More silliness from the Dawkins forum, from my series of sermons. This one was much misunderstood at the time!

In this, the second of my Sunday sermons, I would like to take a moment to thank you all for the stunned silence which met my first sermon. At least I would like to think it was stunned silence — I suspect in reality it was either utter indifference, or an unwillingness to sit through a lengthy exposition. With these thoughts in mind I will now ask Mr Grimble on organ to play “Anarchy in the UK“, and for us to reflect deeply on the moving sentiments of that 20th century divine, the Rev. J. Rotten.

Thank you, especially to the choristers whose enthusiastic moshing brought a tear to my eye, especially that low aimed kick from Scrubbage minor. Let us proceed…

This evening, as we have all just witnessed, I received a right kick in the balls. And as I reeled around clutching my testes (and let us not forget testament derives from the same root, from the Roman custom of swearing veracity upon the testicles: still I know many of you know this for i have frequently heard you refer to the New Testament as “bollocks”, a knowledge fo ancient linguistics I find surprising in this remote village, but which assures me of your intellectual fervour and that my sermonizing has some effect… anyway, I was moved to think by Scrubbages attack on my manhood, “how often in life do we need a sharp metaphorical kick in the nads; and how often do we receive it without asking.”

Now it is fashionable these days to decry old fashioned notion of good and evil, and to pretend that evil and sin simply do not exist. How can such nonsense persist in a culture filled with learned scientists, dedicated to truth and rationality? Empirically i can assure you that sin and evil exist – for evil even now dwells within my nads, a nagging ferocious pain, and the look of ferocious malice and delight on Scrubbages face as he kicked me left me no doubt that he has a black sadistic soul, and a sadistic streak which would put the divine Marquis to shame: in short that he is exactly of the normal character of choir boys everywhere. If there is one error popularly ascribed to Rome I can have no understanding of, it is the often claimed propensity of their priests for choir boys. I doubt it can be more than a myth, as would anyone with even passing acquaintance with the breed who sing here.

Now does any here doubt the existence of evil? Scrubbage will deliver empirical evidence to your satisfaction, if you would care to come forward? He has a most excellent right boot? No? Why are my altar calls so unpopular these days? Very well, let us proceeed…

It would be easy for me to administer my wrath upon the unfortunate Scrubbage, were it not that I too was once a boy, and know that the urge to aim a kick a pompous old balding jackass in a cassock in the balls is one not lightly resisted. This is part of that burden of sin we all face — the urge to do what comes naturally, but what one really should not, for the benefit of others. I don’t care much if you want to spend an evening with the entire Welsh Rugby team high on drugs in a San Francisco bathhouse: what you do in the privacy of your own head is none of my business. Despite rumours about me climbing a ladder to stare in to the voluptuous Edna Nibbins bedroom window, I can assure you what you do in your bed rooms is no concern of mine. Looking at the size of most of you reared on a diet of MacDonalds and super-sized choco milkshakes, oozing out of your Sunday best, buttons straining against cheap polyester even imagining your sex lives renders me nauseous. I’d prefer to develop a mental lens cap when it comes to your vices – solitary, communal, or with the goat, the fetters, and the lard.

What bothers me is when you do not act in a spirit of love, charity and forgiveness. Note I say ACT. You can mentally act like a James Bond Villain for all I care, torturing unfortunates, sleeping with a bevy of beautiful women and winning the Church Bingo four weeks running. If however your actions bring misery upon others, then we have a problem. To think about such things – well it’s none of my business, and who am I to know? Yet to act with malice, to bring about deliberate evil, that is to engage in sin. And the problem with dwelling on evil thoughts is one tends to get rather caught up in them, like a girl trying to work out where her boyfriend was on Tuesday night after the pub, after Chastity Entwhistle gave him a lift home. She thinks and thinks and thinks: Chastity is a slapper, as many here can attest (nods to Chastity), and Brian a Dork – but Fiona’s mind dwells upon it till she calls Chastity a slag in public. Oh how easy it is to sin! See, I just did!

Now we often sin quite inadvertently. and cause misery to others. We should be sincerely repentant, and do our best to make amends – Chastity, did i forget to mention the Miss Joyful Prize for Raffia Work you won this has had the five pound prize replaced with a mini-break to Disneyland? – and we should sincerely ask for forgiveness, which looking at the surly pout on Chastity’s prize haddock face may be some time in coming. Damn! I did it again! Er, Chastity, see me after the sermon…

So why does evil come, when all we desire is good?

SEX.

Yes, you heard me, it’s all down to SEX. And I am deadly serious. For in the act of sexual reproduction, we take on Original Sin, the base mammalian traits and survival characteristics encoded in our Selfish Genes. In short, we act with animal instincts, because we are biological beasties, born through sexual reproduction. And let us never forget the stirring final chapter of the Book of our Prof, in which RD tells us a great truth – that we are by nature, naughty, wicked and inclined to act like irritating little shits, like in fact, choir boys. Yet RD reminds us that we have a true Grace, a chance of Redemption, for we alone of the greater primates (excluding possibly choir boys – I understand one once acted altruistically, a little angel in South Park Colorado called Eric Cartman, though others have expressed doubts) are capable of making moral choices, seeing ahead, and acting for the good of others – in short repudiating our selfish genes, and embracing loving kindness through imaginative sympathy with our neighbour.

Miss Jones! Mr Louder! Not that kind of embracing and loving! there is a place for that sort of thing – its the vestry cupboard, through that little door over there! And yes the flying helmet and the wet stick of celery is imaginative, but not that imaginative – I watched ‘Allo ‘Allo too!

Anyway, lest I drone on till the older members need funerals and someone decides to try and get a discount rate, yes, I can see you yawn. Yes, this is an awful lot like Christianity, and the teachings of Jesus and Paul. Yet if CS Lewis can get a Hollywood blockbuster deal, and so can JRR with his trilogy, well there has to be a place for crypto-Christian messages in todays society. And unlike those gentleman, I’m here and happy to be called a boring old fart and answer back.

Now if we can all sing Hymn no. 23 I fell in Love with a Starship Trooper – I trust you all brought your torches??? – I will just take Chastity outside for some much needed personal catechism.

May Your Mods be With You…

j x

This week’s lecture comes to us from the veritas forum that was held at the University of Indiana. The lecturer is Ravi Zacharias and his topic is Theism and Atheism: Points of Tension. I found this to be one of the best discussions of the the two worldviews and there ramifications. Additionally, the Q&A at the end is very helpful. Click here to listen or download.

(This was posted as a Facebook note a number of months ago. Thanks to the insight of some of the comments left, I think some of the ideas could be tweaked and reworked, but I decided to post it in its original form.)

I decided to do the unthinkable: really dig into Dawkins well-known diatribe against religion in general in Christianity in particular: “The God Delusion.” Just the title sounds utterly scare-the-pants-off-the-Christians-ish. I appreciate what Dawkins has to say, at least some of it, as I do the rest of the New Atheism crowd, but I think the fashion of militant, neo-atheism will die down at some point soon, mostly for three reasons:

1. In the U.S., they’re working against 2,500 years of Western tradition that has shown respect for and integrated religious values and thought into the core of its identity. It’s true that there simply is no modern civilization known past or present that has not had some knowledge of a god or the divine, and practiced forms of religion, but for Western culture, and the United States in particular, this strain is especially strong. Reports of the massive shift towards secularism, or the massive shift towards spirituality come and go, but religion, especially of the Judeo-Christian sort, remains vibrant and strong.

2. Religion, especially orthodox Christianity, is on the rise in other continents, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America (see http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/november/38.46.html?start=2 and http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-jesus-1-1-webjun22,0,2458211.story) Many Christian pastors and theologians predict that the center of Christian thought and activity will soon move away from America into a different continent. The new atheism simply isn’t something people are listening to in these continents, where people are seeing the tangible, transformative results of deep, orthodox Christianity. Even more amazing is the agreement of some atheists that this surge is both positive and to be encouraged! (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece – this article is particularly intriguing). The people in these countries are being confronted with a Christianity that is real, challenging, and satisfying, and not the sleepy American brand of “Jesus helps you feel good about yourself.” Moreover, some of these countries have been sitting in the muddy puddle of Communist atheism, and have seen enough of it to know it’s something not worth having… I don’t think the new atheists have the means to fight this battle worldwide.

3. But the biggest problem, and one that none of the new atheists seems to address sufficiently is: how exactly to we go about imposing this new atheism? What is unique about “new” atheism is not that they argue religion is bad, or belief in God is irrational. People have been saying that since the Enlightenment. What is new is the insistence that even tolerance of religion or respect for religion is bad, even dangerous, and should be banned. But how do the new atheists plan on implementing their goals for society, without falling into a vicious cycle of degrading, demeaning, and ultimately oppressing religious members of society?

Religion will not die easily, as is seen in the case of Christian persecution throughout the ages. A systemic removal of religion would not be as simple as a subtle shift towards educating children in schools that religion is wrong, or implementing new federal laws banning religion and its voice. Historically, that just hasn’t worked. The only solution would be one that absolutely disrupts civil order and reeks of the immense evils of previous Communist and tyrannical civilizations: oppress and exterminate religion by exterminating its adherents. This can be the only realistic way to implement the change the new atheists seek. And it’s one that no one is willing to argue for (yet) or stand by and watch happen. This is one of the most particular reasons I find the new atheist books dishonest: they simply don’t deal with the practical implications of their arguments, in terms of how they would look fleshed out in society. The rhetoric and demeaning attitude of new atheism towards any kind of religion is a recipe for civil and societal disorder and chaos, not enlightenment and freedom from dogmatism.

Click here and here to watch two excellent lectures by Oxford scholar, Dr. John Lennox, on the new atheism and morality. The lectures were delivered at SEBTS in March 2008, so I don’t know how long the videos will be available.

If you’re sitting there wondering whether you should take the time to watch, my favorite professor at Southeastern, Dr. John Hammett, says these are the best lectures he has heard in the 13 years he has been teaching there.

This is a story that will not go to sleep.

As soon as I had written about the sad and strange case of Major Hasan, now fading because it seems evident we are dealing with a culturally disconnected man, disturbed by private demons, I closed Karen Armstrong’s book A Case for God vowing never to waste another dime on her cooked to publisher’s order histories.

I do not know if this is her twelfth or thirtieth book, and it does not matter. They are the work of someone who finds it impossible to think things like religion through and as a result finds it very easy to write about religion.

It is easy to pan her prose. The conservative religion journal First Things marveled recently at her “selective compassion” but was more direct about her ignorance of history and theology:

Among people who know nothing about religion and don’t care much about factual information (an unfortunately large demographic), Karen Armstrong has become something of a sensation. But for those who think that claims about religion, ethics, or history should have some grounding in reality, Armstrong is considered an embarrassment.

And the superb Hugh Fitzgerald in The New English Review said

For Karen Armstrong history does not exist. It is putty in the hands of the person who writes about history. You use it to make a point, to do good as you see it. And whatever you need to twist or omit is justified by the purity of your intentions—and Karen Armstrong always has the purest of intentions.

This positioning is aforethought, naturally. “Religion,” bigly conceived, she seems to have learned as a nun with specific Jungian inclinations, is what God gave us in the form of religiousness with the idea of him in it.

That makes any specific denomination or faith a little too cramped to accommodate the Great Idea, the fundamentally noble truth, that all religions imperfectly embody. Welcome to the World Parliament of Religions, circa 1883. It’s all about goodness, compassion, but never about religion in a specific cultural location with specific and much smaller ideas called dogmas.

She dredges up nineteenth century ideas of the centrality of God (read: golden rule) to human experience, superimposes these features on her reading of the world religions, and then finds it remarkably easy to identify the compassion gene in each of the world’s great faiths. She is quoted approvingly by all dialogists who think that those of us who see religion as being at the heart of some of the world’s intractable problems are just plain wrong.

She is annoying and convincing, appealing to every soul that twinkles in the light of naïve ignorance.

A featured essay in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine gives us vintage Armstrong in an essay called “Think Again: God.” In it she creates a series of propositions and then “refutes” them not with argumentation but attitude and cliché.

It is a doubly disappointing performance because the propositions aren’t bad, though loosely strung beads of different colours, and deserve more thought and attention than Armstrong gives them.

The answers seem almost contrived to be dismissive rather than profound, written in the “Of course this isn’t true” mode of a neo-scholastic–and (more tragically) seem to have the work of the New Atheists in view.

The entire essay, without meaning to be sly, is in the style of a Dominican lecturing her class on missing the most obvious questions in their catechism.

A few trying examples will suffice:

God is Dead. No, she says, not even if Richard Dawkins and Nietzsche say he is.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.

I don’t disagree with the bit about meaning. Who could? It is seductive, and who doesn’t like a little meaning with their tea?

But the undefended suggestion that God (or belief in God) supplies ample meaning for the citizens of the modern world causes me to tremble. –Because even if this is so for religious folk, what would that “meaning” consist of if not a self-referring ego-worship as Feuerbach (whom she’s apparently never read) announced a century and a half ago? Doesn’t meaning have a little to do with reflection, wisdom, education, creating human values, including constructs like God and systems of religion?

God and politics don’t mix. Don’t believe it she says: “Theologically illiterate politicians have given God a bad name.”

It is a familiar and troubling (and increasingly popular) idea that the problem that looks like religion in the world of politics and society is not religion, but bad theology. She then quotes the electioneering slogans of presidents like John Kennedy and Barack Obama–men made nervous by faith but politically clever enough never to appear to reject it–as proof that religious faith “binds people together.”

Exactly. That binding is what got us the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, the Holocaust, 9-11 and gets hundreds of spiritually hungry and far-from-theologically-illiterate Muslims killed every year through no fault of their own by their fellow citizens in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Brushing these things aside as brief distractions, she strides to her next and related point.

God breeds violence and intolerance. If your pulse has raced with approval at the vintage 1971 American NRA (National Rifle Association) bumper sticker used by advocates of assault weapons to hold on to their weapons, “Guns don’t kill, people do,” you will have some sympathy for her answer, which is essentially the same: “No, humans do.” But one wonders about all those worthies, patriarchs, prophets and, yes, even nuns who heard the voice of God and did, or almost did, hideous things at his beck and call, beginning with Abraham. I suppose none of that had anything to do with religion.

Savvy religion scholars have been commenting for a decade (I know I have) on how the central myth of Christianity requires us to believe that God required the violent death of his own son in order to restrain himself from another act of more general violence against the whole of sinful humanity—a repetition of the first global homicide perpetrated against Noah’s generation. Do any of the religions she can name lack a concept of judgment, sin and retribution?

Perhaps Armstrong believes we should not take such stories seriously. But then we have to ask, what is to be done with the rubbished tales of Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition? And do we then end up with a mute and indistinct God who is not violent because he has never spoken, never acted, and may not exist. Clearly Armstrong doesn’t wish to go there. That’s where the atheists are having coffee. So she goes here instead:

As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you.

Without challenging whatever she may mean by “balance,” Armstrong, more fundamentally, misses the etiology of religious violence, which is the same as the etiology of religion.

The remainder of Armstrong’s propositions range over whether God is bad for science (not necessarily) or bad for women (yes, at least in those areas where she feels women must have the option of choice, as in the abortion debate).

In general, as we have come to expect, religion is a pretty good thing because Ms. Armstrong does not wish to write about unpleasant things and her readers are bored by facts.

But her responses are careless and uncongealed. She appeals to a “principle of compassion” as the underlying and ancient principle binding religions together. But as Joe Carter writes in First Things, “Where exactly is this ‘ancient principle’ to be found? Isn’t it the case that this principle is a modern invention, often used to provide a less embarrassing interpretation for religious claims that have been held for millennia?” Yes, of course.

This book and the many interviews, pitches and essays by Armstrong that follow from it are final documentation of what many of us have said for a long time: the inexhaustible Ms Armstrong, friend to all religion and true servant of what she thinks of as God, needs to write less and read more. And think about what she reads.

As Hugh Fitzgerald says in his brisk analysis of Armstrong’s twists and manipulation of history (dealing only with her first paragraph in his review), she smuggles in details as she sees fit, making Columbus a Jew (why not, no evidence to the contrary), and religion a psychic need, the real-world effects of which—especially brutality—can be justified as simply misunderstanding its essence.

She can roll history about, she can pull it apart, she can twist and turn it with the same delight exhibited by a two-year-old when a-too-solid block of Playdoh is finally softened up for use by grown-up hands. But the two-year-old is an innocent at play, and even if he leaves a momentary mess, he has done no real harm. Karen Armstrong is not innocent, and manages to do a great deal of harm, careless or premeditated harm, to history. Too many people read that she has written a few books, and assume, on the basis of nothing, that she must know what she is talking about.

I am not sure I ever thought that, but Fitzgerald’s warning is important. This is schlock: a mixture of sloppy history, poor reasoning, wishful thinking and amateur psychology.

Not a “case” for God but a case for not–ever–taking anything written by Ms Armstrong seriously.

In February 2008 (5th – 8th) … Dr Albert Mohler presented the thrust of his book to the Dallas Theological Seminary (a good background to this and a really good explanation of ‘The New Atheism’, exploring very briefly the ideas of the modern scientificic populizers…and their challenges…)

To get your copy of the book…

Dr Albert Mohler’s – “Sermons and Speeches“

To visit Steve Camp’s blog : here

Enjoy your week,

Apologetix

I have so enjoyed and been effected by the book my wife and I are reading, PRECIOUS REMEDIES AGAINST SATAN’S DEVICES, I wanted to post the second device and its remedies. The second device, according to Thomas Brooks, that Satan uses to trick the elect into sinning is, ” By painting sin with virtue’s colors.”

The remedies that he offers are as follows:

1) sin is never the less vile by being so painted.
2) the more sin is so painted the more dangerous it is.
3) we ought to look on sin with that eye with which within a few hours we shall see it.
4) sin cost the life-blood of the Lord Jesus.

I will post each of the remaining devices and their remedies as we read them.

Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God gives the go ahead.  ZJEmptv calls for Christians to end the wishy washiness on the subject of genocide and to unequivocally denounce it.  One would think this wouldn’t be so hard for those who adhere to the tradition that alleges itself the vanguard of moral truth and spiritual advancement. 

So, how about it, my Christian friends, can you say here and now that you condemn genocide in all its forms and for all justifications whatsoever or do you reserve the moral right of genocide for God either in the present or at least in the past?  Where do you stand on this most basic of moral questions?   Is denouncing genocide unequivocally less important to you than preserving the already shaky logical consistency of your admittedly unjustified  faith claims to the divine truth of the Old Testament writings and their general accuracy in communicating the mind and character of God?  And if your opposition to genocide can be so compromised, what does that say about your morality?

(via Dwindling in Unbelief, a fellow Planet Atheism blog)

Your Thoughts?

The New Atheists or scientists, as I like to call them, don’t just have a problem with organised religion. They have a problem with the very concept of faith.

In science’s language, the definition of faith is this – living your life as though human-created stories are real things in the world.

Making concepts real is what faith does, and all concepts, by definition, are human-created. Faith is simply a belief that a belief is real.

I, for example, have faith in the existence of love. I know it cannot be explained as the causal link between two brains or organisms. I know love only exists because I believe it’s existence is real. But I also know that my faith in love, along with everyone elses, is all that keeps love in existence. I could inspect as many brains as I like, and I will not find love, only the brain parts which make the concept possible.

So how can I have faith in something’s being real, at the same time as knowing that it only exists as a concept? Doesn’t this make it an illusion?

This all depends how you want to define reality. There is no absolute rule stating that you have to restrict the concept of reality to exclude concepts. You may choose to believe that there is such a rule, and you can make your arguments around assuming that rule is true, just as many atheists do. That just isn’t a good way to argue (to assume your answer).

Personally, I wouldn’t want my concept of reality itself not be real – for me that would be confusing. If you think it works, let me know how.

So if you allow conceptual as well as material reality in, what then?

Well you have to accept that things like love, happiness, joy, freedom, responsibility and community are real, but only in so much as we believe in them.

Actually, the relationship is much more complex than that, we’re not talking about twinkerbell here. Faith, defined as a belief that a belief is real, is a necessary condition for the existence of our conceptual reality. But the articles of faith still have to acted upon to make them real. It’s no good believing love is real when no-one is actually in love.

Now here’s the crunch. Communal conceptual realities (or you could call them faith communities I guess, or folks that share the same story) that do not include the discoveries of science don’t personally suit me. I’m an atheist, and always have been.

And there is no doubt that literalist religious conceptual systems can cause harm in some cases – the intelligent design lab biologist for example, or the Al Qu’aida bomber. However, most people who believe in concepts that massively contradict material reality – that the world is young, the people go to a special place after death and so on – lead pretty normal lives, considering.

The point is that there is so much more besides, which fits in just perfectly with the material reality, but which still make use of our ability to live our lives within complex and beautiful narratives. Here are just a few examples:

Awe and wonder. Richard Dawkins prefered conceptual reality, built on our emotional (concept) reaction to beautiful(concept) natural (concept) scenes.

Golden Rule. Love thy neighbour. Perfect consequentialist rule of thumb.

Humanism. Ain’t life great. Couldn’t it be great for everyone.

Humanitarianism. Ain’t life shit. Couldn’t it be great for everyone?

Progress. I believe there will be a situation in the future, which could be better or worse depending what I do now.

History. What I am now is because of great-great-great-great-great grandpa’s awesomeness.

Evolution. How brilliant is it that complex life, or life itself, even exists. How great that the ancestors survived and changed.

Freedom. I can do anything.

Community. We can do anything.

Creativity. I can improve the world by making interesting and beautiful things.

and last of all Depth. There are such things as shallow and deep experiences, and the deeper ones are often better.

There are tons more, let me know your favourite.

What does it mean to be an atheist? Is there some special club with weekly dues and funny hats that you must pay and don in order to be a ‘proper’ atheist? Do you have to know a special handshake? What sort of club is this and where is my gin and tonic? I ordered it ages ago. The service here sucks. Oh, wait. No wonder. This is Fuddruckers and not some convoluted atheist circle jerk.

I’m noticing a fairly disturbing trend lately. It seems that we atheists are expected to stick together and lift up anyone else who happens to be an atheist, as well, no matter what other factors might ordinarily inhibit support for them. First, I suppose we should define atheism. All it means to me is a lack of a god belief. Anyone can be an atheist. There really isn’t much to it. There are no codes or bylaws one must adhere to in order to join. There are atheist conservatives, atheist liberals, atheist Jets and atheist Sharks. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that binds us together is a lack of a belief in god.

I’ve never felt the need to support anyone just because he happens to be an atheist. What’s the point? Atheism isn’t a platform. It’s simply a word that helps us identify ourselves and other people who don’t believe in god. It’s a small part of our identity and, if you ask me, atheism is simply a by-product of something I find to be much more important: critical thinking. Without logic and reason I don’t know why anyone would come to the conclusion that there are no gods. That’s why it confuses me when atheists also happen to be conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers. I don’t quite understand how someone can come to one major logical conclusion and then throw reason right out the window in favor of some groundless conclusion. Can atheists have wacky beliefs? Sure. Do I have to respect them for it? Absolutely not.

In short, rules belong to religions. Now bugger off. Here comes my drink.

Cuddles,
Kate

Do New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry turn off more people than they persuade?  I always emphatically argue no and the video below is solid evidence that I’m right.  Before this debate the audience was polled on whether they wanted to support the motion, “The Catholic church is a force for good in the world.”  Before the debate the results of the poll were 678 for the motion, 1102 against, and 346 undecided.  After the debate they asked the audience again and the results were 268 for the motion, 1876 against the motion, and 34 undecided.  That means he dissuaded roughly 410 people who came in favoring the view that the Catholic church was a force for good and persuaded roughly 312 of the undecideds.  (Of course, he may have persuaded more than 410 of those originally for the motion and some of the original undecideds and opposers of the proposition may have wound up for the motion).  In net sum, they gained 774 supporters for their position.

It’s a debate with 5 parts, watch them for yourself, determine what you think of the question in advance and see if you are persuaded one way or the other, and give us Your Thoughts.

(via Atheist Media Blog and special thanks to Sendai Anonymous for putting me on the lookout for this debate to surface online.)

Your Thoughts?

One of the most prominent proponents of Intelligent Design, William Dembski, sums up the theory in one minutes worth of clips from one of his speeches:

The idea comes from a terrific speech on complexity by PZ Myers (which you should really watch in its entirety) from the Atheist Alliance International meeting last month:

Your Thoughts?

Michael Brull exposes exactly the hypocrisy and evasiveness at the core of religious attempts to silence criticism from atheists on the grounds that it’s inherently “offensive”:

Facing a new attack with an international audience playing close attention, religions have as little rational argument in their favour as ever. There was a time when they could deal with dissent through more draconian measures: the kind that can still be practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia. Having lost the power of the gun in the West, apologists of religion have a new weapon: being offended.

Rather than confronting (say) Dawkins’ arguments with counter-arguments, people like Craven, and many others like him, instead cry out: why are you picking on us? All we want is for you to respect our beliefs. And so, the crybaby theists hide behind the demand for respect, which sounds reasonable enough. The more shameless – and their ranks are represented in many religions, such as Muslims, Christians and Jews – complain that when someone criticises their religious faith, the people who belong to that religion are being subjected to abuse.

The bottom line is that such special pleading is a way for theists to avoid answering their critics. The cry that religious beliefs are not being treated respectfully often demonstrates incredible arrogance and hypocrisy.

And an oft overlooked ironic hypocrisy in all of this:

hearing of the need for religious beliefs to be treated respectfully by evangelical Christians is galling. This is a religious faith full of those who believe in the importance of preaching to unbelievers and converting them. Obviously, if they respected the views of atheists and believers in different religions, they would not indulge such practices.

Your Thoughts?

Phil Zuckerman is a sociologist of religion with a particular interest in the irreligious. An atheist himself, he  believes that the non-religious are ‘an important and largely understudied segment of humanity’ (p3). In this book he wants to do something to redress that imbalance, although he has other reasons for writing this book – principally, he wants to argue against ‘certain outspoken, conservative Christians who regularly argue that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity’ (p4). Denmark and Sweden are exhibits A and B in his case against these claims. His case seems strong…Zuckerman spent 14 months in Denmark researching these societies firsthand, and absorbing their vibe and ethos. He begins by citing an array of sociological statistics that indicate how irreligious modern Danes and Swedes are. He then cites another array of measures indicating how healthy these societies are in terms like life expectancy, wealth, crime rates, levels of health care. Denmark and Sweden are shining examples of markedly irreligious societies that Zuckerman describes, from his first hand experience as ‘moral, stable, humane and deeply good.’ (p35)

Zuckerman’s point may be well taken, although he writes principally out of the North American experience and for that audience. Here in Australia we have many affinities with Denmark in our societal attitudes to religion, and the debate over the necessity of committed religious belief for a stable society does not have the same dynamic as in Zuckerman’s home. Indeed it is hardly heard. But Zuckerman’s point should discourage Australian Christians from making a simplistic argument that if people didn’t believe in God they would become thieves and murderers and society would disintegrate in a generation.

That said, it is interesting the degree to which Danes happily inhabit a Christian (specifically Lutheran) moral and cultural inheritance. Danes routinely belong to the state church, marry in church and baptise their children. They routinely think of themselves as Christian, meaning by that that they are ‘good people’ who adopt to some degree the fundamental ethic of love that is a distinctive ruling principle of Christian moral judgement. Here we have the familiar story of the slow collision of Christianity and the Enlightenment humanism that arose in multiform reaction to it producing ‘churches’ that preach liberal Christianity, an odd hybrid of Christianity and humanism. Danes may be atheists, but it seems they are still to a large degree Liberal Lutheran atheists. Perhaps the current peace, prosperity and sanity of Danish and Swedish society owe more of a debt to this deep Christian current flowing through its history than to the organic atheism which has comparatively recently emerged in its wake. Maybe only time will tell on this point, although Zuckerman does address these questions in chapter 6, where he speculates that in fact Danes have never been too pious, and really serious Christianity was just an 18th and 19th century anomaly in Scandinavian society. Is it that serious Christianity is the unstable and fading anomaly, or will ‘organic atheism’ (i.e. grassroots, freely adopted atheism) prove to be an unstable historical anomaly? The polemical possibilities are laid out here: choose your team!

All this aside, I really found the excerpts of transcripts of conversations with ordinary Danish people the most absorbing parts of the book. Zuckerman went around asking ordinary people the big questions of life, and collecting their responses. What do you think about God, about dying, death, and life thereafter, about the meaning of life, and how to live it? What is the place of religious belief and practice in your life? I have mentioned the affinities I think exist between secular Scandinavia, and secular Australia, and so this candid series of insights into how various people live life and make sense of it, from their own lips, was fascinating to me. Zuckerman’s warm affection for the worldview of many of the people he interviewed, and his clear prose style made this book a real page turner for me. The challenge is to learn to address the Christian gospel effectively to people who think like Jens, Anne, Christian, Lene, Sonny, and Gitte (some of Zuckerman’s interviewees). Also interesting was the contrast with US society that came through at the beginning and the end of the book. I’d love Zuckerman to undertake a similar project in Australia.

This book represents an original contribution to the discussion and debates about religion that have arisen after the reinvigorated New Atheists hit the bookshelves. Unlike some others its polemic is civil and measured, and unlike some others it presents a warm and likeable face for irreligion, even if that irreligion is of a generally unexamined, frequently incoherent, type. It is a testimony, I suppose, to the fact that total depravity does not preclude social decency, and the enjoyment of many satisfactions in ordinary life.  Perhaps it is a testimony also of the need for exhortations like those given to Israel in Deuteronomy 8:6-18, which include these verses: “Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” (NIV)

Maybe there is something here to contribute to an understanding of the correlation between peaceful and prosperous societies, and the ‘organic atheism’ that may emerge in their populations.

in last week’s Newsweek, Lisa Miller, the religion editor, of whom I’m not a huge fan in general (though she’s intelligent and mostly reasonable), wrote yet another article on the new atheism and its main leaders, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris (why no Daniel Dennett, the final member of the “four horsemen”?).

I don’t want to discuss her entire article, or some of her specific points, at length, but two of her main points are that these three individuals have unfairly dominated the discussion/debate thus far and that it’s time to move on past the aggression and onto rethinking spirituality, humanism, etc.

regarding the first point, it’s not that these individuals have unduly grabbed a hold of the debate and won’t let anyone else have a turn.  there have been plenty of other books written about atheism — theirs just happen to have been the most successful.  granted, Dawkins and Hitchens were already well known (the former more so, generally) and so there was more attention given to their books, but Harris was virtually an unknown.  he just happened to write two very successful, very persuasive books that caught on.  sure he has done a lot of debating, but he’s also been working on his PhD in neuroscience of some sort and is no media whore.  (by the way, does she know that he doesn’t even like to use the term “atheist”?)

the real reason that they have “hogged” all the attention is simply because people like Lisa Miller won’t shut up about them.  honestly, she’s written at least three or four pieces for Newsweek on them this year already!  and in this vein, you can’t find any broadly appealing piece on the growth of non-religious portions of the country that doesn’t mention “the three” or “the four” (horsemen, that is).  they’ve only been dominating because people like you, Lisa Miller, keep complaining about them.  you are the silver-haired wind in their middle-aged-cracker sails.

and the truth is, she doesn’t appear to have any real clue as to what’s happening in the atheist blogosphere.  there are far louder and much more prolific voices on the internet (PZ Myers comes to mind), and there is a grand variety of atheists out there whose levels of “stridency” and whose views regarding religion vary enormously.  for those atheists concerned more about the undue influence of religion in the public sphere than about winning arguments, there’s Hemant Mehta, your Friendly Atheist.  and then there’s the somewhat overlapping, ongoing debate among professional scientists about how science should relate (or more accurately, how scientists should try to relate science) to religion, aka the “accommodationist” debate.  so here you have a lot of writers, some of whom may be non-religions but that’s irrelevant, who are opposed to the attempts of people like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller to placate moderately religious Americans by claiming that all’s well between science (read: evolution) and religion.  Jerry Coyne is probably the leading (unconquered) writer in this vein.  there are even non-religious writers/scientists like David Sloan Wilson who see atheism and science as types of religions, further muddying the waters.

anyway, the point is, among atheists and agnostics and secular humanists and the like, “the three” are hardly the most active or the loudest voices.  what about writers like Ian McEwan or Victor Stenger?  it’s one of those, “Well, everyone’s talking about them so they must be the most important” things that endlessly perpetuates itself.

the second point, which is a good one, is also problematic when it comes out of Miller’s mouth because, as I hinted at in the last point, there are tons of writers and groups out there for non-religious people who are doing just that — focusing on re-conceiving our notions of ethics and morality and what it means to be “good without god.”  there is the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbyist group, there’s the Center for Inquiry, and there are all sorts of secular student groups and local communities that have been raising their voices and getting media attention lately.  you know all those billboards going up around the country (and in other countries) and needlessly causing a stir?  well, those poster boys have nothing to do with it.

even the first bus campaign in England was started by a hitherto unknown, Ariane Sherine.  sure, Richard Dawkins donated some funds and took a publicity ride, but he joined after the fact.

and what about the Brights?  it’s a designation chosen by non-religious intellectuals who want a more positive take on their outlook, as opposed to “atheist.”  plus, it’s a more proactive way of understanding the world, not just by what you don’t believe, but by how you think the world can and should be understood.  here you find all sorts of very influential intellectuals, include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, yes, but also Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker.  in fact, for many people, atheism implies a secular, naturalistic, humanistic outlook.  (fyi, Sam Harris also dislikes the term “bright”; he is very picky.)

speaking of Sam Harris — the entire latter part of his The End of Faith was about the future beyond faith, exploring new areas of human spirituality that go beyond our inherited traditions!  his book was essentially about the very thing Miller says we should be doing instead of what she accuses him of doing!  Jerry Coyne briefly touches on this here.

finally, moving on to a topic/group Miller does cover, there are various humanistic groups out there, represented in her article by Greg Epstein, Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain.  Epstein is the author of the soon-to-be-published Being Good without God, a topic he is very enthusiastic about.  his approach is an entirely positive one, focusing on what “a billion non-religious people do believe” and helping to create renewed sense of meaning and even (gasp) spirituality among non-religious persons.  he is by far not the only person with this outlook of course.  I think of the ethicist Peter Singer or the author Ronald Aronson, who wrote the influential (and on my wishlist) Living without God, or even the sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who write last year’s popular Society without God (also on my list).

in fact, Germany has had a figure like Epstein for a while now in the person of Michael Schmidt-Salomon, a well-known German humanist writer and apologist (who is associated with the atheist camp though he also avoids the term).  he has worked to try to encourage humanism and take the debate and media flurries surrounding the “new atheism” to a “new humanism” (whence the title of this post).

in any case, I do believe that in the case of the non-religions, any media attention is good attention, as more and more people realize they are not alone in their unbelief (as the billboards proclaim), and that they too have a say in what happens in this country and in this world.  and it has also been (or at least will be) helpful (even if still shocking) for people to realize that there are non-religious persons (even atheists!) all around them, and that’s a good thing.  Schmidt-Salomon talks about this, and uses the wonderful German word “stinknormal” to describe how average these atheists prove to be once people take a look at them (Der Sensationswert des Atheismus verglühte im Scheinwerferlicht und man stellte fest, dass „diese Atheisten“ letztlich auch nur stinknormale Leute sind, kaum geheimnisvoller als Mutti Krause von nebenan.)

and hopefully the public attention will continue to turn and focus on this other side of being non-religions.  it’s not all about put downs and arguments  — it’s also about excitement about what we do know about ourselves and this world, along with how we continue to go about understanding both, and creating room in public discussions about science, ethics, morality, policy, the environment, etc., for those of us who don’t feel the need to appeal to tradition or revelation or supposedly unchanging religious values in order to have a reasonable, fruitful conversation about our future.

Non-Stamp Collector is one of my most favorite YouTube atheists who has provided us with fantastic videos which serve as great content on the blog, so I feel obliged to give his hilarious commercial hawking his new wares some space on the blog in return.  (If you just want to see a regular video and not an ad, I’ve included one below the ad.)

Your Thoughts?

And I guess I’m at risk of repeating a kind of stale critique of my own, if I keep banging on about this kind of thing. To the point of tedium, perhaps?

If I do sound like a broken record, please consider that it’s because I’m describing the track from a broken record that keeps getting far too much air time. Please, defenders of the faith, apologists, get some new material!

Bert Archer, writing for The Star, notes that Richard Holloway is in Toronto for the International Festival of Authors, touting him as a friendly kind of atheist. To me, this is a funny kind of assertion, as Holloway has always struck me as about as atheistic as John Shelby Spong – which is somewhat of an best-guess approximation more than a discrete category. Holloway self-identifies an “expectant agnostic”, which to me speaks of a kind of soft theism, or deism.

Of course, the thing about Holloway “preaching a kinder atheism”, is that it differentiates him from those nasty “neo-atheists” – another group of writers whose self-identification seems to get the hard and fast treatment. Oddly enough, Holloway, from the looks of Archer’s piece, didn’t have anything to say about “neo-atheists”, and much less about Dawkins than what Archer seemed to conclude.

Take this old, oft-repeated track.

“…it’s a Scot named Richard Holloway who reminds us that the certainty of neo-atheism has a lot in common with the certainty of religion.”

(Bert Archer, 2009)

Certainty! Neo-atheism! Two things Holloway apparently didn’t have anything to say about in his interview. Perhaps he did, and maybe we’d have read about it if only Archer would have stopped persecuting the same old line and let more of the article be about what Holloway was doing in Toronto – was his visit in any way related to those strident Hitchenses and Dawkinses?

At any rate, broken records, in addition to being repetitive, are also predictable. Especially if you heard the broken track (tract?) being played over and over.

This is the part of the broken record that seems to be almost uniform across the genre of broken religious apologetics records – you hear “Certainty!” Then someone asks “What certainty? Do you have an example, a quote?” From that point, you get a repetition of the part of the record that plays cicadas chirping, tumbleweeds tumbling and the sound of the wind whistling, sometimes through the apologist’s ears.

If you are going to level an accusation against a group of intellectuals, it really helps to have done two things.

One, to actually collect some evidence. Archer needs to tell us how the “neo-atheists” are acting on certitude. Bare assertion is not enough. Two, to have checked for counter-evidence. Try to falsify your claim before letting someone else do it for you, making you look a bit silly in the process.

Naturally, I’m only too happy to make Archer look silly.

First cab of the rank is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has now his famous 1-7 scale (you have read The God Delusion haven’t you Archer?), where 1 is certitude in your belief in God and 7 is certitude in your belief that God doesn’t exist. Dawkins calls himself a 6.5, saying in interviews (and I paraphrase) that “it’s never a good thing for a scientist to be certain about anything.”

And then there’s Christopher Hitchens, whom Archer brands the same way. Let me explain by way of comparison.

Victor Stenger, author of God: The Failed Hypothesis, claims that traditional gods, those anthropomorphic, interventionist deities are constructed in a way that makes testable claims about the world. The God of the 6000 year old Universe can be tested against the fossil record, amongst other things. Stenger (in God: The Failed Hypothesis), claims that these gods have been falsified by what we already know about the world – “beyond reasonable doubt”, to use his own words from The New Atheism.

This isn’t even that contentious when you consider that many, many Christians have moved away from older God hypotheses for pretty much the same reasons. There’s no point in calling Stenger a certain neo-atheist if what he’s doing (falsifying older God hypotheses) is so similar to what has already been practised by many moderate Christians, or even a less moderate Vatican. It’s empty rhetoric.

Stenger has more recently turned his gaze towards the gods of moderates, especially those taking refuge in quantum theory, which considering that Stenger is a physicist (amongst other things), is not too dissimilar from a geologist or evolutionary biologist pondering the 6000 year old God – even a mainstream Christian geologist or evolutionary biologist.

There are however, still some further epistemic limits to Stenger’s criticisms. His position on deist gods (which in Quantum Gods and The New Atheism, he distinguishes from traditional gods), is that some of them do elude scientific analysis. This isn’t what certainty looks like.

Back to Hitchens. Keeping in mind that Hitchens published a section of Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis in his The Portable Atheist anthology, in response to Tony Jones at the recent Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, Hitchens criticised Stenger’s stance on the question of God’s existence as being over-confident.

How can certainty be less than certain? If Hitchens can take this position relative to Stenger, how then in the absence of evidence to support Archer’s allegation, are we to accept a charge of certitude? I’d say that if you were being honest, you couldn’t. The same goes for the allegation as levelled against Dawkins, and other un-named “neo-atheists”.

And again, what has this got to do with Holloway’s visit to Toronto? It seems to me that Archer has just used the man’s visit, reputation and accessibility as a means to push an oft-repeated, never substantiated and entirely unoriginal piece of posturing that’s been doing the rounds for the last three years.

If it looks like a duck. If it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. An opportunistic, apparently plagiarizing, holier-than-thou duck.

When Holloway gets a word in, and it’s actually tangentially on the topic that Archer has chosen to write about, this is what he has to say.

“If you’re a crusading rationalist, if you think rationality is the ultimate good, therefore, that might make you a missionary. I think Richard Dawkins is a missionary for rationalism. I think that we’re much more complicated than that. I think that we have a level of rationality, but there are dark, brooding things under us as well.”

(Richard Holloway in interview with Bert Archer, 2009)

Which is to say that Holloway has a point of difference with Dawkins. This doesn’t add to what Archer has already said about “neo-atheists”, and it doesn’t follow from this as Archer infers, that Dawkins et. al. “chuck the stuff [they] doesn’t understand”, nor that somehow having “no particular compunction to figure everything out”, is virtuous. Indeed, please do tell me how scientific or moral enquiry are a bad thing!

I think it worth mentioning though, that I believe Holloway is deeply wrong on this point. Having a rational world view is in no way prejudiced against the realisation that humans are complicated and not entirely rational. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, while advocating reason, also recognised the passions of the human mind – something that Holloway should be familiar with, being by a Scot. Indeed, I think Holloway’s Godless Morality could be improved with the inclusion of some of Hume’s observations.

In the more contemporary setting, viewing Dawkins’ proselytism for reason being at odds with the realisation of human nature is frankly absurd. Other primates don’t have the faculty for abstract thought that we do, although they share some of the passions. As an ethologist, Dawkins is forced to view such animal behaviour through a rational discipline, but it doesn’t stop him from making observations about the less reasoned behaviour of apes. Indeed, get Dawkins talking about gorillas, especially rights for gorillas, and you’ll get rational discussion without discounting emotion, galore.

Further to this, from an evolutionary perspective, the observation of instinct is part and parcel of Dawkins’ main contributions to science. Such as the way the observation of kin-selection and altruistic behaviours arose from the genecentric view espoused in The Selfish Gene. Taken to its logical conclusion, this extends to the evolutionary psychology of the human mind and the work of the likes of Stephen Pinker, wherein all sorts of emotional, irrational behaviours are observed in rational contexts.

Neither reason, nor the valuing of reason, lead to a prejudiced appreciation of human nature. It’s not like Dawkins or Pinker (or Dennett or any of the others who are usually pilloried with this false criticism) are arguing for reason to the complete expense of human experience.

Indeed, Peter Singer’s brand of preference utilitarianism, with his recognition of a Darwinian perspective on human nature (which informs human preference), recognises human passions, urges, emotional needs and desires. And in recognising these aspects of human nature, it is a moral system that Dawkins has praised as “logically self-consistent”. (Check the unedited interview between Singer and Dawkins from The Genius of Charles Darwin if you want to see some of the very interesting, and worthy discussion I’m citing – but at 43 minutes of HD YouTube goodness, you’d better be ready with some bandwidth).

While not accusing Holloway of a false allegation of scientism, (of which I am also oh-so-tired of hearing), I think Victor Stenger’s response to the allegation in The New Atheism, contains a response to Holloway’s point of contention, and more so Archer’s use of it.

“The atheist view is not what some believers derogatorily call “scientism,” the view that science is the only source of knowledge. Atheists appreciate the beauty of art, music and poetry as much as believers, along with the joys of love, friendship, parenthood, and other human relationships.”

(The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason, Victor Stenger, 2009)

Or for more appreciation of irrational and counter-intuitive human nature from a rational, Darwinian perspective, one could just direct Holloway and Archer to Dawkins’ ‘Atheists for Jesus‘ essay (for which a discussion between Holloway and Dawkins was inspiration), featured in Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist, right smack-bang before Stenger’s contribution. I’m glad Holloway prefaced his comment about Dawkins with an “if”, and I’d invite him to re-evaluate it.

Really, I don’t think that there’s as much at odds between Dawkins, his ilk, and the likes of Holloway, than Archer makes out. Archer’s take, if not the worst example out there, smacks of re-hashed, unexamined, baseless posturing and frankly, it gets in the way of someone I’d rather be paying attention to (Holloway).

~ Bruce

(HT: Thanks to Martin for the heads-up on the article. You can follow him on Twitter here, or at his blog here. Time to add him to my blog-roll like I promised to do last Friday. Now I’ve just got to finish reading Godless Morality for the third time, and then I can write a review I think I’ve promised.)