Why I am a happy atheist

One reason is that we’re winning. Christian web sites are full of articles complaining about how young people are leaving the church; Ken Ham even wrote a whole book about it. Here’s an example of the genre from someone called Marc5Solas.

The statistics are jaw-droppingly horrific: 70% of youth stop attending church when they graduate from High School. Nearly a decade later, about half return to church.

Half.

Let that sink in.

There’s no easy way to say this: The American Evangelical church has lost, is losing, and will almost certainly continue to lose OUR YOUTH.

I let it sink in, and for some reason I just can’t stop grinning — a nice wicked devilish grin. Yes, yes, yes, the church is increasingly archaic, and it even helps when people make lists of everything that is wrong with the church, because they aren’t seeing beyond the problems. It’s lovely. Just keep hemmoraging, godly institutions, I’m happy to stand back and watch you bleed out…although I wish you’d stop thrashing about, you’re doing some damage in your death throes.

10. The Church is “Relevant”:

He’s actually complaining that the church tries hard to adapt to modern culture — it’s a typical conservative view that the old ways were better. It ignores the fact that religion always changes: the 19th century Catholic and Baptist religions were different than the 20th. But that wouldn’t fit with their pretense of holding eternal truths.

But hey, churchies, please do insist on locking yourselves into antique dogmas. I’m all for it!

9. They never attended church to begin with:

This one is related to #10. All them newfangled singalongs and pizza parties and hep cat stuff are distracting — make the kids sit and listen to a sermon for two hours, that’ll root ’em in the church.

8. They get smart:

My favorite! It’s those atheists who treat kids as intelligent questioning people that suck them in. Yay us! I mean, damn us. How dare we.

7. You sent them out unarmed:

To counter those atheists, the church has to get back to theological basics. Yeah, right. One problem there: that’s exactly what drove me away from the church, was learning what kind of bullshit I was expected to believe.

6. You gave them hand-me-downs

We’re back to the old-time religion whine. Kids are told to express their feelings, but those are lousy evangelical tools. Teach them the traditional stuff.

Please. Please do.

5. Community

Another complaint about the fuzzy wuzzy touchy feely modern church. Jeez, this guy really hates anything that deviates from his specific version of the faith.

4. They found better feelings:

More complaints about subjective faith over the virtues of dogma. I think he’s really padding his list of 10…so far it’s really about 2.

3. They got tired of pretending:

Christ, I’m so bored. It’s more of the same.

2. They know the truth:

More. Of. The. Same. Jebus. Now he’s complaining that kids taught this “god is love” stuff don’t have a proper appreciation of the fact that ‘god is law.’

1. They don’t need it:

Has he ever considered that maybe kids leave the church because the yahoos running it are boring as fuck? Yet again he’s complaining that an alternative liberal church let’s people find their way out of the rigid trap he thinks they ought to build.

Now you see why we atheists should be happy. Not only are young people abandoning that stupid mess of nonsense called church, but the priests are crankily sawing off the branch they’re standing on. May the whole rotten mess collapse soon.

You can all call me Mahout Myers now

Oh, no. Not again. It’s another arrogant wanker insisting that atheism is a religion, too, and of course, making dumbass arguments to do it. And here they are:

Atheists are, in fact, some of the most religious people.

First, they have a functioning God under whom they are subservient (normally it’s science or rationality, but mainly themselves), and that idea of God informs the way they live and interpret their lives. It informs their biases and determines their values, and governs any sense of morality or ethics they adhere too, or ignore.

So, if you believe in yourself or trust empirically determined facts about the universe, why, that’s exactly the same as believing in gods, therefore we’re all religious. Having any sense of morality is exactly the same as religion, even if it is a secular morality.

We’re not dealing with the most discerning intellect here, are we? Everything in the world is the same gray porridge to him; bicycles and elephants are all just objects, you know, so when people try to tell me they’re different, I’m going to say NO, and I will keep one in my garage and I will attach my pump to its toenails to inflate it and I will find a place to attach this spoke wrench.

The second argument is hilarious: keep in mind that this is a commentator on Fox News.

Once that’s all settled all that’s left is the preaching.

And they preach all the time.

This new breed of atheists is obsessed with the idea of God. They write books, deliver speeches, comment-bomb the evangelical blogosphere and generally rant on ad nauseam about the ills of believing in God.

So when anyone goes on a rant about the ills of liberalism on Fox, it means they really are a liberal themselves? I’ve tuned out that channel for so many years, but I guess I’ve been missing out on some great progressive discussions then.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re obsessed with how religion poisons our culture with endemic stupidity. I’m planning to cite Johnnie Moore, the author of the rant about atheism (oh, hey…I guess that makes him an atheist, too!) as a perfect case study in the future.

Another point he makes is that Richard Dawkins was defeated in a debate with Rowan Williams. It’s true, I looked it up: the audience voted 2:1 in favor of the Anglican priest.

Welp, I guess I gotta give up this atheism thing since a majority of people in England believe in god. Oh, wait…they don’t. It’s kind of evenly split right now.

So I guess I should adopt a faith because Dawkins had an off day?

If you read the summary of the debate, it was about whether religion had a place in modern society, and I thought this young person made a telling point about Dawkins’ performance:

One second year student told TCS: "He did not address the motion. His points focused only on debating whether religion is true, and ignored the question of whether it has a place in modern society."

Heh. Yes. I guess that’s quite perceptive. To some people, it’s completely irrelevant whether a claim is true or false, and they are quite happy to build a society around a lie.

I’m not one of those people. I guess I need to stay an atheist.

(via The Zingularity.)

Hamza Tzortzis is playing gotcha with Lawrence Krauss now

After that debate between Tzortzis and Lawrence Krauss that was overshadowed by the disgraceful anti-egalitarian exhibition of Muslim misogyny, iERA is now trying a new tactic: they’re releasing tiny snippets of the debate that they believe they can spin into anti-Krauss sentiment. Here’s a perfect example, Krauss’s reply to a question about the morality of incest.

The audience gasped when Krauss said it’s not clear to him that incest is wrong, and then he went on to argue that there are biological and societal reasons why incest is not a good idea, but that he’d be willing to listen to rational arguments for sexual and emotional interactions between siblings, for instance…not that he’d encourage such behavior. It’s a nuanced and complicated reply in too short a time, but otherwise, he’s not wrong.

But you know what Tzortzis is thinking: this is a perfect clip to play to the dogmatic mob, his people, who don’t do complicated and nuanced, and don’t care about rational arguments, only absolute dictates.

I’d add two other arguments that might sink in.

One is that religions also rationalize incest. Here’s the Protestant Christian example:

Since Eve was made from one of Adam’s ribs [Genesis 2:21-22], she would have been a clone of Adam and, had there been any genetic mutation in Adam, this would have been reproduced in Eve and expressed in their offspring. However, we may reasonably conclude that there were no mutations, and the very first commandment given to them was “to be fruitful and multiply” [Genesis 1:28]. However, the business at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil took place long before there were any children.

The account then continues where God confronted the guilty pair at the tree, but they did not confess their guilt or plead for forgiveness [Genesis 3:1-13]. God then cursed the serpent, imposed reproductive difficulties upon Eve and “cursed the ground for [Adam’s] sake” [Genesis 3:17]. From that moment, everything that Adam – and mankind since – ate had grown in the cursed ground. Cell by living cell, Adam began to very slowly change from his initial state of eternal perfection to mortal imperfection, and he finally died at the age of 930 years [Genesis 5:5]. Nevertheless, Adam and Eve’s immediate offspring would have been very close to physical perfection while brother-sister marriages were the only unions possible! Further, according to the genealogies given in Scripture, pre-flood longevity was about the same as that for Adam, so families were very large compared to those of today. Brother-sister unions were not only unavoidable, but they undoubtedly became traditional and expected.

Catholics make a similar argument.

Incest was not a problem for the immediate descendants of Adam and Eve. It became a problem when the deterioration of the gene pool meant that there was an increased likelihood that the offspring of the unions of near relatives would inherit physical or mental problems. Adam’s immediate descendants inherited perfect or nearly perfect genes, so the unions of near relatives were not a problem. Besides, near relatives were the only people who existed.

Muslims, too.

it is a known fact that legislation differs from one Shari’ah to another, while the principles and beliefs remain the same in all of them. So, making of portraits was allowed in the Shari’ah of Sulayman (peace be upon him) but is prohibited in our Shari’ah. Similarly, making prostration of salutation was permitted in the Shari’ah of Yusuf (peace be upon him) but is illegal in ours. Also, war booty was prohibited for nations before us but it is completely legal for us. The Qiblah of people before us used to be towards Bayt Al-Maqdis, but for us it is towards Ka’bah. In a similar way, marriage between brothers and sisters was permitted in the Shari’ah of Adam (peace be upon him) as opposed to those that came afterwards. The following is a clarification on the issue by Haafidh Ibn Katheer, who said:

Allaah allowed Adam (peace be upon him) to marry his daughters to his sons for necessity. Every couple used to have a boy and a girl. Hence, he married the girl of one couple to the boy of another. This is said by Suddi regarding what has been narrated by Abu Maalik and Abu Salih, from Ibn ‘Abbas, by Murrah from Ibn Mas‘ood and by other companions of the Prophet (peace be upon him) that Adam did not have (in his grandchildren) a baby boy unless it was accompanied by a girl, so he married the male of a couple to the female of another, and the female of a couple to the male of another

So apparently their absolute moral prohibition against incest isn’t quite so absolute after all. A good Muslim can fuck his sister if Allah tells him to.

But the other example I’d give is current, and it’s done all the time. Ever looked at a purebred Arabian horse’s pedigree? It’s an incestuous nightmare, and it’s encouraged — it’s even regarded as a good thing to reinforce good stock with a moderate amount of inbreeding.

Here’s an example of a horse pedigree. Notice what’s going on?

horsepedigree

Look at Pie’s Joseph, for instance. He is the product of a breeding between Wood’s Jay and Wood’s Jay’s granddaughter, Wood’s Chili.

Pie’s Joseph was then bred with his own niece, Pie’s Lady I, and they had a daughter, Pie’s Lady II. Pie’s Joseph was than bred to his own daughter to produce a son, Blue Joe, who is also his grandson.

Let’s not even get into cows and pigeons. Here’s a quick glimpse at the sordid sex life of Favorite:

cowpedigree

Are you squicked out yet? You shouldn’t be. This stuff is going on on farms all over the world. The biological prohibition isn’t quite as strong as you might think — if you want extremes of a phenotype, as you might in agriculture, trying to achieve selective homozygosity for specific traits might actually give you an advantage.

We tend to not want that kind of result in human crosses…although, if you think about it, an unscrupulous nation could embark on a breeding program for athletic ability that would benefit from a multi-generation pattern of incest…

But this all highlights a common problem: get into a debate with fanatics and ideologues like the iERA mob, and they will actually hold it against you if you actually consider the complexities of reality. We like both complexity and reality; how can you argue with someone who comes in with a bias that what you regard as virtues are sinful, and demands that the universe fit itself to their false simplicities?

Squishies and Crunchies

In the bowels of an ugly review of AC Grayling’s latest book, Jonathan Rée makes a familiar accusation against ‘militant’ atheism (just the use of his modifier is a grand tell, isn’t it?). It’s that atheists are fundamentalists who see all of religion as fundamentalist, in a classic act of projection.

Militant atheism makes the strangest bedfellows. Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes. Resistance is, of course, futile. If you suggest that his vaunted “clarifications” annihilate the poetry of religious experience or the nuance of theological reflection, he will mark you down for obstructive irrationalism. He is, after all, a professional philosopher, and his training tells him that what cannot be translated into plain words is nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Aside from being a thoroughly tin-eared statement of Grayling’s position — the man loves the metaphors and poetry himself — it’s completely wrong about us atheists in general. We certainly do see the differences between the varied approaches to religion, and we certainly do not confuse them or misapply criticisms valid against one branch to a branch to which they are irrelevant. I think he’s gotten confused because of all the varieties of religious thought, we despise them all…but I assure you, we despise each one uniquely for its own treasured inanities.

Part of the problem, of course, is of the believers’ own making. We use this word ‘religion’ to apply to so many different kinds of beliefs, and they love it that way: it makes the confusion universal, and creates a great blinking billowing smoke screen of noise and lights and chaos under which nonsense can thrive.

But let me take a moment to cut through the ambiguities in one way and propose one simple distinction that might help resolve these uncertainties about what atheists are criticizing. I propose that there are two very broad categories of popular theologies. I am not claiming that these categories are complete or perfect or absolute, just that you can go a long way towards recognizing the kinds of arguments your opponent is making if you identify which way they are thinking, and that you can at least make it clear to the other that you aren’t trying to accuse a Baptist of being an Anglican, or vice versa.

My two categories are crunchy theology and squishy theology.

Crunchy theology is rigid, absolute, inflexible, and clear cut. Crunchy theology proponents like to tell you exactly how the universe works: you will go to hell for abortion, masturbation, gay sex, and believing in evolution. They have a definitive dogma that changes every few decades, but even so, when they adopt a set of propositions, they will tell you that it has always been this way since the first century AD. A crunchy religious person votes Republican because that’s what Jesus would do.

Famous crunchy religious people: most of them, but they include people like Albert Mohler, Ken Ham, Shmuley Boteach, Ayatollah Hassan Sanei. I say “most” of the famous ones, because crunchy theologians are the ones who shout out their theology the loudest, and are the quickest to define themselves by their faith.

We atheists despise them because they are wrong. They will happily assert the most errant nonsense in defiance of all reason and evidence simply because it must be true, or the whole house of cards that constitutes their dogma will fall apart. The book of Genesis must be literally true, because if there were no Adam and Eve and no fall, then Jesus’ sacrifice would be meaningless.

Squishy theology is evasive, ambiguous (and reveling in it!), and well-meaning but dishonest. They are confident that people are good and that the universe is loving and beautiful, and that religion’s role is to provide a framework for gentle moral guidance and an appreciation of God’s creation. Squishy priests are like the docents at an art museum; they want you to really, really love everything, and for the right reasons. They’re offended if you don’t love God and Jesus because…because…because you’re supposed to, and Jesus loves you, so how can you be so mean and deny him? But you can love him in your own way, of course.

Famous squishy religious people are Karen Armstrong, Norman Vincent Peale, the Dalai Lama (sometimes, at least publicly), the religion columnists at the Huffington Post. Also, probably, most of the ordinary believers you know.

We New Atheists detest them because they’re dishonest pollyannas. They’ll skirt around conflicts between their beliefs and reality, preferring to divert the argument into a pursuit of red herrings (for example, accusing atheists of treating Karen Armstrong as synonymous with Terry Jones, rather than facing the vacuity of Armstrong’s beliefs). Look, most of the Western ones are Christian — they’re asking us to believe in the divinity of an ancient Jewish carpenter. But can they come right out and admit that? No. We point out that what they’re asking us to accept as reasonable doctrine is fundamentally absurd and silly, and they defend themselves by accusing us of denying poetry and metaphor and art (see: Rée, Jonathan). They love to call themselves “spiritual” (an undefinable, meaningless term) and claim atheists are missing out on feelings of awe and belonging.

Squishy theology even has some appeal to some atheists, like Jonathan Rée, who hold vaguely charitable feelings towards the ol’ church, because their wonderfully dodgy approach to the truth allows such atheists to avoid confronting any incompatibility between belief and actuality. It’s a fine refuge for people who don’t want to think too hard about what faith actually says.

So really, Jonathan Rée, I know the difference. I think you’re a foolish apologist for bogosity because you’re a coward who hides behind magical metaphors (to which I always ask, “metaphor for what?”), not because you believe Abraham had a strong position on the age of the universe. I will happily tailor my arguments against religion to be appropriate to your goofy beliefs in the beneficence of lies.

For instance, your blatant denial of valid knowledge…

The distinction between believers and unbelievers may be far less important than Grayling and the New Atheists like to think. At any rate it cuts right across the rather interesting difference between the grim absolutists, such as Grayling and the religious fundamentalists,

Wait, wait…I have to stop him there. Has Rée even read Grayling’s books, or met the fellow? Grayling is a soft-spoken, friendly gentleman who is happy to discuss nuance — he’s a freakin’ philosopher. “Grim absolutist” is about the most absolutely wrong-headed description of Grayling I’ve ever read.

OK, carry on.

who think that knowledge must involve perfect communion with literal truth, and the sceptical ironists – both believers and unbelievers – who observe with a shrug that we are all liable to get things wrong, and the human intellect has a lot to be modest about. We live our lives in the midst of ambiguities we will never resolve. When we die our heads will still be filled with a few stupid certitudes mixed in with some more or less good ideas, and we are never going to know which are which. There is no certainty, we might say: so stop worrying about it.

That we lack absolute certainty — a position that those scientific-minded New Atheists happily endorse — does not imply an absence of probablies. We can examine the evidence of reality and see that no, the universe almost certainly doesn’t love us; no, there is almost certainly no life after death; no, your favorite Jewish laborer or Arab merchant almost certainly wasn’t a prophet with divine favor, because there is no reasonable evidence for any of those claims. And further, the people who argue otherwise do not have any special access to evidence, no particular authority on supernatural matters, and are completely unable to provide replicable, confirmable support for their claims.

So I would agree that both atheists and theists (squishy and crunchy!) will die believing in things that are wrong. But that does not mean that we can’t discern in this life what things are almost certainly false.

PZ was wrong wrong wrong

My esteemed co-blogger lists the usual pope field marks — old, male, conservative, homophobic, godbag — and says “that’s all you need to know” about New Pope. But it turns out, as pointed out by a few commenters downthread, that Francis I is worse than that. A lot worse.

Says commenter sc_e94313c775e472e2749a200883fdec2e (can I call you “sc_e”?)

As an Argentinian I can confirm your “rumours” and add that this guy was a collaborator with the military during the last coup d’etat during the 70′s : Among many things, he informed to the military that two monks that were working in a low income neighbourhood were no longer protected by the catholic church, facilitating their detention and posterior disappearance.
Mind you, to “dissapear” at that time meant to be detained by the military, held without rights or trial, possibly (and often) tortured under suspicions of being a Marxist/ “terrorist”, being completely incomunicated with your family and finally be killed and buried on an unmarked grave, or thrown form a plane into the river.
Thrown.
From a fucking plane.
Into the river. (Known as “deathflights”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights )

I’ve seen some “progressive” Catholics in the English-speaking world already lauding this guy for his apparent concern for the poor. I seem not to be able to embed Storify curations here, so here’s a link instead: Check out this Storify being collected by Asteris Masouras. And if you’re an English speaking progressive of whatever religious orientation who doesn’t know what the Dirty War was, you need to learn. This Al Jazeera documentary is a start. (Serious trigger warning for, well, everything.)

New pope, same as the old pope

It’s Bergoglio, an Argentinian Jesuit that the Rationalist Association had as a 33:1 longshot.

Rumor has it that he’s conservative, hates that contraception and gay marriage crap, believes he has a magic spiritual hotline to the lord of the universe who is named Jesus, and is not — I repeat, is not — scientifically minded or an atheist. He also engages in magical rituals several times a week, and does not encourage women to touch his penis. At least, not openly.

He’s also old.

There. Now you know everything you need to know about the new head of one of the world’s oldest criminal organizations. You can turn off your TVs now.

Strident Catholics hurt my brain

I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.

This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.

Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.

Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.

It didn’t happen.

Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.

Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.

teen-birth-rate

A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.

Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.

How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?

And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.

So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?

*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.

Might Christianity be both true and terrible?

I am late to the feast! the Digital Cuttlefish, Larry Moran, and Jerry Coyne have all picked over the bones of this ridiculous fellow Damon Linker, who has been moaning about the dearth of honest atheists nowadays. Real atheists, he says, should be dismayed and horrified at the absence of a god-being in their lives; they should be despairing at the knowledge that their lives are meaningless and doomed, nothing but the tragedy of blindly executing chemical reactions until they flop into the grave and rot. Oh, and also, atheist views are so despicable that they not only shouldn’t be allowed to run for public office, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Sweet guy, huh? And so trite and unimaginative. His lack of ability to comprehend our sense of liberation at being free of his petty tyrant of a god is not an argument that we should be similarly fettered.

But all those other guys have torn that part of his argument to shreds. Let me take a different tack and approach another of his assertions. This one, the subtitle of his article.

“That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.”

I’m going to try something unusual, for me. I assume that Damon Linker fervently believes that his god is real, and normally I’d go after that and argue against his deity. But this time try pretending that somehow, by some miracle, it turns out that the Christian god exists, and Mr Linker is actually correct. Is he able now to contemplate this possibility?

“That Christianity might be both true and terrible is something that Christians refuse to entertain.”

Let it sink in, Christians. Really think about it.

If this religion were true, here is what we have to live with.

  • Our lives are miserable and evil, tainted everywhere by sin. Only in our death do we have an opportunity to escape.

  • We are pawns in a war between a god and an army of demigods (angels), and Satan and his army of demons. Satan is constantly trying to corrupt us.

  • When we die, we have two possible fates. The most likely is that we’ll end up in Satan’s clutches, which means an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) of pain and agony and grief, tortured in a lake of fire.

  • If we win the god’s favor, we get to spend an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) servilely worshipping this deity.

  • We have a purpose. It is to be slaves to god. That’s right, under Christianity we are all slaves to a omnipotent, omniscient master.

  • In some Christian sects, everything is predestined. Your efforts are futile, your ultimate fate in heaven and hell is set. No amount of struggle will change what will happen to you.

  • In other sects, you have free will, and can influence where you end up. Unfortunately, the exercise of your will is irrelevant except in your ability to follow arbitrary and peculiar rules: you may not masturbate, for instance, and you must avoid eating certain foods. You are free to obey god’s capricious whims, or not.

  • Your god loves you so much that he will kill his own son for you. But there’s a catch: you have to believe that god is the kind of guy who would murder his own son (and worship him for it!), ot you will go to hell.

  • Your god is the kind of monster who would exterminate just about every living thing on the planet because they were wicked. But at the same time, it’s dogma that every one of us is a wicked sinner. The axe is always suspended above your neck, the only thing keeping it away are the fancies of a tyrant.

  • This god is not a moral being: he has advocated rape, genocide, the murder of children, slavery, and blood sacrifice. The purpose of these horrific acts? His glorification.

Now please notice: I am not making the fallacious argument that because these consequences are awful, god is not real. I’m stipulating that the Christian god actually exists, and I’m asking Christians whether that would be a good thing or not — whether we should exult or be downcast at the idea of Jehovah’s existence.

If it would help, because I know they’re so soaked in the indoctrination that says an immortal incarnation of Dexter is a great thing that they’ll find it difficult to see beyond that, imagine if Allah were the one true god and you were expected to follow Muslim practices in order to be in his good graces. Or if that’s still too benign for you (I can’t imagine how), picture what eternity would be like if the True God were Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war and human sacrifice.

I rather suspect that extortion on a cosmic scale will dictate what most Christians can say. The existence of the Christian god would be a colossal catastrophe for humanity, reducing us to inconsequential slave to an invulnerable authoritarian megalomaniac, but if you really believe in such a nightmare, you wouldn’t be able to complain — you’ll LOVE GOD AS HE DEMANDS, or he’ll SET YOU ON FIRE. And if you have any doubt, if you speak out and suggest that maybe his rule is a bit scary, he’ll just wish you into the cornfield.

But try, for just a moment, to admit that that god is damned evil. If he’s not so evil, he’ll forgive you a little doubt, right? And if he is that evil, why are you planning to spend eternity worshipping him?

Hamza Tzortzis’s reputation goes before him

Ophelia is hosting a wonderfully entertaining guest post on Hamza Tzortzis and the UCL segregation debacle. I know that guy; Tzortzis seems to show up somewhere every time I’m in Europe to peddle his peculiar brand of ignorance, and he’s invited me to debate him a couple of times now. The article will make clear why I’ve turned him down every time, even though it would have gotten me an expenses-paid trip to London. There are some things I just won’t do.

Absurd segregation

Lawrence Krauss agreed to a debate with a Muslim spokesman at University College London, and discovered that the Muslims had organized segregated seating: men in one section, couples in another, and women in a third (apparently, in back, too). He walked out until they agreed to allow mixed seating. Richard Dawkins has an account, and there’s another on facebook from an attendee, with video.

It’s bizarre. I have no idea what they talked about; it’s all overshadowed by the archaic bigotry of an old patriarchal religion. Of course, do we even need to know what was said after the Muslims shot themselves in the foot so thoroughly?