Atheist Revolution has a post this morning on the debate over where the US government should pray before governing. Needless to say, he is against it.

Dr. Jim is also against the practice as it is in found in some levels of government in Canada. Vehemently opposed to it, in fact. As A.R. points out, it is not a simple, neutral tradition, but carries a lot of implications for imposing belief on others. A.R. and I also agree that “generic” prayers are just as bad as sectarian ones, although a lot more fun.

Here is my go at one.

i Our parent(s) and/or legal divine gaurdian(s) and/or designated, covenanted or otherwise contractually obligated divinity, quasi-/semi-divinity, and/or spiritual and/or ancestral entity and/or alien-life-form and/or abstract cosmic principle(s) and/or Pasta.

ii Who art in any one or more of the following: Heaven, Underworld, deep caves, bottom of the sea, tops of various mountains, Planet Zorg, Ipswich (UK), or any other abode, place, domicile or sphere.

iii Hallowed be thy no-name.

iv Thy Kingdom / Queendom / Hermaphrodom / Androgydom / Neuterdom come, but not in that sense.

v Thy will or unconscious workings of cosmic order be done on Earth and/or other planets/planes/dimensions as it specified, indicated, implied or insinuated in verse 2.

vi Give us (please) or otherwise empower us to have fair access to (at a fair price) our daily bread, rice, maize, noodles of assorted sorts, taros, yams, gruel, donuts, hamburgers, additional yams as required, bacon, free-range chickens, tasty mammals, cheetos, and/or walruses according to our individual preferences and cultural traditions, respecting, of course, our respective taboos (i.e., don’t worry so much about bacon for the folks in the Middle East, they’ll get by).

vii Forgive us our trespasses and unseemly loiterings, and other breaches of religious law, custom, or ethical standards, and for simply being such easy targets when thou art in a bad mood, as we decide to put up with other folk being bastards towards us.

viii Neither lead, command, direct, tease or cajole us into temptations or otherwise acting like jerks.

ix In the very least, deliver us from evil, violence, cruelty and so on, including taxes, although a damn good smiting of the bastards inflicting it may, at times, be more appropriate than a simple deliverance. Nip the problem in the bud, we say.

x For thine is the monarchy or polity of some another form; the power (although the Unitarians remain free to differ on this point), and the glory and street cred, for ever and ever until we redefine you differently.

Agender (unspecific).

Technorati Tags: god, religion, church+state, government, prayer, invocation, blessing, freedom+religion, Lord’s+Prayer, atheism, secularism,

READ THE FULL ENTRY AT ATHEIST REVOLUTION

For a variety of reasons, some Christians erroneously insist that atheism entails absolute certainty that no gods exist. This reflects either a misconception about the meaning of atheism or another less innocent motive. In fact, atheism does not require any particular level of certainty. All it requires is the failure to affirm belief in some sort of god(s).

Consider each of the following two questions for a moment, and notice the important difference between them?

1. Do you believe in some sort of god or gods?
2. Are you absolutely certain of your answer to question #1 to the degree that you have no doubt whatsoever that your answer is correct?

Only one of these questions is relevant to atheism. I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t the second one. Okay, that is not really fair. Both are relevant, but only the first is necessary to classify someone into the mutually exclusive categories of theist and atheist.

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The question can be phrased a variety of ways:

• If you believe in prayer, why do you have insurance?
• If you believe in prayer, why do you invest?
• If you believe in prayer, why do you have a burglar alarm?
• If you believe in prayer, why do you see a doctor?

The crux of the question is simple: If you truly believe that prayer works – works in the sense that your god intervenes in your life – why do you not behave as if you believed it?

If “prayer works” means nothing other than the act of praying makes me feel better, I do not disagree. But if it means anything more than that, then those advocating the wonders of prayer should have no need for the reality-based alternatives to which they cling. And if it does not always work, work completely, or only works on the small matters, then what does this say about your god?

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Vjack at Atheist Revolution gives theists a way to convert atheists to belief in God in his post, How to Make Atheists Believe in God.  Amusing piece worthy of our attention.  Here is an excerpt.  

Let me say at the outset that this is not a challenge, a demand for evidence, a call for miracles, or anything of the sort. I pose no grand test for believers to meet, nor do I intend this as a trap for the dimwitted. There is a very simple way that atheists can be persuaded to believe in god, and I will reveal it in this post. If those who call themselves religious ever want to defeat the big bad atheism once and for all, this is how to do it. Just realize that it will come at a bit of a price.

To persuade an atheist to believe in god, all one has to do is define “god” so broadly that it cannot possibly be doubted. …

…

The religious could claim every prominent scientist as one of their own if they would merely expand their definition of god and jettison that little matter of the supernatural.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_—–____——-__–__-_-_ HT: The Atheist Revolution

Now that Washington State has approved the addition of a Festivus pole to the holiday display at the state capitol, I think we can properly hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on our metaphorical air craft carriers. Yes, combat operations have ended in the so-called “Christmas wars.” Of course, atheists can only join the celebration as observers since we were never actually involved in the conflict. In fact, it turns out that the only combatant in this bitter dispute, a handful of dimwitted Christians, have finally achieved victory over themselves. They have made a thorough mockery of the very holiday they were allegedly defending from imagined threats.

At first, nobody objected to the “holiday tree” erected in the Washington State Capitol. However, a handful of thin-skinned Christians soon decided that using the more inclusive term “holiday” was a blow to their preferred religion. They requested the addition of a nativity scene, and with the help of a lawsuit filed last year by the Alliance Defense Fund, their request was granted this year.

The thing is, Washington State recognized that the only legal way to permit a nativity display in a public building would be to permit all other groups to add their own displays. So, in getting their nativity scene, the Christians opened the door to virtually any other sort of display. Washington State deserves credit for understanding the implications of the Establishment Clause.

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With Christmas approaching, some atheists are starting to call on other atheists to be more tolerant of religious belief, nicer to believers, and the like. There may be some real merit in doing just that. But before we all hop on the tolerance bandwagon and convince ourselves that we should shelve our quest for equality this time of year and withhold criticism of an irrational and dangerous belief system, I’d like to offer a few words of restraint.

Do you know what a rape myth is? Briefly, psychological research has demonstrated that male rapists and other men predisposed to sexual violence against women are more likely than the average man to hold erroneous beliefs about male-female interactions, female sexuality, and the like. In non-offender samples (e.g., male college students), the tendency to agree with rape myths has been associated with negative attitudes toward women and more positive attitudes toward violence against women.

If we consider just a few examples of rape myths, these findings will not surprise you.

• “Women secretly enjoy being raped.”
• “Women ‘ask for it’ by their dress or actions.”
• “If I spend a lot of money on our date, she owes me sex.”

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE AT “ATHEIST REVOLUTION”

Vjack talks about his trouble with the facebook setup in a post. Here’s an excerpt:

… I was not sure what to make of the “religious views” line on my profile. Coincidentally, a reader e-mailed me and asked my opinion about this very issue just as I was confronting it myself. She did not want to put “atheist” under religion because she recognized that atheism is not a religion and did not want to pretend it was. This led her to think of simply putting “none” in the space. However, she wasn’t sure she liked this idea much better.

You see … vjack does not think of atheism as a religion.  He explains this in another post.

Thus, an atheist is one who does not believe in a god or gods. Note that “one who lacks belief in a god or gods” is not quite the same thing as “one who believes that there are no god or gods.” This distinction may be subtle, but it is important for reasons I will review below. 

As I have stated elsewhere, “Atheism is not a religion, a philosophy, a worldview, or anything similar. It is not the conviction that there are no gods, ghosts, angels, etc.” Rather, atheism simply refers to the lack of theistic belief. A young child or person living in an isolated community who has never heard of any gods is an atheist. In fact, we are all born atheists because we have not encountered any theistic concepts before birth.

… it is critical to recognize that atheism does not involve the assertion of any belief claim. An atheist is simply an individual who do not hold the theistic belief claim (i.e., that god or gods exist). … When the theist says, “God exists,” we are correct to expect evidence in support of this claim. Without such evidence, the claim cannot be accepted on rational grounds. 

But vjack can’t get away that easy.  You don’t escape the worldview nature of atheism just by stating it’s belief negatively as the absence of theism.  I could say that theism is just the absence of belief in atheism.  If vjack is not ready to assert positively that there is no God, god or gods, he is not actually an atheist, but a skeptic—–someone who doesn’t affirm theism but doesn’t leave out the possibility that God, a god, or gods exists either.  Is Vjack really only a skeptic or does he have strong convictions that belief in God, god or gods is irrational, and therefore that God doesn’t exist?  Based on his definition, he only wants to be considered a skeptic.  But if you just read a few posts on his blog, you will see that he thinks people ought to live as if there were no God.  He’s not simply unsure about whether there is or is not a God, he’s working out the implications of hard-atheism.  

Vjack’s way of defining things is not original.  Atheists have long argued for a distinction between hard-atheism and soft-atheism.  Hard-atheism as belief that there is no God, god or gods, and soft-Atheism as belief that there is no apparent rational reason to believe there is a God, god, or gods.  Either way, vjack’s claim that atheism is not a worldview, then, is unfounded.  Atheism actually demands presuppositions about the nature of knowledge (epistemological presuppositions) to even begin to evaluate whether there is or is not any evidence for the existence of God.  Read the last part of that excerpt again.

When the theist says, “God exists,” we are correct to expect evidence in support of this claim. Without such evidence, the claim cannot be accepted on rational grounds. [italics added] 

Epistemological presuppositions about how we ground true knoweledge is at the very heart of worldview theory and determines the outworking of what one accepts as true, false, right or wrong.  It’s the hinge on which one’s worldview turns.   

Therefore, for vjack to claim atheism is not a worldview may be a sly way of dodging theistic rhetoric, but it is also reveals a glaring logical blind spot.  Atheists tend to pride themselves as rational, but as I see it, they make foundational rational mistakes all the time.  This is one of them: Claiming that atheism is not a worldview when in fact, it either demands that one assert there is no God (which results in a different way of viewing the world as not created by God) or that there is no apparent rational reason to believe in God (which demands a non-theistic epistemology, such epistemologies being at the heart of worldview theory).    

———————————–HT: Atheist Revolution——————————–

VJACK over at atheist revolution had an interesting post about the idea of atheist churches.

There were a lot of interesting reactions and replies to the idea.

I think there has been a serious misunderstanding over the years of reading too much into the word atheist. Many theists continually use the word to imply the “religion” of the unreligious, and many times this use is intended as a derogatory slant toward anyone who doesn’t believe whatever specific dogma they call their own. It is a loaded word with a negative connotation built right into it. It is reminiscent of the Romans calling the early believers of Christ “Christians” or little anointed ones in an effort to slight their belief in a monotrinistic (oxymoron: belief in one trinity god) god.

Many atheists convolute the problem by giving too much importance to the label. Much of this is in self-defense. I know I have certainly found myself having to explain what my definition of atheism is and having to justify it with numerous arguments and posts. It is such a mind-numbing waste of time and energy arguing repetitive points to people over and over. It is necessary, but it takes time away from the more important topic; and that is, what do you center your life around that gives it meaning and value while leading you astray of organized belief in God?

I find I hardly ever dedicate time to this question, which I have read several times in different places and phrases. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in something.

The following is part of my reply to VJACK as to why atheists do not need to compete or mirror their organizations after churches, especially since there are already plenty of worthy, secular candidates to choose from to donate your time and energy to:

I don’t want to get caught up in a theological arms race and waste loads of cash and time that can be better spent by donating to local secular charities and organizations.

The reason why there is not a proliferation of atheist churches is because (at least from my point -of-view) atheism is not the central tennent of their belief systems. It’s already been said, but the only thing the label “atheist” does is let others know one’s stance on religion.

Being atheist is not what is important; it is secondary. What is important are beliefs that different atheists stand for and what their lives are built around, such as teaching, practicing science, medicine, etc.. There are no holy books that must be scrutinized and regurgitated. The closest atheists come to dogma is learning how to think critically and rationally and the scientific method and peer-review. Those things are there for our education, not for worship.

The punny guy that I am, I do find the idea of “atheist churches” to be attractive from the perspective of irony and ridicule. But it is not worth the problems it will cause by adopting the idea, no matter how comforting some of the social aspects are of belonging to a church. Even if most atheists are by metaphor black sheep that have been led astray of the flock, there is always some comfort in simply talking with like-minded people in a brick-and-mortar building no matter how effective and helpful the internet freethought community may be.