The Rev. Dan Erickson, Senior Pastor at Chisholm Baptist Church, has managed to publish an op-ed in the Hibbing, Minnesota Daily Tribune titled “It’s not easy to be an atheist.” Apparently, the Daily Tribune is so desperate for content that they’ll publish tired religious cliches, and Rev. Erickson has never actually talked to an atheist.
In his book, “When God Goes to Starbucks,” Paul Coppan notes that there is plenty of evidence we, as human beings, have a disposition to believe in some type of deity or spiritual reality. Thus, he says, if someone wants to overcome this predisposition to believe in God and be an atheist, it may be necessary to make some intentional choices in order to avoid being a “default theist.”
I’ve never read Coppan’s book; it seems to be a collection of apologetics for Christians to use in every day situations. I already disagree with him. Many of us have no such predisposition — despite being brought up Lutheran, being exposed to to all of the doctrine and dogma, when I was asked to accept the church’s belief in a deity, I couldn’t. I guess I can say that at least some of us have no predisposition to believe at all.
I would also point out that believing in a specific faith seems to require an awful lot of indoctrination — it’s not as if children born in China suddenly, as their first words, start professing a belief in Jesus without being first told by authority figures that they should. How does Rev. Erickson explain all these people — somewhere between 10 and 15% of the American population — who despite all the cultural bellowing about Christianity still reject it?
Erickson then give us four prerequisites to be an atheist.
First, the aspiring atheist should sequester him/herself in urban settings and avoid the majesty, power and beauty of nature. The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies display his craftsmanship.”
I’m an atheist, and I’m a biologist, for dog’s sake. I suspect I know more about nature than some small-town Bible-walloper. I also don’t think Morris, Minnesota counts as “urban”. My town is a third of the size of his, so I get to dismiss him as too cosmopolitan to actually appreciate country living.
Second, someone who does not want to believe in God should avoid spending time with religious believers and taking their experiences seriously.
Oh, trust me, I would love to spend less time exposed to Christian believers. Does he even realize that Christians are an overwhelming majority in this country? That if I turn on the radio or the TV, I’m going to be incessantly dunned with Christian messages?
I don’t believe in God for many reasons, but one is that many of his followers seem to be smug wankers oblivious to reality.
Third, one who wants to maintain his/her atheism should avoid urgent or life-threatening situations. During those times people are tempted to call upon a supernatural outside agent for help. There seem to be very few atheists in battlefield foxholes or in classrooms during final tests.
So god is a supernatural agent to rescue people as a very last resort? It seems to me that if god was such a good protector of soldiers, they wouldn’t bother digging those foxholes. That they do suggests that they don’t have that much faith.
I think my students would also testify that praying at final exams is not as much help as studying for them.
Also, I must be an completely anomalous human being, because I’ve been shot at, I’ve been in a few desperate situations in which I feared for my life, and I took a whole lot of exams, and never once prayed. It seems like such a silly and pointless thing to do, you know?
Fourth, a person wanting to avoid theism should hole up in a university-like setting, where atheists tend to congregate. They do so not because they are more intelligent than theists, but because this setting allows for greater energy devoted to explaining away God’s existence than most.
Yes, isn’t it unusual that the loci that attract the most intelligent men and women in the country always also seems to have the highest concentration of atheists? Erickson can argue that it’s because they have the free time to argue about religion — but that just means that when educated people argue about gods, they tend to conclude that they are nonexistent.
Also, in all of my years of training, guess how many lectures to rationalize away gods I have received? One hint: it’s the same as the number of lectures I’ve given in my classes to explain why there is no god.
Answer: zero. Did Rev. Erickson ever attend a secular college?
No friends, being an atheist isn’t easy. I am also convinced any effort to maintain atheism is unwise, because theism is really a much better choice. Belief in God, especially the God described in the Bible, provides a foundation for an individual to experience purpose, meaning, love and hope. And, there is every reason to believe this God actually does exist.
And those reasons are…?
Oh. That’s the end. Isn’t it odd how they always insist that there are so many good reasons to believe in a deity, yet somehow they always run dry before they can deliver them?
Maybe I should swing by Hibbing to deliver a lecture to his congregation. They seem to be lacking in intelligent input.
During those times people are tempted to call upon a supernatural outside agent for help. There seem to be very few atheists in battlefield foxholes or in classrooms during final tests.
There seems to be a lot of praying going on in Las Vegas, yet none of the games favor any particular religion. Is god siding with the house?
“There might not be any atheists in foxholes, John Bell thought with a grim smile, like that dumb Catholic Chaplain in the Philippines said, because nobody here dug foxholes. But he knew a lot of them in slit trenches, and getting more and more every day.”
-James Jones, The Thin Red Line
Unless god is statistics, no.
Funny how no real conclusive physical evidence was presented for their deity. It must be purely philosophical, which means it can’t do anything in the real world. Minor problem with such theology.
Quite the load of crazy there. I’m sure anyone who tries to make sense of it will tend towards atheism.
1.
The first sentence is nonsense. This is usually a sign that it is all nonsense.
This isn’t even new. It’s the Sensu Divinitus, thousands of years old and in Latin when it was a living language. Xians from Augustine at the least have claimed humans have an in built sense of the divine. After 2,000 years that cliche is so old, it’s mummified.
2. We have a good idea of why religions exist. Lifelong, continual brainwashing starting at birth. Tribalism. Backed up by every means of social control known including the murder of defectors.
If their religion was true, they wouldn’t have to burn people alive on stacks of firewood, their best argument. And lie all the time.
3.
Got it backwards. The Fundie xians created the New Atheists. They are our most powerful weapon just by being themselves.
Xians have been creating atheists since 33 CE.
3.
A. Actually the more you know about reality, the less likely you are to believe unevidenced superstitions like xianity.
B. Erickson thinks backwoods hicks are religious because they live in the backwoods. It’s more like to be due to povery and ignorance.
C. And he and his cult are out of luck. The USA is the most urbanized country on earth at 84% and going up. A lot of rural areas are now crime ridden, poverty stricken, and full of social problems. A good example would be southern Indiana, where widespread opiate addiction lead to a widespread HIV+ epidemic a few months ago.
Apologetics like this are always nonsensical and just plain dumb.
They aren’t meant to convince anyone.
They are meant as rationalizations for believers to keep on believing. After all, Erickson needs the money if he wants to keep on eating.
The first time I wrote university level exams, I was an evangelical Christian. Yeah, I prayed to do well — mostly in the sense of: “Help me concentrate on my studying, remain calm and collected during the exam, and remember all the stuff I need to remember”. The second time ’round I was a much more liberal kind of Christian. I’m about to embark on a third trip through academe (yes, I’m a masochist, why do you ask?), in which I expect to start, progress, and finish as an atheist. Seems like an interesting test of his hypothesis, though.
(For those who care: degrees #1 and #2 were engineering; #3 is in philosophy).
@5 raven. I’d argue they could be at least interesting and not dumb on the surface. Kind of like good numerology. This on the other hand is uninteresting, totally dumb.
Paul Coppan notes that there is plenty of evidence we, as human beings, have a disposition to believe in some type of deity or spiritual reality.
I partially agree with this, in the sense argued by Atran, Boyer et al — overactive agent detection and what have you (and allowing for a lot of individual variation). But:
– A vague “disposition” to believe in nature spirits is a hell of a long way from the elaborately constructed theology of any modern religion.
– I realize that such belief is an invalid inference based on a cognitive error.
First, the aspiring atheist should sequester him/herself in urban settings and avoid the majesty, power and beauty of nature.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the great outdoors, and I appreciate mountains, forests, deserts, canyons, the night sky, etc, as much as the next person. And I’m aware that it includes a good deal of chaos, misery, and shit-that-just-happens. Inferring a god from that is another, well, it doesn’t even rise to the level of a cognitive error — it’s just the argument from “Wow!”
Rev. Dan:
Oy. I screeched to a halt right here. I am an artist, happily tucked away in my teeny tiny, very rural hamlet. (Applying ‘town’ to Almont just isn’t workable). Yesterday and today, I uploaded my photographic mini-series on the Art of Decay. I wonder if Rev. Dan ever spends hour upon hour, reveling in all the nature which is around, and truly seeing it. Later today, I went back outside to look at and gather some deadfall to make patterns with, and I just now got my natural-dyed muslin off the stove. I am interwoven with my environs, and nature gets every ounce of my daily awe, not some psychopathic figment, which actually draws a person away from the reality and beauty of nature. Sorry, Rev. Dan, but you are so off base, it’s laughable.
About that “no atheists in fox holes” thing. I just finished rereading James Jones novel “The Thin Red Line” about Guadalcanal. In that book his characters as as often as not are atheists. In fact one of them comments on that. He finally decides that while it may be true that there are no atheists in fox holes, there were a lot of them in the Army on Guadalcanal, but he figured that might be because they all dug slit trenches there.
I read this as an essay that he is writing to himself in the third person to explain to himself why he refuses to go atheist and cling to the ~paycheck he’s receiving. As in:
In other words:
projection is strong in this one.
You know, we also need to make some intentional choices in order to avoid being a “default illiterate.” Even if magical thinking is innate and critical thinking must be taught, that’s not a good argument for sticking with the “default” of ignorance.
“Oh, trust me, I would love to spend less time exposed to Christian believers. Does he even realize that Christians are an overwhelming majority in this country? That if I turn on the radio or the TV, I’m going to be incessantly dunned with Christian messages?”
This belief, or at least attitude is incredibly prevalent, to the point of invoking cognitive dissonance in people who see the reality of that super majority.Along with it is the thought that somehow very few people have ever heard about Jesus. It’s just plain damn weird.
Literally none of which is actually given in this pastors screed. I can only conclude that this pastor never actually engaged on these topics with any atheist, person of a non-christian religion, and probably not even of any wildly different christian sect than his own.
A sad, little world this person lives in. At least he can bilk a good living out of a cushy job, so there is that.
So desperate people in desperate situations asking God for help, as a last gasp, is enough evidence to prove the existence of what the desperate are hoping for?
Sorry Rev. I don’t buy it.
I admit, I will in such situations exclaim, “God!” or “oh God please don’t let this happen”, (more recently:) “oh God make this not to have happened”. If God exists, and none of these remedies are provided, I’ll take that as (strong) evidence of null.
And looking around nature and being amazed at the wonders therein, even atheist can be awed and be amazed at the capabilities of existence; without requiring invoking some magic artist to paint the sunset or sculpt the flowers, etc. I do not see it as difficult to accept something as just existing. beauty is in the eye of the beholder is not just a throwaway aphorism with no meaning. It is shorthand description of the emotional reaction to the structure of some object is within the mind of the beholder. Beauty is not some immaterial feature that some magic entity bestows on various objects. The fact that we see a sunrise as beautiful is because of the person seeing it, regardless of the physical mechanisms creating the effect.
[gettin longwinded…]
You’ve been shot at, PZ? Wow. Is it a story you’ve shared here that I missed?
The understanding that the Aurora does point to something pretty magnificent. If you delve and do the hard work to understand (no quotation marks) them then you will inevitably come across some amazing physics, which is at the pinnacle of human knowledge. You get Maxwell’s beautiful equations. The deep subtleties of quantum mechanics. Relativity, which will change the way you view the universe when you understand it. The beauty that we see in this phenomena, as well as the beauty that we see in biology is the result of deep symmetries and patterns that our minds
are tuned to find as pleasing.
You also get to know that outside our thin atmosphere and magnetosphere the universe is a place 99.99999% hostile to our life form. I’m not sure what sort of deity supposedly designed this universe ‘for us’, but I sure don’t want anything to do with it.
If you want to see the power of nature, go clean up after a tsunami. There is no beauty to it, and no majesty. But there are people who will claim it proves that their religion is correct.
(There was a woman who had been trying to get her family to safety, when her husband said that it was the end times as predicted in the scriptures, sat himself down, and tried no more. She got the children almost out of reach of the water, but she could not hold them by herself.)
And the god-bots should avoid doctors and other emergency personnel the next time s/he is involved in a life-threatening accident, has a stroke, heart attack, develops diabetes, get cancer, and instead rely on all those prayers thrown out to god to be healed. To do otherwise reveals the doubt and uncertainty in the ability of the god to actually perform that healing thus negating all that faith they’ve been harping on about.
I’m curious has Rev. Dan been in a foxhole. Has he been shot at, or bombed whilst in said foxhole. What terrifying experiences has Rev. Dan lived through. I imagine that he hasn’t been through anything more strenuous than the average athiest.
The first time I experienced sleep paralysis, it was an unexpected and particularly distressing episode complete with visual and auditory hallucinations of a malevolent cackling face made of fire peering down over my unmoving body. At no point during the experience did I pray to god for help, nor did I believe for a single moment that it was supernatural in origin. I was afraid and upset, no no such conclusions were drawn. And for years afterwards, it didn’t even occur to me that anyone would consider it supernatural until I relayed the story to a Christian friend last year, and he said that it sounded like a spiritual attack. I felt stupid for not anticipating his reaction.
I guess I just lack the mental architecture to entertain that idea without external assistance? It wasn’t an effort to deny the supernatural under those conditions, it was an effort to keep my heart rate down while I trawled my memory for useful information pertinent to the situation.
This is very curious. Any way you slice it, the aurora are several orders of magnitude LESS magnificent than the sun. The only way they can possibly indicate something more magnificent than our sun is by looking at the colours of the aurora, deducing what elements must be aglow, and calculating that the only way those elements could exist is by the life and death of stars much more massive and much more ancient than our sun. That still doesn’t get you to god, though I suppose those ancient stars could be made targets of worship by the worshipfully inclined. Certainly they deserve it more than any deity.
There’s also plenty of evidence that we, as human beings, have a disposition to believe the earth is flat, and that the sun, moon, planets, and stars revolve around us. Both of these things are wrong. That people have beliefs is not an argument for believing anything.
I can’t avoid spending time with religious believers, but I can not take their experiences, at least not their religious experiences, seriously.
Basically, if you deconstruct Dan Erickson’s gibberish:
It is OK to hate atheists because they are urban, educated, think religious kooks are both dangerous and stupid, and try to survive life threatening experiences instead of sitting down and praying.
That will work for morons who live in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. A very small fraction of the US population, thank Cthulhu.
As immortalized in one of my favorite phrases, ‘ As smug as a Christian with four aces.’
Erickson is also just listing stereotypes.
Atheists are university professors, male, Democrats, urban, elites, elitists, and secretly hate the gods but want to commit sins, and think deer and duck hunting are silly and boring.
The reality is the Nones make up 23% of the US population, 73 million people. They are a lot closer to a cross section of the US population than Dan Erickson’s cult, which he lists as Baptist.
If I was to stereotype Baptists in Hibbing, Minnesota, they would be all white, mostly very old, uneducated, low in socio economic status, and hate everything that happened in the USA since Abraham Lincoln was elected.
Oooooohhh! This is funny.
1. My favourite part of The Netherlands:
http://www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/~/media/10-persbeeldbank/natuur%20en%20landschap/achterhoek-hr.jpg
Nr. 2: http://advanderzee.com/tag/duinen/
Where I live:
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=luchtfoto+Moengo&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
2. I’m probably the only atheist in town. As a kind I have sung in a (catholic) church choir, played one of the three Biblical Magi on stagen and learned the Lord’s Prayer by heart (I thought it cool).
3. I think I was close to death two or three times; two times due to very high fever. I wasn’t afraid at all and certainly did not ask for divine assistance. Also I have looked (I’m not sure how close I was then because I can’t look in the heads of other people) into the wrong end of a loaded rifle. I talked myself and my partner out of it, without any need for divine assistance again.
4. Last 15 years I have taught physics and math at a public school. All my colleagues are religious and there are only four (ex-)pupils who where unbelievers. One of them was my son.
Since a few years I’m a 7 on the scale of Dawkins, while I started out as an agnost almost 40 years ago.
Atheism DEBUNKED:
Google Search: “All Knowing Atheists Vip”
The “childishtale” is only infant when understanding the most basic layer of scripture.
The most advanced layer is scientific.
Link to Article for Atheists
A friend recounts how she became an atheist because she was in her cell in the nunnery where she lived, with a view of where Israel was bombing her muslim neighbours and wondering if in an instant she would be killed, like so many around her. Then she realized that there could not be a god — at least not one worth helping.
As for me, I have occasional moments where, under stress, I stop and very consciously fight the panic. I collect myself, collect my thoughts, and in my head address myself and tell myself to push ahead with a good plan of action.
If I believed in a god I’d probably do exactly the same thing but address some god instead, and it would be called a prayer.
So I kinda-sorta get the third point. Of course, “praying” to nobody makes no sense to someone who believes in a god.
As a child. “Kind” is Dutch for child.
@27 swb: Will you pay for me?
spiritworldblogs #27
Be advised: PZ doesn’t like preachers.
@4 Raven
“C. And he and his cult are out of luck. The USA is the most urbanized country on earth at 84% and going up.”
Actually the USA isn’t the most urbanized country in the world. To begin with several countries are city states (e.g., Singapore) and so by definition are 100% urban. Even if we ignore them, there are countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and Belgium in the high 90s. Venezuela is 93.5% urban, Iceland 93.7%, Brazil 90.6%
Am I misreading something here? The paragraph is setting up the idea that people are naturally inclined towards religion as the default state, but then the final passage appears to contradict this by stating religion requires intentional choice in order to avoid defaulting to atheist instead.
I was a country kid, living in a town with a three figure population. Hell, we didn’t even live in the town proper but were on its outskirts, in a valley with a whopping three houses. My early leisure time was dominated by cycling around the hills with the neighbouring kids, exploring for the sake of exploring. I lived on a small farm with sheep and chickens, my closer neighbour had the same plus cattle, while the further had a dirt bike practice track.
I studied astronomy at uni. I guarantee I know more about the aurora than this guy even though atmospheric stuff isn’t really my thing, and no, they don’t suggest anything religious in the slightest unless you are already religious. Also, what is it with these apologist types and their zany use of scare quotes? I can practically see him sneering as he scoffs at those who learn about natural phenomena… an observation that I see is amply borne out further along in the letter. Ugh, what drivel.
Today’s Oglaf is rather amusing on that subject.
Rev. Erickson doth speak:
The fact that we are all made of starstuff is awe-inspiring and beautiful all on its own. I do not need a deity to find beauty and majesty in nature.
Ah, but he did deliver them! They were:
0) All human beings are naturally inclined to believe in a god.
1) Nature is awesome and reminds us that god must be really terrific.
2) Other people believe in God and their stories are so compelling.
3) In life threatening times people like to call on God.
4) To avoid being exposed to God, you gotta hide yourself up in a walled little ivory tower ’cause everywhere else God is simply spilling out everywhere.
What? Those were so insipid it never occurred to you those would actually be what he considered reasons? Just goes to show you are fighting your nature to believe and in such such unnatural state of effort you insist that reasons need to be as strong as your unnatural perversion to not believe. If you gave in to your true nature as the good Reverend assumes everyone must be, you’d see your reasons need only be as insipid as his faith.
=====
@34
Am I going nuts, or did 3 hours ago this reads as “‘default atheist'”?
There is no contradiction (now?) in that his argument is: human beings are naturally inclined to be “default theists”. To actually buck this inclination a non-believer hell-bent on atheism has to really contort himself and go out of his way not to fall back to the default. He needs to avoid nature, other christians, crises, and he needs to hole himself in the vacuum of a university setting. Nope, it sure is hard. So default back to God! It’s the right and easy thing to do.
Frankly, I did pray once or twice. When I was drunk. That pretty much explains it all.
What kind of boneheaded bullshit is this “Reverend” peddling?
Okay… So this just of this is
1. Stay in the city
2. so that [causal statement]
3. one does not see the “majesty, power and beauty of nature”
4. which is revealed when one looks at
5. the “heavens” or the “skies”
Excuse me, but how does being city-bound prevent one from seeing the sky?
We people with functioning brains get curious about that sort of thing.
Mnb0 @26: groetjes uit Minnesota — ik houd van Suriname! :) I’ve never been to Mosngo, but I’ve been to Albina and Galibi (and obviously PBM.) I’m always excited to make a Surinamese connection, especially a freethinking one.
I have lived in urban settings, rural settings, and all in between—right now, I’m in a rural mountain valley (the town is smaller than his town is), surrounded by “the majesty, power and beauty of nature” rising 5000 feet above my home elevation. Nary a sign of any gods, in any environment. But then, I was never an aspiring atheist: I was a wondering agnostic until age 15, and finally recognized futility of goddism.
There are religiosi in my family; my little rural town is quite religious, thankyouverymuch. I can’t avoid “religious believers” and I must take their experiences seriously. I have no reason to consider their experiences determinative of anything except their gullibility.
But then, it’s not a matter of “not want[ing] to believe in [g]od[s]”: it’s a matter of finding nothing credible in support of god-belief, either in objective reality or in the ‘testimony’ or behavior of religiosi.
I presented, one night, at the neighborhood hospital with septic shock from pancreatitis. No prayer in sight, just thanks to the medical professionals who restored my blood pressure and cleaned up the infection. About six months later, Sanjay Gupta gave a CNN report on JPII’s condition, and stated that presenting at an ER with septic shock had an 85% mortality, so JPII’s prognosis was grave. There were, presumably, millions of catlicks praying for JPII’s survival: it didn’t work.
A few years later, I presented at the local hospital (different locale) with septic shock from a painless ruptured appendix. Still no prayer. Well, we did humor the neighbors who wanted to pray for me: they might have done so, but I was too busy not dying to pay attention. OK, 15% survival the first time times 15% the second time: that’s 2.25% probability that I’m still alive, with no prayer at all, and no thought of any gods getting involved in my condition. Just more medical professionals, doing what medical professionals do to rescue people from “life-threatening situations.”
I’ve spent years in university-like settings, and more years in non-university-like settings. I’ve had to deal with religiosi everywhere. There were more religiosi congregated in the university-like settings, and more discussion of gods and goddisms there.
I agree with him that “It’s not easy to be an atheist.”
In much of the world today, and through most of recorded history it is hard—mainly because the bastards kill or punish you!
Of course what he really wants us to believe in isn’t God, but his specific weird version of God, who thinks he’s three people, one of whom is his son(who apparently has no mother) and the third is some weird vague spirit thing. Why I should believe in that version, instead of say the Sikh version or the Bahai version, is beyond me.
So, basically:
“Be religious! It’s easier!”
Cool slogan, Erickson.
“Of course this would never have happened if we’d had the ceremony in the LORD’S house, rather than in the cheap showiness of NATURE.” Guess they’ve changed up that message.
I’ve been ensconced in urban areas for most of my life, but I’ve done plenty of field work out in the wild. And let me tell you, going down the wrong draw and ending up slogging through a vegetation-choked creek for miles is a good way to remind you of the indifference of the universe.
Well, we all know cities are Bad. Therein live lordless hoi-polloi who don’t fit neatly into the feudal order ordained by Heaven. How simple was life before cities! You have your peasants to do the crop-growing. You have your lords to do the crop-burning and the raping of livestock. You have your clergy telling the peasants to obey the lords and saying Masses for the souls of the lords. But cities? All those artisans, doctors, engineers, LAWYERS??? And sometimes they even govern themselves?? Not surprising those places are dens of all kinds of ungodly ideas. Unfortunately for Rev. Dan, the majority of the world’s population now live in cities (source: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html), so living in a city isn’t exastly “sequestering” oneself, and his clarion call for pastoralism is about 900 years late.
Appreciating the majesty, power and beauty of nature is conservaspeak for donning camouflage and setting out armed to the teeth to kill — at a safe distance, of course — a dumb and defenseless animal (preferably a representative of an endangered species) — while chatting with one’s buddies in faux-military lingo.
If Christians are the real tree-huggers, they sure have a funny way of showing it, at least in this country.
That’s also sound advice for people who don’t want to **** their pants and aren’t sure they can keep it together in a stressful environment. Urgent or life-threatening situations have been known to induce people to lose control of their bladders and bowels. Jaroslav Hasek described WWI soldiers charging onto the battlefield while defectating and vomiting SIMULTANEOUSLY as being pretty common. Point is, stressful situations put a strain on people’s degree of control over themselves — both physical and mental. That fact isn’t proof that God exists. What is pertinent, however, is that prayer has never been shown to be effective in an urgent or life-threatening situation.
Reverend, universities aren’t the gateway drug to atheism. BOOKS are. Forcing oneself to read also increases the risk of becoming an atheist. Whereas if you are incurious and illiterate, you can spend your energies on hunting witches instead of “explaining away God’s existence” through the infernal means of education. Luckily for Rev. Dan, people in his fictional world are so incurious, they can only come to reading by making a hard choice to be atheists. Conversely, if you are a theist in Rev. Dan’s world, you’ll never have to exercise your mind. Now there’s an argument to appeal to the intellectually lazy if I ever saw one.
In other words, “choose faith, because it’s easier”. Just like Jesus did. This man calls himself a Christian?
So, social pressure to conform to dominant cultural paradigms, therefore god?
There is no hard evidence of ‘default theism’ without pre-exisiting religious indoctrination, as our squidy overlord points out. There is also the point that, even if there were some nebulous innate drive toward supernaturalism not explicable by social forces and power structures (there isn’t), not only is there no reason to suppose that it would be a christian flavour of supernaturalism, but indeed xianity is a relatively recent arrival on the god bothering scene – there are much older religions of far longer standing, so how does our reverend explain the curious absence of chsirtianity during the bulk of human history?
Laughable misunderstanding of the origins of the natural world, therefore god?
I live in one of more beautiful and primeval rural regions of the UK. I am lucky enough to see ancient landscapes and natural beauty everyday, and yet I remain an atheist all the same. It seems I am odd that way.
Cognitive misfires caused by stress and fear inducing situations, therefore god?
Situations of personal danger are by their nature highly stressful and people exposed to trauma can behave in an out of character fashion and indeed entirely irrationally, up to and including running toward the very source of peril they are trying to escape from. That hardly proves the existence of god. I don’t think Erickson has thought through the implications of his argument here, that people who don’t believe in god sometimes pray when they are in an altered mental state due to extreme fear. I could probably make him think he was a chicken if I had enough time, a large enough supply of psychotropic drugs, and a total disregard for ethics – does that mean he really is avian in nature, deep down?
As PZ points out, there is also the point that not everyone responds to danger and fear by suddenly invoking a deity. Many people’s atheism is entirely unaffected by personal danger, which just goes to show the phenomenon long observed by psychologists that different people respond to stress in different ways, but blows a sizeable hole in Erickson’s hypothesis. Then there are also the many, many theists who return from the horrors of war having lost their faith, since they reasonably can’t reconcile the terrible things they have witnessed with the notion that we all exist under the aegis of a omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent god. The trauma they experienced contributed to them becoming atheists so, according to Erickson’s… er… ‘logic, does that mean that they were already atheists and just didn’t admit it or something?
Going with the religious flow is a piece of cake, therefore god?
Ignorance and following along with the general trend of the crowd is easy, rigorous thought and careful anaylsis of one’s own biases is hard – that doesn’t amount to an argument to just follow after what most other people are doing without bothering to think about it. Erickson is literally arguing here that the easiest, least troublesome path is the best; that ignorance is bliss and ’tis folly to be wise. It is all very revealing about his own mindset, and not necessarily with regard to a personal aspiration to unthinking observance, but perhaps more with regard to how easily lead people who aren’t exposed to alternative viewpoints tend to be. This is another example of the pronounced tendency toward anti-intellectualism among some theists. At least Erickson is obliging enough to admit that thinking about this stuff too much is a threat to one’s faith, and thus firmly positions his vision of theism in the camp of the narrow minded rejection of little things like the Enlightenment and modernity in general. It makes life much easier when the bible-thumpers simply admit that they fear understanding and progress because it threatens their cherished delusions, rather than trying to corrupt and subvert the scientific method to their own ends.
Aren’t christians supposed to be big on the nobility of suffering for their faith? Since when is ‘easy’ synonymous with ‘better’? Then there is this ludicrous notion that only religion (and he clearly wants to say only his flavour of xianism) affords a route to experiencing purpose, love, meaning and hope, which is obviously utter drivel. There is no magic man in the sky offering any of us purpose or imposing it upon us. What purpose we have in our lives we find for ourselves based upon what we choose to believe in valuable and meaningful in our existence, and not only are atheists every bit as capable of doing that as theists, we also don’t have the toxic and oppressive baggage of theism getting in our way and wedding us to harmful and outmoded value systems. As a result, we have fewer obstacles to being good people than theists do (though fewer obstacles is no guarantee of success, as we have seen all too often).
The same goes for love – belief in god is not a prerequisite to experience any form of love, whether familial, romantic or a more generalised love for one’s fellow human beings – atheists can and do experience all those things with no psychotic sky fairy mythology required.
As for hope, I fail to see what is so hopeful about believing oneself the slave for all eternity of an immortal, all powerful capricious and sadistic monster, that demands not only your servitude, but that you eternally affect to love it and the chains it forces upon you to. I think that atheism – with its lack of cruel and controlling deities and therefore its scope to accept the possibility that human potential allows us to become something more, something better than we currently are – is an immeasurably more positive vision of the human condition.
Our mistakes as a species are our own, but it also lies within us to create a better tomorrow. We aren’t all puppets in some sick divine comedy, dancing as our strings are tugged for the amusement of an unstoppable, inescapable monster. That seems pretty hopeful to me.
1. the beauty of nature is part of what persuades me there is no supernatural. in my mind, imposing some capricious sky-fairy cheapens it.
2. actually, his #2 has an important kernel of truth. religion runs in families, and it’s usually the parents indoctrinating the kids. most cults have extended families and social groups that ensure that its victims have no, or minimal, contact with outsiders.
3. the concept of praying for your life or for an A on the test seems more rooted in the psychological need for self-affirmation and calming yourself down in stressful situations.
4. yes, atheists tend to congregate in the same places that smart people tend to congregate, and where free inquiry is encouraged.
@40 Jtd: next time you’re in Suriname and happen to visit Moengo ask for that Dutch teacher math and physics. Everybody knows me.
Study Shows That if You Live Next to Natural Beauty, You Are Less Likely to Be Religious
There’s a saying somewhere that expresses it, but regardless of the specifics of the saying I can tell you from experience: I’ve been in a number of “foxholes” (by that I mean being mortared, shot at, attempted to be blown up and the like), and while I’ve been there with a number of atheists, none of whom ever invoked god – what I haven’t seen in a foxhole is a Chaplin.
@51: what I haven’t seen in a foxhole is a Chaplin.
You mean like this one?
“‘There are no atheists in foxholes’ is not an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.” -James Morrow
Eamon Knight #52
lol, didn’t even notice the correction when I posted.
Glad I didn’t though, got a chuckle out of the clip.
I’ve heard the god gene nonsense before and point out to people that I’m white, have blue eyes and am left handed. I pretty well have the recessive gene thing down. No god is not a problem.
The “true believers” are the ones with the hard part.Atheism is easy, like not believing in unicorns. Faith requires continual effort, especially to enforce the 11th commandment “Thou shalt not question”. Anyway most people who ever lived were polytheists, and regarded monotheism as absurd. “They’re this close to being atheists” (Wayne & Shuster).
I’ve been through a couple lengthy, traumatic, life-threatening situations and didn’t go looking for any deity. The only time I even wished there were a deity I could pray to is when a friend is suffering, and I can’t do anything about it. But wishing there were a deity is not the same as believing in one.
Erkison writes:
The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies display his craftsmanship.”
The Bible also says that if you don’t give glory to god he will smear shit all over your face! (Malachi 2:2-3 KJV)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Malachi+2%3A2-3&version=KJV
Uhuh. I was born in the suburbs and spent most of my childhood playing in the local woods. I’m an “outdoorsy” type; I was a scout, and I love camping and hillwalking, and I’m one of those animal nutjobs who watches Attenborough documentaries all the time and likes to tell other people about random animal facts. I climb mountains for fun! There’s no better feeling than being high up on a precarious ledge looking out over a beautiful valley. “Avoiding nature” my arse.
I have many religious friends and acquaintances whose company I actively seek out. Of course I have the fortune to live in the UK where most people are C of E, which is one of the gentler forms of Christianity and not overly given to fire, brimstone, and irritating evangelism. Couple that with the fact that British culture tends to discourage overt statements of religiosity, and most religious people I meet are lovely.
As for taking their experiences seriously, I’m not sure what he means. Presumably he means “spiritual” experiences, but none of my friends are wingnuts and none have ever tried to claim that God spoke to them, or that he’s got nothing better to do than ensure they find their keys just in time to get out the door and catch their train. If they did, I doubt I would take it at all seriously.
I’ve been in car crashes and bicycle crashes, and as mentioned spent a lot of time very high up in precarious situations in quite remote places. I used to longboard as a kid, which basically involves going very fast down a hill on a plank with wheels but no brakes. I’ve taken 3 sets of SATS, GCSEs, AS exams, A-Level exams, and countless university exams, as well as submitted countless pieces of coursework from GCSE onwards, most of them right at the last minute because that’s the sort of person I am. Not once have I ever prayed to God, mostly because I was busy doing something practical that might actually fix the problem.
Admittedly I did go to university. And admittedly universities do spend a lot of time explaining away Gods existence, at least if you do a STEM degree; but indirectly. What they do is educate you, and that education removes the gaps in which God hides. Atheism is a byproduct of university education, not the aim of it.
And statistically, Atheists are more intelligent than theists. Because of the bias of IQ tests, what that really means is that Atheists are better educated than theists, and… well, see above.
This, at least, I agree with. My life would be much easier if I could simply ascribe the unknown to God and kick the fuck back. Instead I have this insatiable need to understand everything, which means I have to read shit. It would be a great comfort to believe there was an all-powerful someone looking out for me, or that when my granddad dies it’s only a matter of time before I get to see him again. It would be much easier to believe what the majority of people believe and not have people look a bit puzzled and ask some variation of “What, nothing?” when I say I don’t believe in God. But the fact that something would make my life easier does not make that something true.
No, it’s an easier choice. Not the same thing.
So do many other things. And what about your God makes it a better “foundation” than any other?
No there isn’t. As already pointed out, the fact that something is desirable does not make it true. And one could argue about whether the existence of a God is even desirable, considering a quick glance around reveals that if such a being does exist, then it’s an arsehole.
Well who would have thought? Communities with Beautiful Scenery, Weather Have Lower Rates of Religious Affiliation.
Actually, there are no atheists in foxholes, per Terror Management Theory. http://www.tmt.missouri.edu
Father Thyme @ 61:
As a child, I endured intense abuse for years. Being raised Catholic, I came to conclusion that the whole god business was a bunch of bullshit at a young age. No help there, y’see, or as Mal said, “that’s a long wait for a train that don’t come.”
When I was a young adult, I had two encounters in which someone attempted to murder me, and they came damn close to their goal. In one encounter, I was badly beaten, rape multiple times, and strangled multiple times. No prayers, no thoughts of “well, afterlife” or anything of that kind. So perhaps Terror Management Theory doesn’t cover everything. Of course, I’ve never been in a foxhole – perhaps those are terribly conducive to the god game, but I rather doubt it.