Why I am an atheist – Chad Brown

I am a long time reader of your blog. It has introduced me to many new concepts regarding feminism and atheism and has helped me greatly to shape the way I view my atheism today as well as my political/social stance and support for feminism. Thank you for these insights and for the time you take to run this blog. As part of my thanks, I have provided my story below for how and why I became an atheist.

I was raised in a Lutheran family in Winona, Mn. Our family attended church every Sunday, but we never talked about our religion around the house. A few years before my confirmation classes commenced I decided to read the bible. I found it obtuse, abstruse, ambiguous, contradictory, unnecessarily repetitive, and with a tendency to prattle on over irrelevant details. When I was 13 and attending confirmation, I started asking some serious questions. None of my confirmation teachers answered my questions to my satisfaction and it became pretty clear to me that our confirmation courses were less about exploration of our faith and more about indoctrination.

I started to have my doubts about religion and I didn’t know how to take my family’s silence on the matter. Was their silence an affirmation that religion was highly suspect, or was religion just too personal of a subject to broach? I sensed that I would not get clear answers at home.

For me, high school history, anthropology, and sociology were the first courses and sources of knowledge to expose religion as a sham. At the time I never even considered science as a path for leaving religion or that religion and science were naturally opposed to each other. By the time I was 16, I considered myself an atheist and really had no doubts about the matter. But the strangest thing was occurring; as I explored the subject with my closest friends, the people whom I believed thought most like myself, I found that they considered themselves believers. I was floored. Why was I alone in thinking that religion was a hoax?

In college I studied Physics and, although I do not work in a laboratory, I consider myself a scientist. In college I started to learn how science and religion are not compatible and I finally started to meet some atheist friends. Since leaving college it has been harder to come across other atheists. Coming out, on some occasions, has been costly and painful. I even had one boss tell me that my problem was that I was, “…a goddamn atheist”. I don’t think he recognized his own irony.

My family found out about my atheism by accident and I know that they are uncomfortable with it. It turns out their silence was not an affirmation of religion’s ludicrousness. I now have my own children. I try to let them know that we can talk about any subject in the house (sex, religion, politics, sexual orientation, etc.) at any level they desire. I don’t want them to spend years wondering what their parents think. Even more importantly, I encourage them to read, study and investigate so they can form their own, informed opinions over such matters.

The online atheist community has been a great source of comfort to me. It has offered me an opportunity to be introspective about my atheism and has helped my perspective on the matter to grow and evolve. I no longer feel so isolated. Your blog, and the works of others from Richard Dawkins to Rebecca Watson, is important to atheists out there like me who have been unable to find support in our local communities.

Chad Brown
United States

Of course the dog won

A while back, the Way of the Master (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) came out with a board game, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. I imagine the Discovery Institute cringes in pain every time those two clowns associate themselves with their brand, which is good; but you know it has to be an awful, horrible, brain-damaging game, which is bad. I thought about picking up a copy just for the kitsch value, but just couldn’t bring myself to pay them money for it (and now it seems to have vanished from their online store).

But Chad bought it and played it against his dog (his wife was too smart to join in). Surprise! It’s as bad as I expected!

It looks boring, too. It’s an old-school board game where you march around the board by throwing dice, landing on squares that make you answer questions on cards in order to win brain tokens. Here’s a sample question, to give you a sense of what you’ll learn.

True or False? The Bible doesn’t speak of a literal place called Hell. It is merely symbolic of the grave.

ANSWER: False (see Luke 16:19-31). Your eternal salvation may depend on your understanding of this truth. If you answered incorrectly, give two brains to the opposing team.

It’s really a test of your knowledge of fundagelical interpretations of the Bible. Now I’m even happier I never wasted any money on it.

(Also on Sb)

DJ Grothe baffles me

His response to Greta throws out several accusations: there exist something called “controversialist” blogs, and their writers have anonymously informed him they’ve been directed to go on the attack by the founders for an “uptick in hits”.

I don’t know of these blogs. Can anyone point me to some?

I can say that there have been no such directions given at Freethoughtblogs, Scienceblogs, the Panda’s Thumb, or any blog I’m associated with.

There other weird things about that comment, but I trust Greta will handle it well; I’m just surprised by this novel conspiracy theory.

Ajita Kamal has died

I am sad to report that Ajita Kamal has died. He was the founder of Nirmukta, and was a leading promoter of science and freethought in India.

Here’s one of his articles that I liked very much.

There is a very important role that anger, ridicule and passion play in any social movement. While intellectual understanding is key to a movement that is well-grounded, it is the primary emotions that provide the impetus for social organization. Without this, atheism would simply remain an idea to be discussed in academia and in private settings.

Let me give you an example. Secular Humanism has been around for more than a century. Humanists often deride the ‘New Atheists’ for their bitterness. In fact, the argument from many humanists has been that their tactics are more effective! But how many people knew about secular humanism before the ‘New Atheists’? Their whole movement was an academic one, restricted to an elite group of people who had the time and inclination for such intellectualisms. While the humanists were debating about human rights and ethics for over a century, atheists continued to remain in the shadows, in a cultural environment where they were unable to realize many of their fundamental rights. The only community that was available to most atheists was society at large. As you may well know, one of the most important functions of religion is to provide a common cultural ground to enable a common morality and social code to bring together people and form a functioning and content community. We atheists did not have this- not until a few years ago. It is easy to ignore the freedoms (from the point of view of social acceptance) we have gained towards expressing our beliefs in public and for gathering in the name of reason. It is easy to forget that millions of atheists crave the kind of social contact that religions have traditionally provided. It is even more easy to forget the role that anger, ridicule and passion have played in creating this global community of freethinkers. Without the ‘new atheists’, secular humanism would have remained irrelevant in the public sphere. Today we can meaningfully talk about replacing religion with a secular morality derived from humanistic principles only because of the social impetus that the ‘New Atheists’ like Dawkins have provided humanity with.

I also recommend this recent article by a group of the Nirmukta writers. He was one of us. We are now diminished.

Why I am an atheist – Michael Glenister

It’s been an interesting change in perspective for my mother. She was raised Church of England (Protestant) in High Wycombe, England, and remembers, as a child, the first time she met someone who didn’t believe in god. The initial response was to cry. The secondary response was to think: “Convert!”. My Dad was an altar boy as a kid, but his family were not as devout as my mother’s. Irregardless they met, grew up, got married, and then immigrated to Canada.

I was born a couple of years later. By this time my parents, particularly my mother, were no longer as devout as my grandparents and other relatives, and going to church was not a regular part of our lives. However there was a large brass crucifix on the wall of our bedroom hall, I was sent to Sunday School for a while, and remember doing some praying by myself before I went to bed.

I figured out a quite a young age that Santa Claus didn’t make sense, and applaud my parents for being honest with me when I asked. I was also an early reader, thanks to my mother’s efforts, and not long afterward someone (I don’t remember, probably a relative) gave me a large, thick, illustrated, children’s bible. I read the whole thing, cover to cover. It was certainly an entertaining read, but my mother now proudly relates that after I finished reading it, that I concluded the whole thing was nonsense and told her so.

From then on I was an atheist, and so were my parents and younger siblings. In high school we covered the Greek/Roman gods, and read “Inherit the Wind”, which gave me ample opportunity to express my opinions. A female student made my day when her essay was read in class. It included a discussion on Mary and Joseph: “An angel makes Mary pregnant. What kind of excuse is that!? If I came home and told my mother that an angel made me pregnant…”

While studying at UBC in Vancouver, I attended the annual “Does god exist?” debates sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. Usually I was disappointed in the debating abilities of the Con side, and wished that I was a better debater myself. I even heard about David Suzuki attending one and getting angrier and angrier at how the Pro side was misrepresenting science.

Years later I read about Richard Dawkins in Discover magazine, did some research, and started collecting books. Consequently I’m a much better debater and look forward to JW’s knocking on my door so that I can refine my skills. As I Science/Math teacher in high school, I also encourage my students to think for themselves, and not accept things as true because an authority figure – including myself – tells them that it is true without evidence.

Now my parents, particularly my mother, and I enjoy reading Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, and discussing the ridiculous and irritating things the religious do around the world.

Michael Glenister
Canada

Also, the sharks are smarter than Eric Hovind

The news a few weeks ago was that hybrid sharks had been found off the coast of Australia. They looked like tropical Australian black-tip sharks, but genetic testing revealed that they’d hybridized with the common black-tip, which has a wider range; these hybrid black-tips were similarly extending their range and living in colder waters.

This is an excellent example of evolution: it’s a population shifting its range, correlated with an observation of novel genetic attributes. This is exactly the kind of gradual transition that we’d expect to be compatible with evolutionary theory.

Unless you’re a creationist, of course. Or an idiot. But I repeat myself.

I wonder if they ever considered that when you stand back and look at them, they are all sharks. That means they are the same kind of animal. That is not evolution taking place; there is no changing from one kind of animal into another kind of animal happening here. We started with a shark and now we have a shark. That is not evolution!

That’s Eric Hovind’s take on the story. First of all, “kind” is not a valid taxonomic unit; it makes no sense at all to demand that a “kind” turn into a different “kind” when “kind” is undefined, undefinable, and unmeasurable. What was seen was a population with a measurable change in their genetic characteristics, and a natural mechanism, hybridization, to explain the shift, and a possible selective force, climate change, to drive the process. That’s the science.

Secondly, what does he expect? That a shark would turn into a mouse?

Thirdly, Eric Hovind does not get to define what evolution means. Biologists get to do that. Eric Hovind does not qualify. Eric Hovind has qualifications equivalent to those of his father: he is a “graduate” of Jackson Hole Bible College, an unaccredited and glorified tourist lodge in the Rocky Mountains which offers a one year course leading to a Diploma of Biblical Foundations, whatever the hell that is. That diploma and an application might qualify him for a job at McDonald’s.

Especially since I looked at their class schedule: not one lick of biology, but lots of evangelism, acts of the apostles, church history, prophecy, mangled geology, apologetics, and most importantly of all, “Intro to Finance”.

(Also on Sb)

Ken Ham vs. Karl Giberson — should I care who wins?

Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson have written a book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, which I haven’t read…but the NY Times has what appears to be a very balanced review. It’s premise is that evangelical Christianity has gone far astray, that within the evangelical stew there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism and contempt for academia…it is not surprising that Uncle Karl would make note of that, given the way his own views were steadily squeezed out of BioLogos, the site he co-founded, as more literal-minded views took hold.

The reviewer makes the point, though, that evangelicals’ attitudes towards academia are more complicated than the authors make out: that in particular, there is a tendency for many Christians to make an exceptionally big deal out of degrees. Kent Hovind went to a fake college to get his Ph.D.; Jonathan Wells stumbled through a real graduate program to get a degree; Marcus Ross got his Ph.D. in Cretaceous paleontology so he’d have more credibility in his claims that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. I don’t think that really sinks Stephens’ and Giberson’s point, though — evangelical Christians love the mantle of authority that a Ph.D. gives, but despise the substance of it. A person with a doctorate is only revered as long as they reinforce their superstitious prejudices.

But I don’t find all this serious discussion of the book that interesting. What made me laugh was that both the book and the review have infuriated Ken Ham, one of the chief targets of the argument against these evangelical know-nothings. Oh, Ken Ham is spitting mad.

Recently, two AiG staff members reviewed a book entitled The Anointed, co-authored by a writer who is well known for compromising the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution with God’s infallible Word.

If you follow the creationist movement at all, one of the clear messages is that atheists like me might be the imps of Satan, but we’re mostly irrelevant to their concerns. We offer no serious temptations to Real Christians™. No, the real dangers are those heretics who still promise all of the good rewards of Christianity — eternal life, paradise, good buddy Jesus, that sort of thing — yet do so without demanding the rigors and trials of pure Biblical literalism and fundamentalism. They offer an easy route out of their specific sect, and the fear is that they will substantially erode the faithful away.

So Answers in Genesis will take an occasional contemptuous swipe at godless heathens like me, or even Richard Dawkins, but the real enemies and the real targets of their hatred are people like Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Compromisers. People who try to find a place for Jesus in evolution are especially wicked.

They also cannot comprehend atheism in the slightest, which is why we’ve been relegated to the status of “pagan religion”. Everything is a religion, from church service to lifestyle to beliefs, so everything is dealt with in a great grand act of projection.

Here’s how Answers in Genesis sees the world:

In our modern church today, there are many leaders who have compromised with the pagan religion of the day (i.e., evolution and millions of years—indeed, this really is today’s pagan religion to explain life without God). Sadly, many Christian leaders have been teaching generations in the church to accept this secular worldview and re-write God’s Word (particularly in Genesis) to fit with it.

Yes, as harsh as it might sound, today there are shepherds in the church who are also “wolves”—they have infiltrated the church with their destructive teaching. Now, I am not saying these wolves are not Christians—I suppose the term can fit Christians as well as non-Christians.

One such example is seen clearly in the writings of Dr. Karl Giberson. Until recently, he was a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts—probably leading many students astray about the Bible’s authority with his compromised teaching.

Gosh, I’m a little bit jealous — I wish Ken Ham saw me as just as dangerous as Karl Giberson. All I’d have to do is convert to liberal Christianity and start attending church regularly and…ack. No. Not going to happen, too high a price to pay.

Ken Ham and Georgia Purdom also ripped through the book and found errors. These are real errors and represent genuine problems in the scholarship behind Stephens’ and Giberson’s book (if Bill O’Reilly can get slammed for errors in details, then Karl Giberson should, too), but it’s amazing how petty the problems are.

This is a book that attempts to be a scholarly look at “unscholarly” Christian leaders of prominence in America. It is, after all, published by the prestigious Harvard Press. Yet we were surprised to find several mistakes in the introduction and first chapter alone—plus a generally snide tone that is unbecoming of a scholarly work. For example, the authors gave the wrong month for our Creation Museum’s opening (p. 11); they mistakenly claimed that Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is a young-earth creationist (p. 19); the year given for the first “Back to Genesis” seminar is incorrect (p. 41); and the name of our daily radio program is incorrect (p. 11).

The biggest mistake there is the attribution of young earth creationism to Dobson, although to be fair, Dobson has been a murky wad of BS on the issue, and seems to me to be willing to take whatever objection to science is currently expedient and babble ignorantly about it. He does promote Hugh Ross, the old earth creationist, which indicates that if nothing else he lacks the ideological purity expected by AiG.

And the bottom line is that Ham cannot refute the major thrust of the Stephens/Giberson argument: the evangelical Christian attitude towards science is epitomized by their lionization of unlettered wacky yahoos like Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and Eric Hovind, and that they’re willing to learn from people with Ph.D.s, like Philip Johnson for instance, only as far as they give them rationalizations for their dogma. This is what the NY Times says about that central issue, and Ham can’t dispute it.

Many evangelicals, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson say, get their information on dinosaurs and fossils from Ken Ham, an Australian with a bachelor’s degree from the Queensland Institute of Technology. Ham believes human reason should confirm the Bible rather than reinterpret it, and teaches that God created the world a few thousand years ago. His ministry, “Answers in Genesis,” includes a radio program broadcast over more than 1,000 stations, a magazine with a circulation of 70,000 and the ­multimillion-dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky. While other evangelicals — for example Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who runs the National Institutes of Health — offer more nuanced perspectives on science’s relationship to the Bible, Ham commands a far larger audience.

It’s entirely true that Answers in Genesis is the most popular creationist organization in the US (he won’t argue with that), and it’s also entirely true that he’s an ignoramus with minimal education in biology. Not mentioned is that, without concern for what letters he has or doesn’t have after his name, he gets all the science wrong, misrepresents the evidence, and willingly confesses that he’s irredeemably shackled to a book of dogma. Yet his is the voice evangelical Christians choose to listen to. And if they don’t like him, they turn to Eric Hovind, another moron for Jesus, or his jailbird daddy, Kent Hovind.

To be fair, they’re stuck in a hard place. I disagree that Collins is more nuanced — he’s just as loony on Christianity as Ken Ham — but that’s the Christian problem. Ultimately, all of the paladins of faith are forced to defend Christianity, which is antique ooga-booga bullshit on toast. When all of your choices are eye-buggingly batty, you can’t use reason to decide among them any more.

Why I am an atheist – Krio Gnosz

I grew up in a rural area of Finland and went to a tiny school of about thirty pupils. As such, I now suppose their education methods could get away with being less than mainstream. Being only about seven to eight years old, we were taught Biblical stories as though they were the truth of what happened.

I was a personality that would find the thought of a perfect, just, omnipotent authority appealing. Being an obedient, yet ingratiating child I strove to act polite and hide my flaws from God in an effort to appease him. All in a very similar manner to my faith in Santa Claus. However, I also had a very absolute sense of morality. Since the Christian stories that I had heard taught that even a malicious thought is a sin, I figured that I was not in control of my own sinfulness. A person would be sent to either Heaven or Hell according to their sins. This made me panic, since I would have to live my entire life in constant fear of a divine punishment that might not even be fair. Normally, I would disguise my misdeeds and pretend to be nothing but pure of thought… but how could I even attempt to disguise and pretend in front of an omnipotent, omniscient God?

One day, I finally broke in tears due to this sense of insecurity. My father asked what was wrong, and I opened up to him. What he said to me afterwards was nothing short of comforting as hell. Something along the lines of “There are thousands of religions on this planet, many of which promise eternal comfort and threaten with eternal agony. And everybody believes theirs is the right one. Christianity just happens to be dominant in this particular country, so take it easy, you are not bound to anything.” This did not make me truly atheist, though. I just mentally told God, “Well, it seems that despite all your greatness, you haven’t provided me with any proof that you exist. So I’ll continue to live my life without you. No hard feelings, but you can’t expect me to have faith in you when you don’t give me a proper reason to do so.”

There was a subsequent chapter of my life where I was, in fact, fundamentalist… in a very special way. Although it is rather hilarious and would make this story much more entertaining, it’s also so incredibly embarrassing that I don’t quite feel ready to disclose it, even anonymously. Let’s just say that I was extremely devoted and routinely exercised some serious fact-bending to justify my brand of religion.

Since having gotten over that phase, I was a live and let live -style nontheist. I figured that since there are so many people who are fervent believers in God, they must all have very good reasoning. As an outsider I couldn’t possibly know enough about their beliefs to criticize them. This changed when I started frequenting a certain forum on the Internet where certain posters in particular, who had received “orthodox upbringings”, were very vocal about what their religions ordered and forbade them to do. This opened my mind to the possibility that… maybe the human mind really can be so willfully illogical as to endlessly defend a mindset that has some serious flaws in it? After all, I had been through this too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The End of Faith by Sam Harris upon skimming through a selection of books in an online library. At first, I thought the writer must have been some sort of radical. Yet his arguments, backed up by statistics as opposed to meandering pseudo-philosophy, were such a refreshing treat that I became a “radical” myself in my stance to religion. Eventually, my sister found my copy and mentioned that she had read a similar book too, by Richard Dawkins. And so on.

Krio Gnosz
Finland

Why I am an atheist – Tony Moss

I was a devout Catholic. I believed. I believed in literal transubstantiation, I belived in Hell, I believed in the Virgin Mary, I believed in Adam and Bloody Eve and the damned Deluge! I was, I suppose, a victim of the phenomenon put forward by Dawkins in which adults tell you, in a serious voice, that something is literally true and you have a tendency to believe them.
When the priest said “let us pray” I really did, and a friend of mine in the pew next to me used to pray with an incredible intensity that made me envious. So what happened? Very basically I left my childhood.

The questioning that is customary in one’s teenage years led to me to realise the absurdity of some of the propositions. For instance the creation story was completely incompatible with evolution which living in England was considered science and not some infernal little secret. But the one thing that really led me to seriously question my pre-pubescent faith was the utter ridiculousness of the notion of an all loving, all forgiving father who would let you burn forever if you didn’t believe. I began to be exposed to the mental gymnastics of Catholic theologians who attempted to explain away quandaries like “what about people who never heard of Jesus?” and “what about babies who die before they get baptised?”. It was also revealing to me that the age of your confirmation at which you declare, before the Church, that you as an adult of sound mind accept the teachings of the Catholic faith and are baptised again as a permanent member of the Church began to diminish from fourteen (!) to eight (!!). What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity? The cynic in me might suggest that this rewinding age of responsibility might go some way to explain the disgusting scandals that have plagued the church in recent years.

For years I struggled with faith (the imagery of eternal damnation is horrible enough to resonate with a young adult and I’m not ashamed to admit that the main motivation of my flirtation with Catholicism in my older years was fear) eventually settling on what I thought was a reasonable position of agnosticism. Then I read The God Delusion. Dawkins’ description of himself on his scale of belief seemed to gel perfectly with what I was. I didn’t believe and hadn’t for decades! I was a de-facto atheist, and because of stupid religious apologism I never realised it.

To put this in perspective the bulk of my catholic teaching came from my public Catholic school. My family were fairly liberal. My dad is a nominal Anglican protestent to whom Sundays were an excellent opportunity to sleep in. My mother describes herself as Catholic but her statement on belief is “I think that there’s something….”. Her mother was the daughter of Irish catholics and while being very devout she indicated she did believe in reincarnation. I think the liberal nature of my family’s beliefs can be summed up in the female members’ reaction to one of my cousin’s neighbours, a gay couple:

“It’s such a shame that those to are gay isn’t it? They’re both GORGEOUS!”

Imagine then the struggles facing an atheist brought up in a truly devout or dare I say fanatical household. I had it easy.

Tony Moss
United Kingdom