On The Issue Of Hate And The Sky Daddy

As an atheist I do not hate God. I cannot hate something that I do not believe in. Also, I do not hate believers. Even though I believe in their existence, I do not hate them. They sure do scare me sometimes, though. They also frustrate the hell out of me. Sometimes I even get a little angry with them. Jim Downey has helped me understand why I frequently feel this way.

I don’t hate the believers, yet it sure seems that many of them hate me. They also seem to fear me. That confuses me. After all, they have God on their side, and I don’t.

From So, do you "hate God"? by Jim Downey:

…the notion that atheists "hate God" has always struck me as being very insightful. No, no, not into our motivations or beliefs. Into the minds of the believers.

Because I don't give God much thought in my day to day existence. And I certainly don't spend any emotional energy on the Big Guy. Because, you know, I don't believe in Him. Or It. Or Them. In fact, the whole notion is about as silly as hating the Loch Ness Monster. It's just absurd.

Very interesting. Very insightful. Sometimes I think that I am slowly driving myself insane whenever I try to understand people who think and believe things (both political and religious) that are the exact opposite of what I believe. I find it very difficult to do, yet I continue to do it because I feel that I may learn something useful. I also feel that we need to agree on something/anything or we all shall perish into the abyss of total chaos. I wonder if those on the other side of the religious/political fence ever even try to understand the likes of me. It seems that I never have seen any signs of that happening. Even once.

Very often I am overwhelmed at the sheer verbosity of the religious when they try to use logic and evidence to prove the existence of God. They write and talk endlessly and never see that they have missed one little crucial point. You cannot make something out of nothing. Their logic and evidence are nonexistent. Everything that they offer as evidence and logic is actually make believe and pretend. And, as Jim Downey points out, they have some strange beliefs about atheists. They believe these things without evidence. This is why I believe that religion is very dangerous. If you can believe in the existence of God without any evidence, what is to stop you from believing in something else without evidence? (For example, that atheists hate God.) How many other things will you believe in before you truly jump into the deep end of lunacy? “Death panels” anyone?

How can one understand that which is impossible to understand? (I don’t mean God here, I mean the people that Jim Downey so aptly described.) How does one even begin to comprehend that another thinks that I can hate something that does not exist? It is mind boggling.

Thank you Mr. Downey for this little gem. And for Sky Daddy, as well.

Belief Change

From Number of atheist groups growing in some US campuses:

As teenagers move into young adulthood, some leave God behind. But not in huge numbers.

More than three-quarters of young adults taking part in the National Study of Youth and Religion profess a belief in God. But almost 7 percent fewer believe in God as young adults (ages 18 to 23) than did as teenagers, according to the study, which is tracking the same group of young people as they mature.

What young adults are less likely to believe in is religion. The number of those who describe themselves as "not religious" nearly doubled, to 27 percent, in young adulthood.

Growing hostility toward religion was found, too. About 1 in 10 young adults are "irreligious" — or actively against religion — after virtually none of them fit that description as teenagers.

At Iowa State, most of the club's roughly 30 members are "former" somethings, mostly Christians. Many stress that their lives are guided not by anti-religiousness, but belief in science, logic and reason.

From 'Sinners' gather at atheist meeting:

Interest in local atheist groups has roughly doubled since the United Coalition of Reason erected a billboard off of Sixth Street in Queensgate Nov. 12 reaching out to non-believers, organizers said.

The billboard states "Don't believe in God? You are not alone" and lists the local chapter's Web site. Coalition leaders said they've heard from many people who didn't know that there were groups out there for non-believers.

"This threw evangelicals into a tizzy"

From Heaven for the Godless? by Charles M. Blow:

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.

The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

It means that when it comes to religious beliefs people believe whatever the hell they want to believe. I believe this is a sign that eventually religious belief will go the way of the dodo bird.

No matter how hard they try to hold on to the things that the Bible and other religious anachronisms tell them, many religious people are becoming more and more secular, whether they know it or not. The more religious people that drift away from the fundamentalist beliefs of religion the weaker religion will become.

From page 19 of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris:

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago - and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.

Even though it seems like it is taking forever, and even though things like intelligent design, trying to ban stem cell research, all the bitching about the "new atheists", and Barack Obama sidling up to Rick Warren may slow the process down, at some point the rubber band of religious belief has to break as more and more people become unable to reconcile their beliefs with reality.

Why God? Why?

Maybe if we pray to him he will tell us. Oh wait. We’ve been trying that already.

From Why Won't God Heal Amputees? by Jason:

"According to a recent poll Poll: Doctors believe in miracles, 3 out of 4 doctors believe that God is performing medical miracles on earth right now. Most Christians believe that God is curing cancers, healing diseases, reversing the effects of poisons and so on.

So here is question #1: Why won't God heal amputees?

It's a simple question, isn't it? We all know that amputated legs do not spontaneously regenerate in response to prayer. Amputees get no miracles from God.

If you are an intelligent person, you have to admit that it's an interesting question On the one hand, you believe that God answers prayers and performs miracles. On the other hand, you know that God completely ignores amputees when they pray for miracles.

How do you deal with this discrepancy? As an intelligent person, you have to deal with it, because it makes no sense. In order to handle it, notice that you have to create some kind of rationalization. You have to invent an excuse on God's behalf to explain this strange fact of life. You might say, "well, God must have some kind of special plan for amputees." So you invent your excuse, whatever it is, and then you stop thinking about it because it is uncomfortable."

Why people CHOOSE to WORSHIP a mean and nasty deity is beyond me.

What Truth Is There In Belief?

From Love Thy Neighbor by Tim Townsend:

In the Gospel of Matthew, it doesn’t take long for the author to show his readers two different sides of Jesus Christ. One minute Jesus is sitting on a mountain, delivering a powerful sermon to a presumably rapt audience: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth….Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” But just five chapters later, Jesus, again preaching to his apostles, changes his tune. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” he says. “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” That’s quite a change from the sandal-wearing, peace-loving hippie we’ve come to expect.

But again, journalists who cover religion also need to weigh that broad respect for belief against a larger truth. If a particular tenet of a particular faith has the potential to influence the public discourse outside the walls of the church, synagogue, or mosque, reporters are responsible for holding it up to the same scrutiny as any other idea tossed into the public square for debate. Which brings us back to The Devil in Dover. Toward the end of the book, Lebo sits down with Judge Jones and expresses her anxieties about the next round of “attacks on this country’s civil liberties.” Jones smiles reassuringly at the author and affirms his faith in the great American experiment. “Democracy is messy,” he tells her. “It’s supposed to be that way.”

 Why do we need to respect belief at all? Where is the truth in belief?

It Is Harder To Disbelieve, Than To Believe

Why do people believe in a god? Why do people believe what politicians say? Why do people believe in “Intelligent Design?” Why do people believe in some pretty stupid things? Could it be that they are just lazy? Michael Shermer sheds some light on this in his Scientific American article Adam’s Maxim and Spinoza’s Conjecture.

What do these results tell us? “Several psychological studies appear to support [17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict] Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection,” report Harris and his collaborators on the study in their paper, published in the December 2007 Annals of Neurology. “Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” So subjects assessed true statements as believable faster than they judged them as unbelievable or undecidable.

This research supports Spinoza’s conjecture that most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity and that belief comes quickly and naturally, whereas skepticism is slow and unnatural.

From this I conclude that John Lennon was not lazy. The lyrics of his song god prove this. I sincerely believe that the world would be a better place if we all were a little more like John Lennon and were a little more skeptical. Imagine a public and a Congress that was more skeptical of George W. Bush. Would we be in Iraq if we were not so quick to believe? We should choose to disbelieve before we believe, not the other way around. This is actually the way of science, as Michael Shermer explains:

The scientific principle of the null hypothesis—that a claim is untrue unless proved otherwise—runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true what we can comprehend quickly.

By the way, Michael Shermer has a blog. Doesn’t everyone? You can find it, and maybe even read it, here.