The destruction of ignorance is goal enough

I am so tired of the fatalist atheists. Julian Baggini is a perfect example: on the one hand he is incapable of seeing the progress atheism has made in the last decade, declaring us at an “impasse”, and on the other, he announces that he, as a philosopher, is going to come up with the productive, powerful Answer. I’m not interested. We’re long past the point where long-winded rationalizations by gooey apologists are at all useful. We must be aggressive and loud and keep the momentum going.

Ophelia takes him on in detail, I just have to mention a few things.

I do not blame the quagmire on the intransigence of any of the three sides in the debate – believers, atheists and agnostics – but on all of them. Broadly speaking, the problem is that the religious mainstream establishment maintains a Janus-faced commitment to both medieval doctrines and public pronouncements about inclusivity and moderation; agnostics and more liberal believers promote an intellectualised version of religion, which both reduces faith to a thin gruel and fails to reflect the reality of faith on the ground; while the new atheists are spiritually tone-deaf, fixated on the superstitious side of religion to the exclusion of its more interesting and valuable aspects.

LIKE WHAT? I guarantee you that every single “valuable aspect” he could mention (which he doesn’t) don’t need religion and are fully achievable by secular institutions…except the lies and promises of magic afterlives. Just for once I’d like these guys to lay it on the line and tell me what, exactly, humanity can’t accomplish without religion.

And then there’s this:

As a querulous member of the atheist camp, one of my aims is to end up with a richer, more constructive vision for what should follow the “new atheism”, which may well have been needed, but does not appear capable of taking us much further. To use another military analogy, the new atheism seems designed for effective invasion, but not long-term occupation.

I’ve often heard this assertion that we have to come up with something positive to replace the religion we eradicate. That would be nice, but it’s not essential: when a doctor purges a person of parasites, they’re not going to moan and fret about what they’re going to replace the worms with — getting rid of them is sufficient benefit.

Even that analogy is flawed, however. We’re getting rid of ignorance. We don’t need to replace it with a different kind of ignorance. It’s enough to learn the truth about reality.

I just got back from Cincinnati, right next door to Answers in Genesis and the Creation “Museum”. I do not feel at all charitable to religion, and my mood was not lifted by the latest insanity from Ken Ham. This is not the Omphalos argument — it’s worse.

As I have spoken at conferences over the years, people have often come up to me and said:

“When I am talking to someone who believes in an old earth, one of the things I say to them, as a young-earth creationist, is that God didn’t make Adam a baby—He made him an adult. And when He created the universe, He created it fully functional, with the appearance of age—even though it wasn’t old.”

My response often shocks these speakers: “By saying the universe looks old, you are trusting that dating methods can give us an apparent old age for the universe—but they can’t.”

Let me explain. When people say the universe has “apparent age,” usually they are assuming, for whatever reason, that the universe “looks old.” I have often found that, unconsciously, such people have already accepted that the fallible dating methods of scientists can give great ages for the earth. So if they believe what the Scripture says about a young universe, they have to explain away this apparent great age.

Ham is denying all of science and all of the evidence. The science does say the universe is very, very old, there’s no getting around it. Ham’s argument is a simple claim that all of science is completely wrong.

Why does he do this? Religion. I have no reason to believe it provides a positive benefit, nor do I need to replace it with some pretentious philosophy. These clowns are wrong.

I’m also not at an impasse. We’re going to crush them.

Seems like a good goal to me.

Mullet’s revenge

All right, that’s quite enough. This religion business has exceeded its allowable silliness quota, and it’s time for it to just stop. An Amish sub-cult is attacking dissenting Amish. Dirty Harry, it ain’t.

In one attack, men are accused of entering a home Oct. 3 and telling 74-year-old Raymond Hershberger, a bishop in a Holmes County Amish community, they were there to talk about religious matters, Holmes County Sheriff Timothy Zimmerly said Tuesday.

After a few minutes of small talk about the weather, the men suddenly announced, “We’re here for Sam Mullet to get revenge,” Zimmerly said.

And then they shaved off Hershberger’s beard and restyled his hair. Not stated, but I imagine they all then jumped into a buggy and galloped off. My fevered imagination then adds a high-speed buggy chase with the bad guys firing blunderbusses at the cops, but I told you, this is too silly. Stop it right now.

Wait…Sam Mullet’s revenge is sending out thugs to give haircuts? I’m done. No more.

I think all Americans have just been insulted by Andrew Brown

He calls Mormonism a “truly American faith”. I don’t think Brown actually knows anything about the Mormons other than the whitewash they’ve been given in their efforts to become more mainstream.

Mormonism is detested by some American evangelicals because it is “not Christianity” – but perhaps more because it is the first, great, truly American religion. It is founded on claims that no outsider can take seriously, but validated by one of the greatest epics of the settlement of the west, and secured by prosperity and tithing.

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Precious but icky

This is what religion does: it institutionalizes and rationalizes stupidity, like these signs in New York neighborhoods.

The large signs started popping up in the neighborhood more than a week ago. They had a Yiddish message that translates as: “Precious Jewish daughter, please move to the side when a man approaches.”

Neighborhood residents were annoyed the plastic signs, which were bolted into the wood, were taken away.

“The signs don’t bother anybody,” said Abraham Klein, 18. “Men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”

Yeah? Well, your religion sucks. And the signs bother me.

Orthodoxy and misogyny seem to go together like a bad sandwich: shit and slime, two awful flavors that taste worse together and don’t stand alone so well, either.

Guess whose house is getting TP’ed this Halloween?

Oh, man, everyone I knew when I was a kid hated these people: you’d go trick-or-treating at their house, and they’d hand out cheesy stupid bible tracts or worse, pieces of paper with bible verses on them. Now some horrible, joyless people are promoting Jesusween, where they encourage more people to do just that.

Ick. Smug and sanctimonious. The only good thing about their website is the graphic prediction on the page.

In addition to the toilet paper, though, expect the cross to be eggsplattered, too.

The Fermi paradox explained at last

The Fermi paradox is a question: if other intelligent alien life is present in the universe, why aren’t they here?*

Even if we postulate large numbers of aliens with the technology to visit Earth, we can now explain why they aren’t saying hello. We’ve been broadcasting idiocy into space.

During a recent conference that focused on the possibilities and implications of long-term space flight, a German professor made an attempt at applying Christian theology to extraterrestrial aliens, leading him to ask the question “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?”

We’ve moved so far beyond speculating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now we’re wondering how many Jesii exist in the galaxy.

If other life forms exist in our universe, he said, we should try to understand why Jesus chose to save those from Earth over other civilized life forms from other planets.

Did God reserve his grace solely for Earthlings and abandon the rest of the intelligent creatures in the universe? If not, how did God deal with the sin problem on multiple planets?

One possibility he mentioned is that God-incarnate visited each of the civilized planets and saved each of the races that inhabited them separately.

In order for that to be possible, however, he says multiple incarnations of God would have to exist at the same time. Assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, and based on how long civilizations are expected to survive, he estimates that there would have to be approximately 250 incarnations of God present in the universe at any given time to cover the sins of each civilization.

So picture the poor bewildered aliens parked out there in the Oort cloud, proposing to send a diplomatic mission to Earth. They aren’t worried about us as a threat — star-faring civilizations aren’t going to be intimidated by a species that has barely been able to wobble a handful of missions to their moon, and is even rethinking their space program — but they are going to be considering the other implications of contact. “The humans…next thing you know, the Seventh Day Adventists will be knocking on our doors on Saturday mornings to hand out tracts; the Catholics will be building special schools and flooding our courts with Jesuits; and the Baptists will be telling us we can’t bezorp the paramales with our deedloids or we’ll burn in Hell. And their arguments will be so stupid. Scratch the contact mission, I don’t think we can handle the exasperation!”

And so the earth orbits alone around its star, abandoned and avoided by the more sensible species of the galaxy, like the creepy born-again Jesus-freak at school with the glassy eyes who you avoid having a conversation with because all he wants to talk about is the Bible. Damn you, religion! It’s your fault we can’t commune with the great minds of the galaxy!

*It’s not really a paradox. It’s an observation that can be explained by the idea that technological intelligence is very rare, and so widely dispersed that communication, let alone travel, between them is unlikely.

A stupid argument for God

There’s this guy, see, and he was talking to his friend who was a physicist, and he got A decent argument for God, so he published it in a newspaper. Where I read it. I hope he’s misrepresenting his physicist friend, because it turned out to be so stupid that he ought to be booted out of the science club if he actually made it.

It started out badly enough.

After reading that astronomers had updated the estimated number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, to around 400 billion, Matt started thinking about the total number of stars in the known universe. The estimate now is about 70 sextillion stars. That’s 7 with 22 zeroes after it.

This is the boring old argument from complexity. It doesn’t work. Natural processes are really, really good at generating complexity: intelligence is good at honing and refining. We generally don’t regard piling up excess and superfluous complexity as a hallmark of intelligence in a design process.

But no, his argument is even worse. He babbles about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox, and then makes his ultimate argument, which is what makes me hope this gomer isn’t actually a scientist.

He smiled and said that was why he had started to doubt his atheism.

“Either scenario,” he said, “leads me to believe that this isn’t all random. In the first case, you have a universe filled with amazing, varied species that all have somehow evolved to the common point where they can speculate, wonder and create. That is really a pretty decent argument for God.

“But in the second case, you have an even stronger case for God. If we are alone in the universe, then our solitude has so overwhelmingly defied statistics that you almost have to believe something supernatural has occurred to bring our very existence about.”

So if there are more than one intelligent species in the universe, god exists; if there is only one species, god exists. I think any semi-competent scientist or philosopher should be able to tell you that he has just shown that counting the number of intelligent species in the universe offers no power to distinguish between the the two alternative hypotheses presented, not that it demonstrates the truth of one hypothesis.

Maybe he meant that a “decent argument for god” is any argument that supports his prior belief, no matter what the observations.

Theocracy will sneak in one justification at a time

Rick Perry is unsuited to high office. That he’s a cretin is one thing, but that he has an anti-American, unconstitutional attitude towards the law is another. He thinks the US is in an alliance with Jesus, as revealed in his recent comments about Israel.

Well, obviously, Israel is our oldest and most stable democratic ally in that region. That is what this is about. I also as a Christian have a clear directive to support Israel. So from my perspective, it’s pretty easy. Both as an American and as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel.

So the US role in the Middle East is driven by Christian fundamentalist theology? That’s scary stuff to announce, on top of practicing.

I don’t even know what the Israel of the Bible is, except that it is defunct and doesn’t exist anymore. To equate the modern state of Israel with the fantasy kingdom of the Bible is even more absurd than pointing at Italy and calling it the Roman Empire.

I knew it all along

Hey, it’s sure been quiet around here. I just got back from Fargo and the Project 42 conference where, most unfortunately, my hotel room’s wifi was abominable and intermittent. I figured you’d all be able to cope without me for a day, right? No panicky withdrawal symptoms, no rioting, no furious outrage and decisions to become a Christian because I wasn’t entertaining enough?

I just started sucking in the mountain of email that came in, so don’t expect much from me for a while. As a sop, you might be amused by this story out of Bay Minette, Alabama: they’ve decided that as an alternative to jail, people convicted of misdemeanors can opt to go to church instead. Didn’t you just know it all along? Church is the equivalent of prison, and attending church is a punishment.

More ugliness laid bare

I missed one example of ugliness in my last post. I already thoroughly detest Christianity, but if I didn’t, one way I’d learn to hate it would be by standing outside of Planned Parenthood and witness the faith on display in the horde of abortion clinic protestors.

If we want to encourage more atheists, maybe one way would be to organize days of service as an abortion clinic escort. It might be a little unfair, though: that really does expose you to some of the worst Christians on the planet.