Hokum-Balderdash Assay

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

--Sam Harris

Darksyde of Unscrewing the Inscrutable has just written a kickass piece on skepticism-atheism. Go savor it, folks.

One wonders why the friggin religionists just don't/can't get it.

By way of God is for Suckers:

If you insist upon disbelief in God, what you must say is, "Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that there is no God." Owing to a lack of knowledge on your part, you don't know if God exists. So, in the strict sense of the word, you cannot be an atheist. (Why the Atheist Doesn't Exist)

Hey, no problemo. And here are some other statements--just a smattering among a huge plethora--that we shouldn't forget to declare either:

* Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that there are no giant red, white and blue striped zebras with gills and wings living in the North Pole. But in the strict sense of the word, I cannot be a red-white-and-blue-winged-and-gilled-North-Pole-Zebra disbeliever.

* Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that Zeus, Shiva, Quetzalcoatl, and the thousands of other deities of the world do not exist. But in the strict sense of the word, I cannot be an a-Zeus, a-Shiva, a-Quetzalcoatl, a-any-deity-of-the-world.

* Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But in the strict sense of the word, I cannot be an a-FSM. In my limited knowledge of reality it may be that His Noodliness is real and that Pastafarians are right.

* Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that there are at present no invisible aliens fiddling with brain and body and making me do things and think in a certain way against my will. But in the strict sense of the word, I cannot be a disbeliever in unseen ETs poking around with my mind and body.

Let's hope Ray Comfort will dutily chant the above as well.

And for his sake, having limited knowledge at present, and having no hard evidence whatsoever that his deity and his vaunted supernatural realm exists, in the strict sense of the word, he cannot go about saying they exist. To be true to the facts he should proclaim, "Having no substantive evidence whatsoever, I nevertheless choose to believe in something as ridiculous and childish as a world outside the universe, a realm populated by non-natural, non-material entities, and to believe in such irrational things as incarnation and resurrection."


And to tackle Comfort's article title: He's muddling the divide between two types of atheism. "Weak" atheism doesn't claim the supernatural does not exist. Such atheists say they have lack belief in the supernatural, just a Christians lack a belief in Greco-Roman deities. "Strong" or "positive" atheism, on the other hand, does claim that gods do not exist. The strong atheists have their reasons. But as Sean says the burden of proof is squarely on the shoulders of religionists to provide evidence--a Flood of them--to buttress their vacuous belief. Right now all they have is faith.

Atheism is the rational position. Why believe when we don't have a shred of evidence for the empirical reality of the supernatural? "Proportion your belief to the evidence," admonishes Hume. No evidence? Then invest not an ounce of your heart and mind in it.

But believers don't believe in the value of evidence. They believe in faith--belief without evidence. And the stronger a person's faith the louder they cheer. Believers are a-evidentialists.

Had been holed up in a hospital for the last five days for possible dengue (H-fever). All the while Jesus watched over me. Through the glass windows of my room (upper section of the wall) I could see that He was omnipresent and was on a 24-hr watch over the other patients too. Hanging above my room's door jamb was a cross upon which he was securely impaled. Whether he was in his last hours of agony or had already expired, I'm not sure. All I know is that Jesus saved my life.

During my first two nights I had a bad case of chills. I had already shut off the airconditioning, had mummified myself with two blankets, had socks on and a sweater spread over my chest (couldn't wear it because of the IV line in my left hand). But my innards were still shivering. I radioed the nurses and desperately pleaded with them for even just ten minutes of their body heat. But no warm-blooded 20-year old female medic ever arrived to save me. Losing hope this atheist turned religious. I thought if I could gather enough crucifixes Jesus would without doubt come to my aid. So, in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably, the delirious but stealthy soldier in me went room to room taking down all the crucifixes I could find. I took them back to my room and laid them in a pile in front of me. Sure enough, moments later I saw the light of Jesus and felt his warmth begin to envelope me. I held my open hands in front of me in reverential pose to soak up as much Jesus as I could. A few minutes later I felt the shivering die away.

And that was how Jesus saved me. Praise the Lord. But maybe I have to thank St. Lady Luck too since even as there were sprinklers on the ceiling there were no smoke detectors in my room.

The story goes that during the opening of the Second Vatican Council when participants asked what the purpose of the Council was, Pope John XXIII quietly walked over to one of the windows of the Vatican and opened it, letting in a breath of fresh air. "Aggiornamento" was the term he used to describe the Council.

In my case, I imagine that when a supernaturalist starts talking about his or her deity, about that god's will and purpose for humankind, about why I should accept the deity into my life, about paradise to come after I've kicked the bucket, I would quietly move over to a window and throw the woowoo out, exclaiming, "Defenestratio!"

It's been two years since Randi made clear his thoughts and stand on religion. It's an article worth rereading each year.

An excerpt:

[I]t was the incredible stories I was told, that really made me rear back in disbelief. For examples, they told me, some 2,000 years ago a mid-East virgin was impregnated by a ghost of some sort, and as a result produced a son who could walk on water, raise the dead, turn water into wine, and multiply loaves of bread and fishes. All that was in addition to tossing out demons. He expected and accepted a brutal, sadistic, death — and then he rose from the dead.

There was much, much, more. Adam and Eve, they said, were the original humans, plunked down in a garden to start our species going. But I didn't understand, and still don't, that they had only two children, both sons — and one of them killed the other — yet somehow they produced enough people to populate the Earth, without incest, which was a big no-no! Then some prophet or other made the Earth stop turning, an army blew horns until a wall fell down, a guy named Moses made the Red Sea divide in two, and made frogs fall out of the sky….

I needn't go on. And that's only a small start on one religion! The Wizard of Oz is more believable. And more fun.

The title of his article says it all. Call me a copycat but I cannot but echo Randi. I too am a vociferous bright, and I cannot fathom how it is that much of the world is under the spell of supernaturalism and other weird beliefs.

What amuses me is that the majority of people worldwide do not describe themselves as atheistic, and yet out of the hundreds or even thousands of supernatural entities that humans have acknowledged to exist and have paid homage to, most of these same people are atheistic toward 99% of them. In fact a good number believe in but one--just one--out of an encylopedia of gods and goddesses. Now just because I believe in one less deity than they do I am stigmatized. So I tell them, Hey, there are a thousand deities out there that both you and I don't believe in, and you're damning me just because I fail to fall on my knees before the one god that you do believe in?

Yet another indication that the books of the Bible are not some deity's words is that the people who wrote the Old Testament believed the earth was flat. Thus, for instance we read the phrase "four corners of the earth" in Ezekiel 7:2 and Isaiah 11:12. Only a civilization that perceived the world as nonspherical, as having nonparallel edges (and hence the existence of corners) could've invented this idiom. It could not have, for instance, taken root in our time since talking about the planet's corners is nonsensical. Quite simply, inadequate knowledge of the shape of the planet by early civilizations led to erroneous belief.

But if God were in fact the creator of the universe including our home planet and had revealed various truths to his prophets, why didn't He tell them the simple fact that the earth is round? Or why didn't He correct any misperception by His people? Isn't it truly perplexing if not downright silly of a deity who is said to be omniscient and for whom a thousand centuries is but a blink to incorporate this egregious mistake in what supposedly is the record of His Eternal Word? If His Word is meant for all people for all times even those to come in the next ten thousand million years, wouldn't it have done Him well to at least get the facts about His own cosmos straight, not least so that future science-savvy societies (like ours) which will read His Word will not upon coming upon this glaring error doubt Its efficacy, and instead infer by Its very perfection that It probably is a supernatural being's pronouncements?

Evidence upon evidence upon evidence suggests that the Bible is merely a collection of writings by humans who lived a long long time ago, humans who were high on superstition and mythic reification, humans who were patently unscientific and did not demand good evidence to substantiate claims about the supernatural. That the supernaturalism mind virus that infected those people several millennia ago has survived practically unmutated and undiminished in its pathogencity throughout the history of civilizations may be attributable to an innate susceptibility of humans to irrationality, or perhaps can be blamed on the relative weakness of our faculty for critical thought which, as a number have said, has to be learned and developed. If our proclivity for fantasy--of which supernaturalism is an example--is genetic in nature then it may be a long time coming before our species develops, so to speak, an immunity from SMV.

Given the lack of good evidence to the contrary, let the pertinent capitalizations I have made above be demoted to lowercase, for there is no case for the facticity of the supernatural. It is time to dismiss it.

Just learned of Universism. A religion started just a few years ago by Ford Vox of Alabama. Some definitions from the site:

"Universism is the world's first rational religion."
"Universism is a progressive natural religious philosophy celebrating the mystery surrounding us."
"Universism is a faithless religious perspective in which the individual strives to perceive the universe as it really is."

Some very beautiful words by Carl Sagan from his hospital bed some ten years ago:

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

Go read the rest of Carl's words


In his intro to the chapter "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Sagan expressed something very personal, and at the same time something that all of us have felt or still do feel:

My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are--really and truly--still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them on up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me--no matter how childish it sounds--that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask." The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care."

... [T]here's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. (Demond-Haunted World, NY: Ballantine, 1996 p. 204)

I know how you felt Carl. And I know that like you I cannot, even if it will bring eternal succor, believe that an afterlife awaits our loved ones and ourselves. We choose to live with the pain that comes with the acceptance that nonbeing is irrevocable, that life really and truly ends.

We miss you Carl. We miss you terribly.