1. Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound

Comment #191027 by bluehillside on June 10, 2008 at 6:07 am

Clearly the article is too stupid to bother with.

Possibly useful of the grounds of the useful idiot argument though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot)

If this is the best a (published) theist can come up with, surely the case for theism is shown once again to be hopelessly flawed...

2. Mount Vernon schools to hire investigator in Bible case

Comment #168646 by bluehillside on April 25, 2008 at 8:53 am

"Last week, Middle School Principal William D. White told Freshwater to remove "all religious items" from his classroom.

Freshwater agreed to take down the Ten Commandments, posters with Bible verses and Bibles on a shelf. But he refused to remove his personal Bible from his desk."

Fine - I suggest concerned parents have their kids exrcise the same right and have copies of The God Delusion on their desks.

3. Blasphemy

Comment #122511 by bluehillside on February 5, 2008 at 11:21 am

Just fyi, the Independent newspaper here in the UK has been running a campaign on this issue. Here's a link:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/save-pervez-global-protests-to-save-afghan-student-from-death-sentence-776783.html

4. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #118863 by bluehillside on January 31, 2008 at 5:01 am

As per RD's comment in a recent posting, how about...

BLASPHEMY:


THE VICTIMLESS CRIME

5. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #118002 by bluehillside on January 30, 2008 at 7:42 am

Thanks for the kind comments oisha. As for your sign, how about:

NON-GULLIBLE HOUSEHOLD:

NO SNAKE OIL SALEMEN,
GET RICH QUICK MERCHANTS OR
BIBLE THUMPERS

Just a thought.

If Will Young is out there, do you fancy having a go at producing the airport sign? Might just be popular (I'd like one anyway!)

Best wishes.

6. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #117510 by bluehillside on January 29, 2008 at 2:13 am

Hello oisha - and thanks for your measured response. There's much common ground between us, but also some points of disagreement that are worth fleshing out a little.

Yup, as you say, Darwin's work had (and still has) monumental implications for religious belief and, so far as I can tell, those implications are all negative. As I've suggested in previous posts, any celebration of his works is inherently therefore a restatement of (some of) the arguments against religion, albeit less obviously so than a direct critique of religious belief.

In other words, celebrating Darwin and taking the mickey out of religious ideas are on the same spectrum of criticism, albeit with different degrees of explicitness.

You comment that ridicule has its place, and I couldn't agree more. From the graffiti of the Greeks and Romans, through the scurrilous cartoons of the 17th & 18th century up to the humour of those oppressed by political ideologies (old Russian joke: A - did you hear that someone broke into the offices of the Politburo last night? B - really, was anything stolen? A - yes, next week's election results!) and more recently too (eg Mel Brooks's point re "The Producers" that the best way to debunk and take the fear out of dictators is to ridicule them) there's a respectable argument that humour/satire has as much or more effect on the beliefs of the general population than any number of serious polemical works.

Here's where we disagree though: all of the examples I've given attack the ideologies by attacking the authority figures who propound them (emperors, kings of England, communist leaders, Hitler) rather than those who have been duped or strongarmed into subservience to them. You'll notice that the suggestion I made for e-cards/T-shirts etc do just the same - I suggested clerical figures as objects for ridicule, not the believers who follow them.

Are those authority figures less "evolved"? Well, many I'm sure can't believe their luck in hitting on a racket that preys on the gullibility of their followers and thereby gives them authority, respect and wealth. These people deserve every bit of opprobrium we can throw at them in my view (cf Chaucer's especially fierce attack on the Pardoner) and, I suppose, there's certainly an argument that they're less morally evolved than those of us who aren't conmen.

Doubtless too there are clerics who genuinely believe in the woo-woo, and who seek to persuade others of that belief. Do they deserve ridicule too? Arguably less so than the racketeers, but their effect is the same - the spreading of unreason in the population, and the implications that follow - and the refusal to engage with rational argument for non-belief in favour of their heartfelt feeling (ie, suspending their critical faculties, to use your phrase) is I think a reasonable target for humour and criticism too.

In short, attacking the authority figures rather than their followers has a long and (ig)noble history, it may well be effective in creating the "mood music", and it's legitimate. Forget "thinly veiled" - some of these people deserve both barrels!

I take your point about ex-believers on the journey way from their former beliefs, and agree that it could be (unhelpfully) upsetting to them
to see their former authority figures ridiculed in this way. Two thoughts in response though:

- for some, it may actually reinforce the courage of their convictions to insult the fraudsters or the misinformed authority figures who previously led them astray. I'd even go so far as to argue that it is out of compassion for the followers (albeit as well as self-interest for me and my descendants) that these reinforcing messages are made; and

- there are many clerics and followers who are not susceptible to careful and reasoned argument. They really think that it's their god-given responsibility to attack (ideally with the biggest weapons they can find) other faiths, to usher in armageddon, to condemn homosexuals to a life of shame, to stop stem cell research etc etc etc. The list goes depressingly on. I for one am more than willing to say "up with this I will not put" and to use whatever means are available to me to do so. Probably a critical e-card won't change the mind of a single TV evangelist or Taliban, but it's all grist to the mill of arguing against religiouly inspired certainties and it has it place therefore alongside other arguments for rationality.

I've just re-read this, and it's a bit heavy. I guess it's horses for courses: some will respond well to or deserve sarcasm, so send them the messages; others won't, so don't.

To lighten the mood a little, here's an alternaive idea instead. How about an airport passenger information sign mocked up to read as follows:

FAST TRACK SECURITY
THIS WAY

ATHEISTS ONLY

Best wishes

7. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #117057 by bluehillside on January 28, 2008 at 6:59 am

Nice to hear from you j.mills - you sound like the kind of person (teacher?) I'd want in my children's school.

I hadn't realised that faith schools are spreading by this back door method. It's worrying that this is so. What next - alchemy lessons?Astrology? How depressing.

As for your main points, I don't claim to know enough about Darwin to know what he'd think today. I guess though that today's circumstances -the kinds of pernicious outcomes of religious certainty I listed in my post - were not around so much then, so who knows...?

Absolutely Darwin's insight moved science forward, but in so doing he provided an explanation that meant many no longer had to subscribe to the idea of a personal god because nothing else explained the complexity of life (the so-called "argument from ignorance"). This is not an argument I've ever really understood by the way - personally, I'm content to accept that there are things we don't (and may never) understand without the need to invent an untestable supernatural being to fill the gap, but there we go.

Whichever way you look at it however, Darwin's theory hacked away great chunks of the foundation of religious belief, whether or not he actually said so (or even thought so). As you suggest, so did the works of many others as they too found explanations for other natural phenomena.

My view therefore is, explicitly or not, celebrating his achievements and those of the other great rational thinkers is a de facto attack on the alternative religious explanations.

Whether it's enough just to celebrate Darwin's (and others') work and thereby implicitly attack the woo-woo alternatives, or whether one should more explicitly make the point on the handy occasions of anniversaries is I suppose a judgement call and a matter of personal preference.

For my part, I'm with Hitchens et al for manning the barricades. Others may take the gentler line. Neither are "wrong" I'd duggest, and both are valid ways of making the same point, albeit with different degrees of emphasis.

All best.

8. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #116994 by bluehillside on January 28, 2008 at 2:18 am

Your posting opens up an interesting issue Oisha (and probably one that needs a new thread) - should we atheists/non-believers etc be content to espouse the sense and wonder of our world view, or should we actively seek to demolish the arguments of the faithful?

For starters, I'm not sure that they're necessarily opposites - surely promoting the rationalist view by implication means we're disageeing with the views of the supernaturalists (or irrationalists)? Both tactics could therefore be said to be "smarter-than-thou", albeit that one is a less explicitly so than the other.

As to the main issue, I think each of us has to take a view: do we accept that people should be free to believe and practice whatever they want, or do we take the view that we have a responsibility to attack nonsensical belief systems - ie, faiths/ideologies etc - when we see them?

For my part, I come from an essentially liberal background that tells me that people should be free to do and behave as they wish, provided those beliefs and actions do not impinge on other people's rights and freedoms. It's the second part of that sentence that is I think the problem with the argument for cultural/religious relativism.

For many decades for example, the Church of England has been largely supine - declining church attendances but still local fundraising for good causes, pastoral care for those that benefit from it etc - but essentially not seeking to impose itself much on anyone else. Leaving aside for now Sam Harris's (and others') point that moderate believers are the thin end of the wedge that ulitmately leads to the Taiban/ they're merely a dormant form of the virus etc etc, broadly I don't have a problem with this "tea and sympathy" style or religion.

Where I do have a problem though is with bringing up my children in a world where fundamentally irrational religious belief systems threaten them and their future way of life. The growth of faith-based schooling, lobbying governments to ban potentially life-saving medical treatments, suggestions of introducing sharia law into western legal systems, threats of violence in response to public criticism (or cartoons), dictating with whom people should be able go to bed, all the way to planting bombs on trains and planes etc all eat away at the best hope for the future of all of us - ie, an enlightened, free-thinking, rationalist worldview.

So yes, time to get of the fence I think and say loud and clear to anyone who will listen: "faith is the opposite of reason, it's stupid and dangerous and I will actively seek to argue agains it whenever I can". If that means supporting e-cards or T-shirts that seek to make the same point, then so be it.

9. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #115346 by bluehillside on January 24, 2008 at 3:58 am

Incidentally, for the US at least how about an E-card or T-shirt that says:

WE'RE ALL AFRICAN AMERICANS

12 FEBRUARY: DARWIN DAY

10. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #114971 by bluehillside on January 23, 2008 at 10:43 am

Steady on Ultraviolet G - yup, I got the "pun" but it just doesn't work ("other" than what exactly?). Bit of a hostage to fortune too as some faithhead website would be bound to have a "hey these guys can't even spell Beatles" kinda crack.

Now "Buddy Holly and a million crickets wish you..." etc on the other hand...

11. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #114637 by bluehillside on January 22, 2008 at 1:43 pm

Except they were called the Beatles...

12. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #114614 by bluehillside on January 22, 2008 at 1:26 pm

OK, got it. How about that famous picture with the crouching ape on the left and a series of evolving figures to the right of it ending with modern man. Only here the penultimate figure is a bishop in full regalia (or a Jerry Falwell figure, or a group of clerics) and the final, evolved figure is Charles Darwin.

As before, underneath the caption: 12 FEBRUARY: DARWIN DAY

13. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #114445 by bluehillside on January 22, 2008 at 8:06 am

Or how about one of those evolutionary family tree thingies with Autralopithecus etc towards the bottom, but with "H. Religious Believer" about half way up (maybe opposite "H. Neanderthalensis") on the dead end branches an "H. Rationalis" at the top. Underneath the whole thing would be "12 FEBRUARY:DARWIN DAY"

Too subtle maybe?

14. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #109883 by bluehillside on January 10, 2008 at 1:58 am

Thank you Smith - that's kind of you.

Regards

15. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #109604 by bluehillside on January 9, 2008 at 9:03 am

Please help! How do I get the darned clip to play beyond 1.07 when it automatically turns itself off and asks me if I want to replay?

No one else seems to have the problem, so is it at my end or can I download the whole debate somehow?

Sorry to trouble you, but if I hear the sainted (!) Sam say "...and secondly, we have a President..." one more time and then have it cut out I think I'll cut up my atheist club membership card and join the Scientologists instead!

Thank you.

16. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #109004 by bluehillside on January 8, 2008 at 6:30 am

I'd love to watch this debate but I kept getting a few minutes in when it stops and I get a "Replay?" message box, which then start the whole thing at the beginning again. Can anyone help (a complete non-tekky) fix this please?

Thank you.

17. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60847 by bluehillside on August 3, 2007 at 1:58 am

Excellent article by PZ.

Flagellant picks up the quote from McGrath that "...TDG is written to reassure the faith of atheists...".

No! It's been said many times before, but the important point here is that atheism is not a "faith", or even a belief system. Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require exraordinary proofs. As Sam Harris points out, the "proofs" for the existence of god are either non-existent or terrible, and an atheist is just someone who isn't convinced by them.

It's an old trick that McGrath tries - that atheism is just another faith, and so no different in essence to religious faith - but it's stupid and wrong, and needs to be challenged therefore.

18. Lou Dobbs w/ Hitchens on Al Sharpton's Bigoted Remark

Comment #39508 by bluehillside on May 11, 2007 at 2:52 am

Sharpton vs the mormons...does anyone else find this akin to watching two bald men fighting over a comb?

19. Is Christianity Good for the World?

Comment #39293 by bluehillside on May 10, 2007 at 9:19 am

Something that strikes me about the arguments of Wilson/ Sharpton/ those two bozos on the Nightline clip etc is their intellectual feebleness.

Others have done good jobs of dismantling their positions, so I don't repeat those points here. Some at least of these clerics do though, presumably, hold positions of authority within their constituencies of believers, and if I was one of those believers I think I'd be getting more and more worried that the atheists are the ones with the more credible and robust arguments.

Leaving aside the thought that there can be no intellectually credible argument for the existence of god, cannot any cleric of any faith be produced who could go intellectually toe-to-toe with the atheists?

So far as I can understand them, the arguments of the faithful seem to boil down to two positions:

1. God exists because I really, really believe s/he does (with the creationist sub-set of "we can't figure out yet how some things came into being, so a magic man must have done it")despite the absence of any evidence to support me (and often despite the fact of contradictory evidence that undermines me); and

2. Whether s/he exists or not, people of faith behave better than people without faith.

Re argument 1, that's so ludicrous as to be not worth considering. A good test is to apply the associated "proofs" (s/he is all-seeing, invisible to humans, exists outside of space/time etc) to, say, the tooth fairy. As they apply equally well, the likelihood of the existence of god is on a par with that of the tooth fairy, or indeed of any other supernatural invention I choose to believe in.

As for argument 2 (and leaving aside its intellectual dishonesty), manifestly people tend to behave worse when they think they're instructed to follow the rule book of an omniscient and omnipotent authority figure who will punish them if they don't follow her/his supposed teachings. There are billions of perfectly well-behaved non-believers in the world, and the research suggests that secular countires (eg Sweden) are, on the whole, more law-abiding than countries of the faithful (eg, the USA).

As Hitchens quoted, good men will do good things and bad men will do bad things, but it takes religion to make good men do bad things.

So, can any cleric anywhere come up with an intellectually robust case either for the existence of god, or for the notion that people behave better because of a religion that's a propagandist for that god?

20. Science and fiction

Comment #37361 by bluehillside on May 4, 2007 at 7:31 am

Here's an idea: why don't we pass a law that requires all schools to categorise the science subjects they teach as "Evidence-based" and the mumbo-jumbo (religion, creationism, fairies at the bottom of the garden etc) as "Guesswork"?

Isn't it depressing to live in a country where, after three hundered years of enlightened thinking, we have Government-funded schools filling pupils' heads with medieval voodooism...

21. Episcopal Church Rejects Demand for a 2nd Leadership

Comment #26911 by bluehillside on March 22, 2007 at 9:08 am

Rather like watching two bald men arguing over a comb...