751. Jesus 'Love-Bombs' You

Comment #35040 by _J_ on April 26, 2007 at 4:09 am

28. Comment #35026 by briancoughlanworldcitizen

Oh, thank you thank you thank you for that link. So simple, so perfect...

752. Jesus 'Love-Bombs' You

Comment #35038 by _J_ on April 26, 2007 at 4:03 am

Yeah, I recognise this stuff from when I became a Christian, although the process at 'my' church was a good deal less in-your-face and unrelenting than what's described here. In Britain, the back door to apathy is never wholly barricaded. All quite different from the later process of becoming an atheist, though.

One minor point of dissent:

---'There is a false, but effective, fiction that one has to be born again to be a Christian.'---

Where could that 'fiction' come from? Surely not:

'John 3.3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
3:4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
3:5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
3:7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.'

What Hedges is describing isn't some 'false, but effective, fiction' of extreme Christianity. It's just Christianity paying attention to its own text.

753. Imagine No Religion

Comment #34807 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 10:08 am

2. Comment #34800 by coolwainy

'How can a society work where as long as the majority agree with something it becomes acceptable?'

Marvellous question. Whereas, if we determine twenty-first century social acceptability in terms of adherence to the opinions of a vocal minority in the bronze age Near East, clumped with some later additions hobbled together from existing mythologies, selectively edited and then subjected to several centuries of varying interpretation, translation and reinterpretation – that way, utopia lies. Yes, of course, it's all so obvious. Step this way; mind the graven images.

754. Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Comment #34794 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 9:01 am

44. Comment #34791 by Coel on April 25, 2007 at 8:50 am

'So let's see if I've got this straight, your evidence to support your claim that Hitler tried to "get rid of" Christianity is that he went for the Jews. Correct?'

Quite right! It's a schoolboy error: 'Those liberals are truly the root of all evil. I will annihilate them all – beginning with the conservatives…'

755. Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Comment #34793 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 8:53 am

38. Comment #34778 by weefree

Hi, weefree.

First: ta!

Second: okay, my definition of 'fundamentalist' may be - and probably is – not wholly standard. I may have fallen into this usage as a way of trying to find a useful application for the word. It seems very prone to sliding into becoming a straightforward pejorative term for 'those baddies who aren't us' – and that kind of use strikes me as a step towards establishing 'us' as some kind of unexamined in-group. This is an obvious danger in a community of people spending a lot of time reinforcing shared opinions.

By way of redeeming myself, I've just checked my dictionary. The two meanings it gives for 'fundamentalism' are both 'strict maintenance of [one faith or another]'. This appears to me to chime very nicely with my usage. 'Strict maintenance' of a belief is the defence of it against any pesky new findings that might challenge it: the belief is held to be 'fundamental' and unassailable. A fundamentalist theist regards her/his religious faith in this manner; a fundamentalist atheist would regard her/his unbelief is equally unquestionable.

Third:


'"Since the evidence actually is wholly on the side of atheism"

No there's a fundamentalist statement if ever I heard one. How sweet and reassuring for the believers.'


Oh, but you're mischievous with these jibes! (I am waiting for Yorker to bite your finger off for the one about his/her 'faith'). Still, fair enough – it was a rather sweepingly absolute claim. I'll rephrase it:

'Since all of the evidence that I am aware of appears to be wholly in support of atheism (in so far as that it indicates a reality consistent with the absence of divine agency, and increasingly presents persuasive, non-supernatural, explanations for the widespread phenomenon of errant religious belief)…'

Not so snappy, but if I must speak by the card…

756. Brian Lehrer interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #34765 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 7:03 am

31. Comment #34661 by un_ko

Well done! That's a bit of an effort you've gone to, there!

757. Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Comment #34750 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 5:30 am

Oh - further to the above, it goes without saying that Matthew Parris, Richard Dawkins and the usual targets of this sort of accusation are of course not 'atheist fundamentalists' in any way. Obviously.

758. Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Comment #34748 by _J_ on April 25, 2007 at 5:23 am

Regarding 28 Comment #34723 by scottishgeologist

Without desiring to cause a ruckus (as I'm overwhelmingly on the same side as you – certainly with regard to attitudes like weefree's) I think I want to disagree (in a friendly, over a pint, sort of way) with your logic here:


'To be a-theist is to not believe in god or gods. end of story. You cant have degrees of "not-ness" You eiter "are " or "arent"

The use of the word fundamentalist implies that there are degrees of atheism - which is ridiculous.'


By that rationale, you can't have fundamentalist theists, either: as you said 'you either "are" or "aren't"'.

Not wishing to be robbed of the word 'fundamentalist' (which I find terribly convenient as a label for people who enrol on pilot training courses and skive off the sessions on landing), I think we have to admit that you can have fundamentalists at both extremes of a dis/belief spectrum that does indeed stretch right from fundamentalist theists to fundamentalist atheists.

However, whilst fundamentalist theists are ten-a-penny, fundamentalist atheists are a rare, possibly entirely theoretical breed. They would have to hold that there isn't a god *irrespective* of the evidence. A fundamentalist atheist would, even if god unexpectedly materialised tomorrow saying 'Sorry I'm late, got tied up over with the Glieseans for a couple of millennia – now, about this evolution thing…', nevertheless still remain an atheist.

I suppose, finally, that there may be a danger of becoming a fundamentalist atheist without realising it. Since the evidence actually is wholly on the side of atheism, it's hard to know whether there are those among us who would betray our professed reverence of facts if the tables were suddenly turned. Given the demonstrable predisposition of human beings as a whole to rationalise and justify opinions that they have come to hold strongly (irrespective of the means by which they acquired them), I suspect this is possible. It might be worth finding something to be crashingly wrong about every once in a while to keep us honest.

759. Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Comment #34594 by _J_ on April 24, 2007 at 3:39 pm

Gosh. First Mapantsula's response to Dinesh D'Souza and now this. All of a sudden my cup of magnificent 5-minute trumpet blasts for atheism runneth over. It's like Christmas (with obvious differences).

760. Street Evangelist Saves 300 Souls From Enjoying Park

Comment #33860 by _J_ on April 22, 2007 at 9:02 am

@ oeditor - Nice thought, but I think the folks I remember were evangelists with the emphasis less on Creationism and more on Revelationism. Readier with the curses than the blessings.

@ scottishgeologist - Now *he* sounds like an entertaining sort of a preacher. I like this quote:

'Speaking recently, he said the tumour was the result of a "personal attack" by Satan. He said: "I had to assume that if my ministry was still useful to God, then this must be an attack by Satan."'

The implied alternative being...

Still, he sounds like far too animated a preacher for my lot (who rather gave the impression of having been reanimated). I think I'd have liked to meet Pastor Glass.

761. Street Evangelist Saves 300 Souls From Enjoying Park

Comment #33766 by _J_ on April 21, 2007 at 4:50 pm

@ briancoughlanworldcitizen,

Well done. You knocked that together pretty damn quick, and it's good, too. Very efficient firefighting.

And, my god (so to speak), did that awful video deserve it! Frustrated at being unable to name hateful, idiotic, offensive god-mongering as the toxic drivel it is, I've tried to flag it as inappropriate (on the basis that it's hate speech, which seemed the closest category). That's probably my days on YouTube numbered (not bad, since I've been registered for, ooh, five minutes now), but worth a shot.

The motion might carry more weight if others seconded it...

762. Street Evangelist Saves 300 Souls From Enjoying Park

Comment #33758 by _J_ on April 21, 2007 at 4:07 pm

Spot on Onionage, as usual.

Reminds me of the guys I saw at the Edinburgh Festival for a few years running. Maybe it's just my memory, but I recall them as a daunting, haggard and grey bunch, like extras from The Addams Family or Dawn of the Dead, waving banners of doom and shouting - positively shouting - hardline Revelations claptrap at the throngs of festival goers.

Sure, they could have been selling their stage act, but they seemed all too joyless for that (and I speak as one who knows the woes of days of endless flyering). It was almost possible to smell the fire and brimstone. How they reasoned that an enormous multicultural collective of diverse and open-minded entertainment enthusiasts was in need of a crack team of doom mongers remains beyond me.

Anyone know if they still show up?

763. Dinesh D'Souza says I don't exist: an atheist at Virginia Tech

Comment #33711 by _J_ on April 21, 2007 at 10:15 am

Wow. Just a quick round of applause. That's just about the best summing up of full, honest, atheistic humanity I have ever heard.

Squeezed around the overall numbing horror that news of the shootings brought, I'd had a creeping worry that the usual outbreak of post-disaster religiosity might take a more explicitely anti-atheistic turn, partly due to the accelerating religion/secularity debate and partly due to the reported detail of Cho's anger at religion. It was worrying me slightly that the general atheist response to this might be to quietly skirt the issue. We, surely, have so much more to offer.

It's genuinely moving to read a statement like Mapantsula's. So often in the past I have seen such well-intentioned and emotive comments after similarly appalling events, that leave me agreeing profoundly but wishing I could just cross out all the references to 'God' and insert 'people', 'humanity' or 'each other'.

This, by contrast, I can genuinely rally behind, state complete allegiance to, and even aspire to living up to as I go about life. I will be copying this passage and referring to it often.

Thank you for writing it and good luck in making the best of the rest of your life, and of your students' lives.