around to have it forever. How self-centered. How this view devalues life. What paucity of imagination. What meanness of spirit.

There’s more. The author continues:

There would be no ultimate right and wrong and no moral responsibility to care for one another as fellow children of God.

Ultimate right and wrong? Says someone whose barbaric holy books need constant reinterpretation and explanation to bear any resemblance to the morality held by normal people today.

And as far as moral responsibility, if he needs to believe in an invisible man to care about other humans, then I hope he never stops believing. Luckily, we atheists can take care of people we love and contribute to the good of humanity without all the supernatural baggage.

I wonder if the author of this quote would be disappointed to find that atheists aren’t all miserable and depressed. We have the temerity to be happy in this life. And how confusing it must be to see us taking care of other people without an ‘absolute morality’. I think I’ll confuse him even more by dropping a few coins into ‘Non-Believers Giving Aid‘. Figure that one out, God-Boy.

Back to the old meeting-house

16 May 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

I did eventually return that box of church books. I didn’t recycle any of the old lesson manuals or anything, just gave them back. I debated annotating the margins with point for point rebuttals, but that would have taken more work than benefit.

It was good to see some old friends and acquaintances. Oldest Boy came along, too. A few people asked him if he’d be coming back, looking hopeful. (His reaction: Don’t think so.) He thought it was kind of good to see people, though he was annoyed that everyone commented on how tall he’d gotten. Other people’s kids looked older too. That was strange. I must have been away longer than I’d realised. In fact, it’s only been three years, but it feels longer.

The building looked the same, the art was the same, and the lessons were probably about the same as when I’d left. In fact, that was the overall impression I got: sameness. But not stability — stagnation.

Same people there, too, still hearing the same messages, same exhortations to pay tithing, do Home or Visiting Teaching, support the activities, and on and on. I could probably go back in three more years, and still find mostly the same people there. It’s silly, but because I only ever saw these people at church, I had this cognitive illusion that they’d never left the building in all that time. It was all a bit Hotel California.

I couldn’t imagine sitting through another meeting rehashing the same material — same scriptures, maybe some interesting discussion, maybe a bit of controversy, never really able to be resolved, and the same curriculum over and over.

Since leaving religion, I’ve had more time to learn about the world we live in — about science and nature, philosophy and ethics, language and life. No doubt all the church people had learned things in the interim, too, when not at church. But what I’ve learned — and they still haven’t — is that life is enhanced, not diminished, by enjoying the real world and by rejecting the unseen world of gods, angels, devils, and spirits. Sure, I learned a lot of good moral teachings in that church, and some really awful ones. But the religious system was like a maze that you could stay in forever, whose passages only led back to the same places, with no relation to the outside world.

As I left the building that day, I felt relieved not to be there anymore. I want to say that it was the feeling of having graduated, but that’s not quite right. It was the feeling of having escaped.

My son and I said goodbye to everyone, and walked out into the sunlight. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, too nice to be inside. People were playing a game in a field opposite the church. Life was happening out in the real world, and we were a part of it.

Tone trolls

11 May 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 24 Comments

I don’t know what it is about atheism, but we sure do get a lot of tone trolls. A ‘tone troll‘ is like a concern troll, but is especially concerned about the lack of civility in the discourse. The tone troll wants everyone to be nice. That, and to make everyone else be the same kind of atheist that he is.

I’ve had to deal with atheist tone trolls, and even a theist tone troll or two. Here’s how this plays out.

Atheist tone troll: Atheism can be polarising. Don’t make it ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ — they’ll only resist us harder. We need to take a more conciliatory approach. We need to work together with people on issues where we agree.

That’s a good aim. If someone wants to take that approach, I think that’s fine. We need more ‘nice atheists’.

But we also need ‘mean atheists’ like me, who take opportunities to call out religious foolishness with ridicule and a sledgehammer, and who explain about good reasoning and critical thinking. (Of course, you pick your battles, and sometimes the best thing is to say nothing. I don’t always walk around in my stomping boots, but I’m not afraid to pull ’em on if I think the time is right.)

Think of these approaches as complementary. Or perhaps evolutionary. We don’t know what will work in each case, so let’s try everything. I want lots of atheists putting the heat to religion in all kinds of ways. Mockery, sympathy, calumny, there’s no wrong way to do it.

The wrong thing to do, however, is wring one’s hands in dismay, and lecture other atheists on how they’re doing it wrong. Oh, my ears and whiskers! How teddibly uncivil! Theists will never agree with us if we challenge them! (See also: ‘I’m an atheist, BUT…’)

Well, frankly, not challenging them doesn’t do much to move their opinion either. How well did not challenging them work for the last 50 years? Dumping your religion and becoming an atheist is hard. What could possibly be the impetus for someone to do it if all they hear is comforting church hymns, along with the song of the non-confrontational atheist? I know people don’t like hearing that their religion is wrong. But I do say it from time to time because I think it’s important to keep pushing the Overton Window in that direction. I don’t know whether my sledgehammer wakes people up, or whether it just attracts the newly awakened, but more and more people are becoming aware of the absurdities of religion, and we’re forming a vibrant and noisy community of non-believers.

I also had to deal with a theist tone troll once. It went like this:

Theist tone troll: You can say whatever you want. But you should realise that it’s not respectful to say mean things about religion. It hurts people’s feelings. It’s your tone I object to.

I don’t worry too much about these folks. There’s literally no way to talk about religion in less-than-laudatory terms without some people getting butthurt. The only thing they want is for atheists to shut up.

Pick your approach. Choose the kind of atheist you’re going to be. But having chosen, please spare the rest of us the lecturing about tone. It’s just a way of trying to control the communication of other people. Letting go of that need for control can be freeing.

Atheist YouTube party

6 May 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

For this week’s UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society meeting, it was Atheist YouTube Party! With me as programmer. I really enjoyed the chance to share some of my faves. Here they are, as a YouTube playlist. Prepare to be offended and/or enlightened; the choice is, as always, entirely up to you.

NOTE: I think there might be a bug in the YouTube embedded playlist feature. The embedded playlist below skips the first video, which in this case was Tim Minchin’s “The Pope Song”. If you want to see it first, you can either click here to go to my blog post of a few days ago, or click here to find a working playlist on a different page.

Since I didn’t have a rock-solid net connection in the lecture room, I decided to take the precaution of downloading the videos as mp4’s using KeepVid, and then making a playlist in VLC. It made things go much more smoothly.

The Pope Song: A linguistic analysis

1 May 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 5 Comments

Been enjoying this new video from Tim Minchin. It’s catchy, but it does have a wee bit of profanity. Entirely justified.

Here are some stats about the song.

some variant of ‘fuck’: 84 times
some variant of ‘mother’ + ‘fuck’ in the same word: 35 times
some variant of ‘cunt’: 0 times
That’s one ‘fuck’ every: 1.54 seconds
Ratio of ‘fuck’ words to other words: 1:3.85

Other songs, for comparison:

Fuck tha Police by N.W.A.: One ‘fuck’ every 9.32 seconds
Too Drunk to Fuck by Dead Kennedys: every 8.89 seconds
Fucking in Heaven by Fatboy Slim: every 2.29 seconds
Bodies by the Sex Pistols: every 1.0 seconds (but only that one part in the third verse)
Fireflies by Owl City: every 0.6 seconds (subliminal)

Number of other songs I know that rhyme ‘papist’ and ‘rapist’: 0.

Deconversion stories: Why so long?

30 April 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

Why did it take so long for me to leave religion?

I keep coming back to this question, in fact kicking myself over it — all that time and energy gone. Then I cut myself some slack. I remember that it’s hard to get out of a system you’re born into, and one that you’ve believed and invested so much in.

Still, all that aside, why did it take me so long to recognise the now-obvious absurdities and contradictions in Mormon doctrine — actually, in all of theism? And Mormon doctrine is full of absurdities. Translating out of a hat? Pouring oil on someone to heal them from diseases? God living on a planet near the star Kolob? Having to memorise and repeat words and signs to get into heaven? Ridiculous in retrospect. Why did it seem so plausible at the time?

Of course, we can turn to the standard set of devices that humans use to believe the implausible: communal reinforcement, childhood indoctrination, confirmation bias. But recently I realised a little something extra that probably helped keep my belief afloat: It’s very difficult to critique a religion effectively when you still accept some religious ideas. Meeting on Saturday might seem arbitrary, but really, meeting on Sunday is equally so. Believing in chakras is not so absurd when you believe in spirits. Why would it be a problem for a ghost to tell Nephi to kill Laban, when David killed Goliath? And so on. Religious beliefs don’t seem absurd in contrast with other religious beliefs. What we’re able to question depends on what we already accept as true.

In other words, the only solid ground from which to criticise religion is atheism. But how likely is someone to question the whole kit-n-kaboodle all at once? What’s more likely to happen is that we’ll try to preserve as much of the original belief as we can. Much less painful that way. But when you do that, you’re unlikely to question that one little assumption that allows the whole structure to stand: that there’s a god who can do magical things when it wants to. If you accept that one idea, then you can magic your way around any contradiction.

Once you step outside of that bubble and question the idea of a god, then all the absurdities become transparently obvious. But that’s an advanced move, and probably one that people only try when all other options are exhausted. No wonder it can take so long.

Attacking Scientology is a little bit bullshit.

16 April 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 5 Comments

Via Hungry Beast.

Are some religions more loopy than others? Not intrinsically. I happen to think that all religions fall within a narrow band on the loopiness scale. If Scientology seems intrinsically wacky to you, then you’re probably just more familiar with stories about talking snakes, people made out of clay, dead people coming back to life, ritual cannibalism, and people floating up to heaven.

But are some religions more evil than others? Again, I’d say not intrinsically. Whether a religion is one of the ‘nice religions’ is more a function of who’s running it at the present moment. Giving someone the license to claim they’re acting in the name of a supreme being is just inviting abuse — which may or may not be exercised. The nice pastor of the Mild-Mannered Christian Church won’t be around forever. All the ‘bad scriptures’ will be in that bible, waiting for a charismatic extremist to come around. (Tick tick tick.)

Here’s where I disagree with the Beast: At the present moment, yes, some religions are much much worse than others, including fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, and probably fundamentalist anything else. And of course Scientology, for reasons mentioned in the clip. These religions are affecting lives and minds by controlling the information that reaches their people, and by not allowing them to leave.

So, for people keeping score at home:
Scientology: Bullshit.
Other religions: Also bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines: Not bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines more than other religions: Bullfuckingshit.
Criticising crimes done to promote Scientology: Not bullshit at all.
Being wary of the tendency for all religions to become oppressive: Quite a good idea, really.

Update: Blogger layouts narrower than the minimum YouTube video size: Total bullshit.