Why I am an atheist – Steve

I went to a Catholic parochial school in St. Paul for six years, was an altar boy, could pretty competently read Latin, and casually accepted my Catholic faith. But I never believed in it, any of it. It all, even to a child, seemed to not…work. But I didn’t finally lose all semblance of any belief in a god until I worked for the prison system here in MN. I’m an RN, and have always chosen to work in the underbelly; treatment and detox centers, group homes for profoundly developmentally disabled adults who also had mental illness diagnoses, psychiatric units, hospice, and where I totally lost my faith, in a maximum security prison hospital unit.

Every day I addressed the health care needs of many offenders in the system, some not so bad, some inconceivably horrid, and dangerous, most stupid, lazy, and incompetent. But one offender, a sexual predator and murderer of children, totally destroyed any possible belief in a god. This man kidnapped a five year old girl from a church, and over the course of a day, forced upon her almost every filthy, violent, savage assault you can even imagine, and many you most probably can’t. But it wasn’t the rapes, or cigarette burns, or hair yanked out, or the beatings that killed her. It was his feces forced down her throat. Then he tossed her in a dumpster like some dead cat.

I usually never read the court transcripts from any of the men I took care of. I didn’t want to know, afraid I might be influenced to provide less than good health care. I wish I hadn’t looked up this piece of shit’s court record as well. But here’s what killed god for me. This little girl “loved Jesus” according to her mother. And god is supposedly all good, powerful, knowing etc. All I could think of was where is god? When this child went through every possible humiliation, forms of pain, terror, you add your own adjective here, where was god? Theodicy is always the fly in the ointment, Epicurus nailed it a long time ago, but the kindest thought you could take from this is that god is, as Twain put it, a malignant thug. No manner of convoluted magical thinking can excuse what happened to this little girl. If there is a god, even remotely like what most of us have been taught, he’s an enemy, beneath contempt, worthy of our hatred. If he exists, fuck him. But he doesn’t.

One last thing, to all those idiot whining pharmacists and other “health care professionals” who are troubled by Plan B birth control pills. I provided competent, professional care to the monster in prison. I changed his diaper, he was an old man by the time I knew him, after a quarter century in prison, gave him his medications, checked his blood glucose levels, in short, acted professionally. Professionals don’t get to pick and choose who they care for.

Steve
United States

Who needs an IQ test when you’ve got coalescence?

I am just blown away by the consistency of this observation. You know, the creationists are not all stupid; there’s a wide range of intelligence in their camp, even if they are all wrong. But this one recent paper on the gorilla genome has become such an excellent tool for discriminating the competent from the incompetent.

This was the paper that unsurprisingly explained that gorilla genes reveal a mosaic; that some gorilla genes are closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other. If you understand the logic of coalescent theory at all, you know this is an expected result. The only way you could fail to see the distribution we observe is if the population went through a bottleneck of exactly two individuals.

But once again, one of the so-called scientists of intelligent design creationism blows it. Doug Axe has announced that the ape family tree is hopelessly broken, and that the gorilla data should call evolutionary theory into question.

Until recently, the answer was that a real family tree should generate a fully consistent pattern of similarities. [Not true at all. Coalescent theory is an extension of Fisher/Wright models of large populations, and the formal mathematics were worked out in the 1980s] For example, we are told that chimps and humans came from the same ancestral stock (call it CH stock) and that gorillas, chimps and humans all came from an earlier ancestral stock (GCH stock) [Correct so far]. If so, then the human and chimp genomes should consistently be more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla genome [WRONG. They should not be consistently more similar. Does he know nothing of probability?], since the human and chimp histories were one and the same thing more recently than the human and gorilla (or chimp and gorilla) histories were.

Well, the recent publication of the gorilla genome sequence shows that the expected pattern just isn’t there [Jebus. Read the paper. The pattern observed is the expected pattern.]. Instead of a nested hierarchy of similarities, we see something more like a mosaic [AS WE’D EXPECT.]. According to a recent report, “In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other…”

That’s sufficiently difficult to square with Darwin’s tree that it ought to bring the whole theory into question. And in an ideal world where Darwinism is examined the way scientific theories ought to be examined, I think it would. But in the real world things aren’t always so simple [And yet the creationists keep throwing up their simplistic models and being surprised that they’re wrong].

Axe is the one guy the creationists keep touting as a real scientist, a guy with genuine chops in molecular biology, the man who is doing serious scientific work. You know, if you’re going to publicly criticize an observation and claim it calls into question the entirety of evolutionary theory, you ought to first look into it and see whether that observation actually fits a prediction of evolution — actual evolutionary theory, not that cartoonishly naive caricature of evolution the creationists all have in their heads.

Here’s a nice, short history of coalescent theory by Kingman. It’s been around for decades, long before the gorilla genome was sequenced, and it predicted what kinds of distributions we ought to see in our comparisons of different species…predictions that were borne out by the paper Axe thinks contradicts evolutionary theory.

“Athiests” actually is a misunderstood word

Oh, great. Now we’re being hectored by sorcerers. In An open letter to the New Athiests, some guy Who peddles a One Year Intensive Course in real magic wags his finger and lectures us on what’s wrong with “athiests” — we’re all a bunch of dicks.

In short, you have a lot of important things to say but as long as you continue to prenent yourselves like obnoxious zealots far keener to argue than discuss and talk at rather than with, you will actually only set yourselves further back and make the word “Athiest” into an even more misunderstood word than it already is. It wont be because you are wrong necessarily. It will just be because no one likes you.

Right. I’m going to take advice from a self-proclaimed sorcerer who makes a long tirade against atheists and misspells the term every single time.

Here’s the problem: I’ve noticed that people who deeply wrong, like sorcerers, Christians, and creationists, love to tell us that being right isn’t as important as being liked. I suspect they’re driven by self-interest rather than honesty.

All I can say is…you don’t understand me at all if you think I’m trying to persuade you to like me, dumbass.

Why I am an atheist – Beth (the very happy lesbian)

In short, I was able to see the beauty of science with my own two eyes from a very early age.

My father loves science. Accordingly, when I was a 4 year old afraid of an earthquake he taught me about plate tectonics. I spent hours asking him questions about the universe when my mother was at work on the weekends, and I was gifted my first telescope at the age of 7.

So when the bible teacher (in a public primary school I might add!) told us that earthquakes were created by god when I was 8 years old, I immediately realised religion was a fraud. It’s lucky I did, because I later discovered that I was a lesbian. Who knows how much pain and repression I would have suffered if I had allowed that bible teacher to brainwash me!

Beth (the very happy lesbian)
New Zealand

An innovative legal strategy

David Coppedge, the creationist who was fired from JPL and is currently trying to sue them, has submitted his legal brief as plaintiff in the case. It is…bizarre. It includes a screenplay in which Coppedge imagines a dialog between a couple of JPL staff — a dialog in which he was not present, which basically makes it a work of fiction.

Are court cases often resolved on the basis of creative writing?

This kind of crankery really seems to be part of a trend: there was Kent Hovind’s “subornation of false muster” defense, Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell lying on the witness stand in the Dover trial, the prolonged whining by Freshwater, accused of burning a cross into a student’s arm. Creationism seems to draw in the wackiest court cretins; I guess it’s not surprising, given that you have to be a bit off to fall for creationism in the first place.

Martin Pribble: CRUSHED.

It was all about defeating that Australian upstart, and I have succeeded. Martin Pribble, my “competition” in the Readers' Choice for Favorite Agnostic / Atheist Blog of 2012, has been totally defeated, routed, smashed, squished, annihilated, beaten.

Furthermore, the grudge match continues. He has been challenged to a Hug-Off at the GAC in Melbourne. He shall be pulped in person. I shall emerge as the most cuddly huggable lovable atheist in the world by standing on the bleeding, broken corpses of my opponents.

That’s how a Hug-Off works, right? And this isn’t going to happen?

Why I am an atheist – Rod Chlebek

Religion didn’t seem to be very important in my earliest years. We didn’t pray or go to church except for maybe twice a year and then whenever someone died or got married. Strangely, I ended up in Catechism in preparation for First Communion. Somehow I botched that up and didn’t attend when I was expected but I got another chance at it when I hit 4th grade. That was the year I started to attend Catholic School. It was totally voluntary. I wanted to go because my neighborhood friends went there. I made it through First Communion that year being very skeptical about the whole body and blood thing. We were taught that “amen” means “I believe” and that when you receive Communion you are expected to reply “amen”. What bothered me more would have been being the only student who didn’t go through with this. Everyone else did it and believed. I must have been doing something wrong.

Sixth grade brought my third year of being an alter boy and also a heavy dose of science. This increased the amount of conflict I had in dealing with a resurrection, miracles, and the existence of God. Again, I went along with the duality because there’s no way that a bunch of adults could be wrong about this. For a short while, we had an occasional visit from Father John on Wednesdays. It was our opportunity to talk with him about God. I didn’t say much; I didn’t have to. The class asked every question that I had. It was like we had discussed what to ask him just moments before he walked in. He was calm and pleasant as ever, but I noticed something peculiar about his responses. The answers were a bit to the side. There was little that was a very direct from him.

I left Catholic school for 7th grade and returned back again for 8th because my naivety got me in trouble. I went through with Confirmation with the same result as Communion. I knew things were “all in His timing” so I just waited patiently afterward. I thought this was supposed to be a big deal, big enough that I should notice something happening but I didn’t.

High school came and went without any religious influence and I started getting caught up on all the secular things of which I had been unaware. When I finally left home at 20 I bounced around from church to church, from non-denominational to evangelical. I did some soul searching. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and really wanted to know Him. I asked Jesus into my heart. I cried. Nothing.

My wife and I got married at Silverwood Mennonite Chuch in 2000. We were both believers, and very minimal at that, but certainly not Mennonite. That was from her side of the family. I would probably still be a minimalist believer in the Christian god if it were not for another dose of evangelism. Some members of her family were a bit extreme. Religion wasn’t just a part of them, it was them. This created conflict. I never liked being unsure about things that should be so important, so I was forced to try it again. The exception this time is that I took a different approach. My research started with understanding the meaning of words, ones that i taken for granted such as belief and knowledge. The internet proved to be a wonderful tool for finally getting some objective answers. I was fascinated with the amount of knowledge out there. The more knowledge I gained, the less I believed in God. After a hard year of digging, my conflict was resolved. I came to the realization that I did not believe. I was atheist and I found it to be reasonable.

Rod Chlebek

So nice, and so wrong

What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read.

Jason Rosenhouse is my co-blogger at Scienceblogs — he’s a mathematician, but he’s also neck-deep in the evolution/creationism wars. He was in town for the Reason Rally (wait: from the description, he left before my talk. Cancel the review, gotta pan him instead…nah, I guess I’ll forgive him this one time), and he gave me his brand new book, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line.

Jason regularly goes to creationist conferences. I often drop in on the small local stuff — creationists ranting in midwestern churches — but Jason goes to the big events, the major conferences with swarms of concentrated inanity babbling at large audiences who have made a special trip just to bathe in theistic lies. It’s a different environment; he just shows up, listens and takes notes, politely asks questions to make them struggle a bit, and then leaves…to write up the full story in his blog and now this book.

This isn’t the book where the scientist dismantles in detail every bogus argument the creationists throw at us. Instead, it’s a personal account of the audiences and speakers at this event, and there’s something that comes through loud and clear, that I’ve also experienced: they’re all so damned nice. They haven’t got a leg to stand on with the nonsense they’re talking about, but they try to make up for it with friendliness and manners and all these other psycho-social arts of persuasion. They don’t compensate for being wrong, but you can see how they manage to win over so many people who don’t know better.

It’s a valuable perspective to have. Know your enemy; don’t underestimate them, and don’t demonize them as evil. But be aware of exactly how they manage their image, how they cajole people into believing in ideas that are horribly wrong, and what they are precisely saying. Jason’s book is an essential personal view of our foes.

Also, we noticed that the cover uses a very similar minimalist design and color scheme to my book that will be coming out in the fall. Buy them both as a matched pair!

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Anne Marie

After careful thought and consideration, I decide I would write in as to why I am an atheist. Up until about six years ago, until I was 22, I was a believer in fairy tales. I believed that when you blessed yourself and made the sign of the cross that it would be as though it was a “direct telephone line” to God and that whatever I said would go straight to his ears. During mass I would count the number of times I blessed myself to make sure I “hung up” so that in case I thought of something bad it would not go straight to him.

I used to have a rosary and miraculous medals with me at all times, and even carried a scapular and small figures of Mary and Jesus in my purse. After tenth grade I stopped going to church mainly because I hated the parish I went to and detested the monsignor there, who always seemed to be the one officiating. But I still carried those trinkets with me wherever I went. Even though I no longer believe, I still cannot bring myself to throw them away, for sentimental values (gifts from my parents and grandparents).

As far as science goes, I was taught evolution in school and it was not until high school that I learned that people actually thought the world was six thousand years old. Needless to say, those girls were terribly misinformed then as they are now. I am at least thankful that I never believed in that nonsense. The Big Bang makes more sense than creationist stories about how the earth was formed. I love physics and engineering, and am going back to school to learn more about it and to get my degree in mechanical engineering (I know, big leap from fashion design, but I always want to know how things work and why and now that I am 28, I realized what I wanted to be when I was 18 is not what I want to be now that I am no longer a teenager).

The biggest thing that caused me to question and ultimately read about religion more than anything was the child abuse scandal and when the Catholic Church decided there was going to be no more Limbo, which goes back to my constant need to understand things and why it is done that way. I could not believe that no one would come forward for these kids and how dare the priest cover for themselves. It disgusted me that basically the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church cared more about the pedophile priests than they did for the children whose lives were ruined because of them. Additionally when the Catholic Church announced a few years ago that despite the fact that they are infallible, they made a mistake for a few millennia and that unbaptized babies no longer go to limbo they are in heaven. My grandmother had a stillborn baby some fifty odd years ago and she spent every day until her death ten years ago thinking that she would never see her baby in heaven because the Catholic Church told her it was in Limbo with no chance to be with her.

It was because of this anger that led me to start reading about Catholicism and its history, which led to reading about Protestants and finally other Abrahamic religions and a little of the other world religions. I read why Jews didn’t accept Christ because he did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. I read about how there is no evidence for Jesus aside from the Bible. I started to realize that if I grew up in India and raised Hindu, I would believe Hinduism is the only way, or if I grew up in Saudi Arabia I would be Muslim and Islam would be the only way. I started to question why would God only allow his religion to be given to only a few select people. I then started to realize that it was all crap. It was all man made and it all boils down to this one thing: people are afraid to die and are afraid that there is nothing after our time on this earth is over.

Through time and reasoning I came to the conclusion that all religion is false and that I now pity people who believe in it and base their whole lives on pleasing an invisible man in the sky. My family is now what we joke as being on the “Dark Side”, and my mother is pretty much an agnostic now. My siblings are also atheists as well and my dad is a strong agnostic too. I am not going to go back to believing in fairy tales ever again. If only the rest of the world would too.

Anne Marie
United States