Quote Of Note - Jerry Coyne

"Why would one be motivated to do good by the supposed existence of a being about whom you have no evidence and know nothing? What if such a god was not good, but malicious? How would you know?" - Jerry Coyne

Infinite Punishment For Sins Commited By Others

The religious never cease to amaze me. The illogical aspects of their faith seem to be infinite.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the Big Sacrifice:

What a thicket of bad logic! Why, for instance, must sins against an infinite being be given an infinite punishment? If you don’t accept Jesus as your savior, for instance, many Christians think you’ll fry for eternity—infinite punishment. But God and Allah are supposed to be merciful, and why should such a being make us suffer infinitely for doubting Jesus? Isn’t it in their capacity to give us limited punishment?

And why would God allow someone else to die horribly for sins supposedly committed by others? What kind of sense does that make? This is one aspect of Christianity that, although apparently universally accepted by theologians, still puzzles me. Under many forms of Christianity, you can be as horrible a person as you want throughout your life, but if, right before you die, you say you accept Jesus as savior, all is forgiven. You get a pass to Heaven. (This is, of course, the doctrne of “sola fide”: salvation by faith alone.) And that makes no sense, either. But I’m just a poor evolutionary biologist, apparently unable to grasp the nuances of Sophisticated Theology™.

I have often wondered about why the Christian God demands that we suffer for what others have done, especially for what Adam and Eve did.

However, I must confess to never considering why the punishment has to be infinite and why it can't be limited.

Quote Of Note - Jerry Coyne

"I don’t care if a religious person accepts science and practices their own private faith. The problem is that this acceptance of faith — which means belief without substantial evidence — as a useful means to ascertain truth has invidious social consequences. In my country, it’s opposition to abortion, it’s opposition to gay marriage. Creationism is the least of our worries. It’s this enabling of faith, this untoward respect for belief without evidence, that has caused so much mischief. If religious people just kept to themselves, just went to church, respected the findings of science and a) didn’t teach it to their kids (which I think is a form of child mistreatment) and b) didn’t try to take their religious beliefs into the public sphere and make them law for everybody else, than I wouldn’t care so much. But that’s not the way it is." - Jerry Coyne

Funny And Upsetting At The Same Time

Five things that atheists don’t want you to know:

This is an experiment in PuffHo/BuzzFeed/Thrillist clickbaiting. So, here goes:  “Five Things That We Atheists Don’t Want You to Know About Us.”

If you are curious, then click the above link. It's worth your time. You need to see it, to see what I think is funny. Kudos to Jerry Coyne. I think he might have another career as a humorist specializing in parody.

The reason I think that this is upsetting is because it is all too real.

On the one hand is the fact that some people (too many people) actually believe the five things.

On the other hand is the fact that there are way too many internet sites that use all kinds of gimmicks to try to get people to their site, and click, click, click... Sites like these make me run, not stay. (10 Things To Improve Your Sex Life.) I don't bookmark them. I really hate the techniques that they use. Jerry Coyne mentions three sites. There are probably thousands and things seem to be getting worse. Thank Ceiling Cat for Mr. Coynes site. It tends to be very civil there, and it actually has words that you can read. Lots of them. I don't know how he does it.

Let's set content aside for a moment. There are some horrible religious and right-wing sites out there. I mean this from a design perspective. Pop-up crap, java-script crap (I don't go to marketwatch.com anymore because without java-scipt all you see is a blank page), ads and other stuff that gets in the way so much it becomes hard to find the content. Another thing that is irksome are pages that refresh every half second. Also all kind of moving things that take your attention away from everything else. I find it hard to read when something on the page is moving. Things slide out from the side, and things slide out from the bottom. This is all very annoying to say the least. When I look at the content I tend to think that it's all crap as well, but that's another story.

Many religious and right-wing sites are full of ads that simply promote themselves. As an example try Anne Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. Gee, you would think that the world revolved around them.

Try religionnews.com or rightsidenews.com to see an example of an annoying pop-up that wants you to subscribe to them. To be fair religious and right-wing sites are not the only ones to do this.

I wonder how many people are driven away from a site because of its bad design?

How did Google ever become successful without all of this crap, I'll never know.

Other than mine, do you have a unfavorite crappy site suggestion that fits this description?

Quote Of Note - Jerry Coyne

"The way to move US democracy forward is to embrace Enlightenment values and battle the intolerant and authoritarian morality of right-wing Christians." - Jerry Coyne

Quote Of Note - Jerry Coyne

"Religion isn’t a search for truth, but a search for confirmation of what you were taught, what you want to believe, or what you find emotionally fulfilling." - Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne On Atheists, Antitheists, And Humanists

Self-abasing atheist at the Guardian calls atheism is a “leap of faith”:

Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence.

In general I agree with Oluo’s thesis that atheism usually jibes with a liberal outlook. Many conservative political views derive at bottom from religion. And there’s a lot of evidence that religion is often an outgrowth of social injustice: the heart of a heartless world. Ergo, if you’re an antitheist and want to work towards the abolition of faith, one way to do that is to improve the lives of the impoverished and dispossessed.

But not all atheists are antitheists, and not all of them accept the connection between social well-being and nonbelief. Atheism is simply the refusal to accept supernatural deities, and there are plenty of conservative atheists. The view that this life is all we have, and that we should help our fellow creatures, is not atheism but humanism.

Religion Poisons Political Rhetoric

"In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." - Jerry Coyne

Religion poisons progress.

If a person can believe in something without any proof, it follows that they can believe in anything without any proof. A large group of people such as these form the basis of the Republican Party. They believe in anything that they want to believe in. Logic and proof are not a necessary part of their thinking, hence their thinking is incredibly limited. Black and white, zeros and ones, on and off; no grey areas exist for them. Abortion is "baby killing", climate change is not man-made, birth control is wrong, marriage is between a man and a woman, and on and on. Flexibility and compromise are non-existent. They think that they are always right.

Republicans are not reasonable people because so many of them are religious. Reason and religion are like oil and water. Religion defines the current Republican Party. It defines the issues they consider to be important. It defines what and who they will vote for, and the rest of us be damned for wanting a world that isn't so medieval.

Just look at some of today's headlines:

Fiorina makes distortion of Planned Parenthood a centerpiece

Abortion, birth control, race top Supreme Court's agenda

Vatican fires gay priest on eve of synod

It looks like Pope Francis is not so liberal and progressive after all. It looks like he is judgemental after all.

To true progressives and liberals these issues are not political issues at all. In fact they are all legal in the United States. They are only political issues because Republicans force them to be issues. Somehow these issues become more important than murders, crime, infrastructure needs, poverty, pollution, etc. I think that all of us would like the world to be a better place. It is therefore ironic that the Religious Republicans impede many solutions that could do just that.

Belief trumps logic in the minds of the Religious Republican. Debate and discussion become totally useless. Evidence, science and logic become totally useless. In their minds they are always right. They are proud of their idiotic arrogance. They are not content to live in a country that allows them to have their beliefs. They want to legalize their beliefs so that the rest of us are forced to be like them.

They believe that religion is what makes America great. I believe that the Enlightenment is what makes America great, and never the twain shall meet.

Because we are a democracy, a large number of Religious Republicans can make the United States a hellish place to be for the rest of us. 

As E.O. Wilson says, we have become dysfunctional.

"I’m not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems." - Jerry Coyne

"For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent." - Jerry Coyne

"But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has." - Jerry Coyne 

Just read Faith vs. Fact, for god's sake.

Fascinating Information From Jerry Coyne

The correlation of high religiosity in America with everything bad:

In fact, there’s substantial evidence that worsening social conditions, irrespective of politics, have a profound effect on religiosity. When income inequality fluctuates in the U.S., so does religiosity—in the same direction, but a year behind. That implies that when people feel worse off than they did before (and income inequality is a biggie in terms of how people feel about their social well-being), they become more religious. There is also  striking correlation among First World countries between social dysfunction and increased religiosity, in the same direction (more successful societies are less religious).

Quote Of Note - Jerry Coyne

"It’s a vision that there’s nothing beyond the laws of physics and matter. Whether you find that bleak or not depends on your psychological constitution. Are people in Scandinavia or France dragging their heels with their heads down because they find a life without God bleak? No. In fact, you could make the opposite claim. For many Muslims fun is not allowed. Music is prohibited. I would find that kind of life far bleaker than a life without God."

Faith vs. Fact

Sam Harris has posted an interview with Jerry Coyne.

I'm slowly working my way through Faith vs. Fact. So far I like it very much.