God is a moral relativist

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Michael

Since every Christian loves to apologize for their god’s evil acts, God gets a pass for his Old Testament wrath. No one dares stand up and say, “What God did was wrong. We should admonish bad acts regardless of who commits them.” Aside from implying that morality does not come from God, such a statement would show imperfection in God. So rather than admit the obvious truth, Christians do some mental gymnastics so that their claims about God will stand up despite his contradictory actions.

And where does that leave Christians and their god? It leaves them wallowing in moral relativity. They have to argue that what God did in the ancient past was somehow not evil, and the way they accomplish this is to say that his actions and commands were particular to a time and place. If that isn’t moral relativism, I don’t know what is.

Let’s take Deuteronomy 22:28-29 as an example:

28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. [NIV]

I am struggling with how I want to word my objection. Instinctively, I want to express that it is obviously wrong to force a rape victim to marry her rapist, but that does not adequately reflect how messed up this passage really is. The idea here is that it is the rapist, not the victim, who is being punished. He must marry her. What’s more, he is stuck with her for the rest of his life. The poor fella.

But all that aside, the way Christians overwhelmingly choose to get around this problem is to say it was a different time and place. I agree, and we need to have some perspective when we go to judge past cultures, but this isn’t about the particular culture. God told people that the punishment for rape is a fine and marriage. Even if I grant that at least he said rape is wrong (even if the punishment is inadequate), he still said marriage was an appropriate solution. I don’t care what the time or place is, that is wrong. It is wrong because it robs autonomy from the perfectly innocent woman. (It can be said it robs autonomy from the rapist as well, despite his guilt and everyone’s desire to not care about his rights.)

If we say forced marriages, especially one’s of a rapist-victim nature, are wrong today, it is because they have always been wrong. Christians don’t get to play on both sides of the fence, first claiming their god is an objective source of morality, and then second turning around and excusing him on the grounds of moral relativism.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

More negative impacts from religion

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Michael

I was under the impression we were still using the constitution, but I guess that’s not the case in Alabama:

The small town of Bay Minette, Alabama is telling people convicted of small crimes to choose Jesus or choose jail.

Starting this week, the city judge will implement Operation Restore Our Community (ROC), which gives misdemeanor offenders a choice between fines and jail or a year of Sunday church services.

“Operation ROC resulted from meetings with church leaders,” Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland told the Alabama Press-Register. “It was agreed by all the pastors that at the core of the crime problem was the erosion of family values and morals. We have children raising children and parents not instilling values in young people.”

This is a problem that comes from things like religious-based sexual immaturity and a general lack of education. (I know, I know. Poor education in Alabama? I’m shocked, too.) And besides that, I don’t think it’s too out there to say that most of the offenders in Alabama, even the young ones, believe in God already anyway. It’s impossible to live anywhere in America and not be inundated with Christianity. That is especially true of the south, including Bible-thumping Alabama.

Pastor Robert Gates told WRKG that the program was a win-win for everyone involved.

“You show me somebody who falls in love with Jesus, and I’ll show you a person who won’t be a problem to society,” he said.

Westboro Baptist Church, Somalia, Nigeria, George Tiller’s murderer, Catholic Church officials, Kent Hovind, Spanish Inquisitors, the Crusaders, Republicans, so on, so forth.

But you know the religious have really gone overboard when this is the case:

Think Progress’ Ian Millhiser noted that the program would even be considered illegal under conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s view of the Constitution.

“In his dissenting opinion in Lee v. Weisman, Scalia wrote that the state may not use the ‘threat of penalty’ to ‘coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise,'” Millhiser wrote. “Telling someone — even someone convicted of a crime — that they must participate in a religious service or go to jail clearly fails Justice Scalia’s test.”

This is just going to cost Bay Minette a bunch of money in legal fees.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , , , , | 9 Comments »

We aren’t a Christian nation, but…

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Michael

Filed under: Humor, Religions | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

So Christians must have how many religions?

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Michael

I’m used to Christians making the claim that atheists have faith and religion. It’s a dumb statement that is easy to knock down since atheism makes no positive nor normative claims. But I recently saw a cartoon that made a very obvious but easily missed point: If atheism constitutes a religion as so many (often dishonest) Christians claim, then don’t Christians have several religions? One for their god, one by virtue of their denial of, say, Allah, one by their denial of Judaism, one by their non-atheism, one by their lack of belief in Thor, one by their….? Where does it end?

It’s almost as if, if we define everything as faith and religion, we’ve really defined nothing. Except maybe some political goals.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: | 10 Comments »

Christian logic

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Michael

Let me start out with the obvious first: The Bible bears no relation to any actual science. It is a wildly inaccurate account of nature, it has no evidence for any of its significant claims, and it offers zero methodology for determining what is true. That said, I have an analogy I would like to make.

Christians love to look at their cute little holy book and see how it matches up to the world. Sometimes they’ll find something – a battle here or a town there. They never uncover anything of significance – a large boat or a big ol’ tomb, for instance – but the trivial things they discover seem to be rather important to them. The reason is clear: Any confirmation of something in their particular, cultural book is seen as indicative of the truth of the fundamental claims they make (such as Jesus’ existence and divinity, two things for which there is no convincing evidence). This makes for yet another logical fallacy by Christians.

To put things in perspective, imagine taking a 19th century science text and seeing where it matches up today. Except instead of saying, “Okay, these few things are true, but we know where the book has things wrong”, suddenly we’re taking the book to be entirely true. “Well, we can confirm that 19th century scientists knew X, and well, X is actually true, therefore Y and Z must also be true.” The flaw in logic is obvious here. And this all must make one wonder: If the flaw is so obvious in one place, why is it not obvious when religion is involved?

I don’t think it’s too difficult to figure out why Christians are so willing to make an exception to logic: they have no evidence for any of their major claims. Zero. Zip. Zilch. The only option that leaves them is to support their silly beliefs by proxy. It’s just too bad for them they haven’t been very good at doing that either.

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Heaven and hell

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Michael

The overt lack of empathy inherent in the Christian concept of heaven and hell has to be one of the most devilish ideas ever devised.

Most Christians believe there is a place of eternal happiness, and they call it heaven. With all their hearts they believe that is where they will be for eternity once they die. But they also believe in a place of eternal damnation: hell. It may not be a stereotypical, Dante’s Inferno sort of place, but it will bring unending unhappiness. Many people have gone there and many more will, according to Christians.

Now let’s think about this. Christians believe they will go to a place of glory that will give them eternal happiness. Yet they also believe that many people, including those they know and love, will go to just the opposite place. Any decent person would have to admit that the idea of loved ones being eternally damned and eternally unhappy would have an effect on his or her own happiness, even in heaven. But not Christians. They’ve already stipulated – at the very core of their beliefs – that they will be eternally happy. This seems to me to be nothing short of monumental selfishness.

To be okay with such an idea seems nothing less than wicked to me.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , | 11 Comments »

Irony much?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Michael

I recently made a status update on my Facebook wall which mocked Christianity. As sometimes happened, it soon gathered together a small chorus of people who feel nothing mean should be said about religion. “Why, live and let live, Michael!”, they will say. Of course, then we get faith healing laws in the U.S. and imprisonment of gays in Christian Uganda. For that sort of reason (and more), I think it’s perfectly reasonable to mock religion; it is a hell of a force for evil in the world. (In democratic nations where the populace has been able to rid itself of most of the religious nutbags – our mainstream – life is far, far better on the whole.) I would love to see religion go away.

But out of that status update came a common cowardly Christian. Instead of diving into the discussion, he went to his own wall and made a passive-aggressive response. (In terms of my own status, it was probably for the best. My wall actually fostered (and is still doing so) a pretty good discussion amongst a number of intelligent individuals.) First let me show the comment that spurred the passive-aggressiveness. This was made by a friend of mine:

1.) Respect for beliefs and respect for the people who hold them are often confused with each other. Demanding that we respect each other’s beliefs is silly. I respect my room mate. However, I don’t respect his belief that it’s ok to leave the bread bag open. Similarly, I respect my girlfriend. But I don’t respect her belief in God. To ask someone to respect a belief with which they disagree is essentially asking them to agree with it. The very reason people disagree with something is because they don’t respect it.

2.) Religious beliefs often bring with them the encroachment of others’ rights. It’s the belief of many that gays shouldn’t be able to marry. And you think that deserves respect?

3.) Condoning such wide-scale subscription to superstition is a huge impediment to progress.

That was a response to a variety of points, but the part which caught the attention of the cowardly Christian was number 1. Here is his passive-aggressive status update:

Evidently I’m supposed to tolerate your beliefs but mine are to be mocked.

Rather than explain the rather simple distinctions between toleration, acceptance, and respect of beliefs, I decided to point out that he was being passive-aggressive. If he wants to respond to what he sees on my wall, he should grow a pair and make a post in the proper, adult location. (It’s like all those Christian blogs that make response posts but refuse to link back to the original posts because they come from atheist blogs.) This then turned to another Christian saying I was passive-aggressive. It was a stupid reflection of my rhetoric and it had no basis; people may think what they wish about me, but imagining that I’m passive-aggressive is just silly. I quickly dispelled the notion:

[Name of Second Christian], I think you are a genuinely stupid person who cannot understand the majority of arguments you hear. I think your anti-science bend comes from your quack of a mother, and I sometimes pity your ignorance.

How’s that?

(That person is a creationist and his mother is an alternative ‘medicine’ practitioner.)

Well, you can imagine how that went over. “Why, you, sir, have insulted a person’s mother! That’s just awful!” It’s a silly complaint, really. I insulted her ‘profession’ and used her as a proxy to do so. Since the attack portion of my comment is hardly that specific to her, it’s just people having a knee-jerk reaction. It’s like getting upset over “Yo momma” jokes, except the momma in this case really is a quack.

But I’m used to whines about tone. People who can’t argue their points bring it up as if it’s legitimate. Sometimes it’s because of thin-skin. Most of the time it’s a way to demand respect. If it is off-limits to be disrespectful towards something, whether it be religion or quackery, then it will quickly appear as if that something is worthy of an academic or intellectual discussion. And so whines about tone are aplenty. Of course, that gets boring pretty quickly. Just about the only thing that can make those whines worth reading is when they come with a splash of irony. That happened about 50 comments into the status update with this gem:

Ok ‘michael hawkins’, you dont have to believe anything you dont want to, and im not trying to convince you because frankly, from the things you have said in this entire blog, you should burn in hell because its EXTREMELY disrespectful how you are talking to us.

How Christian.

I imagine if this person recounted the Facebook comments to a friend of hers, it would go something like this. (Let’s call her Suzy.):

Suzy: So yeah, this guy called a person’s mother a quack.

Suzy’s Friend: Whoa! Someone’s mom?

Suzy: Yeah, I couldn’t believe it!

Suzy’s Friend: So what did you say?

Suzy: Oh, I told him to go to hell…out of respect, of course.

Suzy’s Friend: Of course.

(I realize that by not naming names, it may seem as though I am ironically being passive-aggressive. If these comments came from a public page, I would post names. Given that I know this person’s Facebook page is only visible to his friends, it would be wrong for me to say who said what. But worry not, each party involved will get the message.)

Filed under: Humor, Religions | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Ethics and morality without religion

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Michael

There are two tactics believers take in regard to the ability to act ethically and morally. The most common is to say that one needs God and/or religion in order to do so. It’s a weak argument that is easily defeated again and again. For instance, Japan has reported rates of atheism near 64%. Another 20% on top of that claim no religious affiliation. Yet they act far and above what we see in many other parts of the world, including the hyper-religious US:

The earthquake and tsunami that walloped Japan left much of its coastline ravaged, but left one thing intact: the Japanese reputation for honesty.

In the five months since the disaster struck, people have turned in thousands of wallets found in the debris, containing $48 million in cash.

More than 5,700 safes that washed ashore along Japan’s tsunami-ravaged coast have also been hauled to police centers by volunteers and search and rescue crews. Inside those safes officials found $30 million in cash. One safe alone, contained the equivalent of $1 million.

The other tactic is to say, why, of course people can be good without believing in God or having a religion. After all, God has instilled within all of us a seed of morality. Believers then usually cite some noise Scripture as proof. It’s a vaguely clever argument in that it gets around the issue of being proven wrong so incredibly easily, but that is the real problem: it can’t be falsified. It is based upon the Bible and is therefore necessarily a faith based claim. Since the Bible provides no internal methods for deciding if what is says is true or not, not to mention the fact that there is no evidence for a key ingredient to the argument anyway (God), this is just a random claim that carries with it exactly zero weight. It’s not even an argument.

Filed under: Philosophy, Religions | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

The decline of religion

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Michael

There is a post making the blogging rounds about the decline of religion and rise of non-belief amongst the younger generations. It has some interesting facts:

  • The number of secular student groups is growing rapidly.
  •   The more that people stand up and are vocal about their unbelief, the more it encourages others to do the same. As [Adam] Lee notes, “psychological experiments [find] that it’s much easier to resist peer pressure if you have even one other person standing with you.) Student activists like the ones I’ve mentioned are no longer just scattered voices in the crowd; they’re the leading edge of a wave.”
  • Atheism increases with each new generation in America.

There are links embedded within that writing. Go to the original link to see them.

The fact is, more and more people are declaring their lack of religion or even outright atheism as the years march on and younger generations come of age. This has been a distinct trend since the end of WW2: each generation of young people has more nonbelievers than the previous generation of young people. Currently we have 25-30% of people in their 20’s declaring they have no religion, a number that is four times higher than for any other period.

The originator of this blogging meme, Adam Lee, has a good idea why we’re seeing this decline in religious affiliation:

I’d love to say that we atheists did it all ourselves; I’d love to be able to say that our dazzling wit and slashing rhetorical attacks are persuading people to abandon organized religion in droves. But the truth is that the churches’ wounds are largely self-inflicted. By obstinately clinging to prejudices that the rest of society is moving beyond, they’re in the process of making themselves irrelevant. In fact, there are indications that it’s a vicious circle: as churches become less tolerant and more conservative, their younger and more progressive members depart, which makes their average membership still more conservative, which accelerates the progressive exodus still further, and so on.

I am more willing to give some of the credit to the Gnu Atheists. It isn’t that we’ve turned so many people to atheism – these numbers primarily reflect a lack of religious affiliation, not atheism – but modern atheists have helped to create an environment where it is okay to criticize religion more openly. Part of that has been due to the writings of people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, but an even bigger part has to do with the rise of the Internet. Atheists don’t tend to get together very easily. We have no unifying philosophy or normative claims, so it makes things difficult. But with the Internet, it’s a matter of a simple click to a website. This has given us more of a voice, and it has made people realize there are more of us than they thought. That not only gets people thinking – I remember as a kid at a Catholic school being astonished to hear atheists even existed – but it brings more people out of the atheist closet. After all, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd of people.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Politics and Social, Religions | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

The first cause argument

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Michael

I hate a lot of arguments for God. There isn’t a single good one. Not one. But the one I hate the most is the first cause argument. It runs smack into the face of science. Here’s why.

For something to be caused, a force must be exerted. Force is measured as mass x acceleration, F=ma. Acceleration is measured as the change in velocity of an object over time. Got it? Good. Now let’s look at this terrible argument from believers.

They say God is eternal. He exists outside time. Okay, let’s go with that. That means they believe he caused the Universe to exist from somewhere outside it. But do you see the problem? They already said he is outside time. As we just learned, something which is caused has a force placed on it. Something which has a force placed on it has mass and acceleration. Something which has acceleration has gone through time. Without any time, God cannot cause anything.

Science tells us, quite clearly, what is involved in causation – most importantly of which for my point is time. Yet in the premise of the believer’s argument is the explicit exclusion of time. They’ve defeated themselves. Any honest believer should immediately abandon this line of argument.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, Religions | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

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