A Bitter Pill

So, normally I try to avoid traps on religion and politics — especially on the interwebs. But, nontheless, I was bored and decided to get into it.

So, somebody on a messageboard posts a topic entitled “If you believe in god, you’re a moron.”

Fort: Recent pope raving:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/05/13/pope.brazil.ap/index.html

“Blame COMMIES! and CAPITALISTS! and CONTRACEPTIVES!

And pretty much anything else that requires thought…” - Pope Dickhead the XCVenth

Okay, fine, so he has something against the pope and organized religion. I can understand that.

So, I reply/bite:

Gospel:

APARECIDA, Brazil (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI blamed Marxism and unbridled capitalism for Latin America’s problems on Sunday, and urged bishops to mold a new generation of Roman Catholic leaders in politics to reverse the church’s declining influence in the region.

“The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit,” Benedict said as he opened a two-week bishops’ conference aimed at re-energizing the church’s influence in Latin America.

But he added that unfettered capitalism and globalization, blamed by many in the region for the deep divide between the rich and poor, gives “rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness

Not to say I agree with him, but you need to read a bit more carefully. Just because some things a person say is wrong, does not mean EVERYTHING he says isn’t insightful or untrue

Which leads to more unearthing of his hatred

Font: Actually, Gospel, let me make a few of the things I said a bit more clear, so you understand:

If you BELIEVE in GOD you are a MORON.

That about sums it up.

Everything the pope says is laden with fairytales of skipping unicorns and guys who SOMEHOW live forever.

But go ahead, and eat that shit up.

I’m not sorry if I hurt some feelings. If you’re religious, then, well, I’m pretty damn sorry for you. You can’t just be happy being part of the Nitrogen cycle.

Uh, let’s try more logic

Gospel: You’re missing my point. I’m not saying I agree with the Pope, nor did I say anything he said is true. But, there are a few religious progressives, including some sects of Catholacism (blacklabeled as “buffet chatholics”) that do not hold the pope’s infalability to be true.

Pope == False ==> God = False ????

Not only are you lumping every chatholic together, you are grouping all flavors of christianity together. I am not having “hurt feelings”. I’m simply pointing out some misunderstandings in your original post.

Let’s see if it works…

Fort: And a point of mine is also being missed:

I don’t take the time to differentiate between sects of catholicism, or christianity, because it’s not worth it.

There is no such thing as religious progressivism. That’s like saying there is a such thing as polished shit.

Nah.. he’s still upset with teh g0dz0r

Gospel: You’re clearly taking the approach of scientific mind. To that extent, would a scientific mind not differntiate between opinions, and to that extent at least hold the possability that what people say could be true and could be false. Furthermore, your opinion could be true or could be false.

Everybody has a belief structure, I don’t see the need to attack peoples’ as a whole unless it is clearly causing problems. Was chrsitanity a vehicle of enslavement and ignorance in the past (circa 12-1300’s+) sure. But, it does do a whole lot of good too in the world in its current mutation. There is nothing in this world that is 100% good or 100% bad, I’m sure Stalin did something good for his country at some point.

You need to differntiate, because there will always be conservatives, extremists, and fanatics in any belief. Dismissal without listening is equally as ignorant as the approach hardcore bible thumpers take; your form of logic is no better than theirs, imo.

Eastern religions are more like philosphy than anything else. Eastern cultures are neither innocent nor any cleaner in terms of Taoism, confucism, and general culture than the Western world (if not worse).

You can find flaws in anything, bible, scripts, whatever. You can find problems with the constitution, acts, laws, ~etc. It just seems Christianity has become the new “safe” whipping boy for people’s angst. Not sure why.

Buddhism and Hinduism did not stop India from being one of the most class-est, tiered societies in the world. Buddism didn’t stop people in Japan from invading their neighbors. Religion isn’t always the savior nor the cause of human strife. If you look at the kill count — yes, religion is very high, but you have to look at the deeper history. How many people were killed over territorial disputes disguised as a holy war (e.g. Vandals “crusade” against the holy roman empire). Or, the famous Crusades … when all they wanted was Israel.

Religion, yes, is a powerful scapegoat — but a blame-all is far from true. Look how many people die(d) under communist, atheist regimes. Look how many people die over trbial conflicts in the Congo in Africa. People will ALWAYS find a reason to kill each other.

Simply put, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Religion does a lot of ignorant things, but it does a lot of good things simply from a social structure standpoint.

Being a “moron” knows no creed, race, or country. It is individual.

TL;DR … maybe that’ll work

Fort: To answer Gospel’s question of why Christianity is the new whipping boy, one word: Evangelism.

Citing the eastern religions, allow me to clear something up, I’m speaking of my disdain for the belief in ‘God’, that being, the humanized version of some sort of super bearded old white guy depcited in the new testament.

So, the far eastern enlightenment chasers aren’t my target at all.

Evangels, Christians, Catholics - That’s who I’m militant against. I know evils are aspects of the individual; they exist in every creed, race, or religion, however: Difference between an atheist pedophile, and an evangel one: The atheist gets caught. Meanwhile the other is sheilded by his local ‘church’ group because he’s ’such a great guy.’ I’ve seen this happen personally in my life, and it boils my blood, and yes individual quams have influenced my anger towards an entire group.

Other problem with evangels, christians, catholics: They think just because GOD has forgiven them, everyone else will as well. WRONG!

The former Nazi Pope can take his ideals of having infinite numbers of catholic kids taking over the planet, along with his kid-raping cohorts in the vatican and cardinal diasies, and he can cram them up his ass.

/end statement.

still more hostility ;(

But wait. A semi-intelligent responce!

Miang: eh, the fact that its intertwined so heavily into our government is my main reason for such a militant attitude towards faith in a god / the afterlife.

Essentially, you can either be a religious literalist, in which case you kill people for heracy, or be a moderate which truely makes no sense. If the bible is the written word of god, and he tells you to kill those who are not of the same faith as you, why is it ok to ignore that part while taking it upon yourself to set the moral benchmark for all the people living around you? Picking and choosing whatever verses are convenient for your social agenda do not reflect a divine relation with a higher being. Fanatic or moderate, both religious models have no logic in them what so ever, yet are still tought as law to unknowing kids.

My problem is that religion breeds ignorance. From birth its an easy answer for most people. In that sense, yes, it has served some function as a sound social institution, but its blatant hate for science and progressive thought has kind of proven to me that humanity will be much better off once we stop treating mythology as fact.

Not to say, of course, that there arent other very important social issues outside of religion, but yeah, its time for humanity to move on.

A good argument, but

Gospel: @ Miang (a very good post)

Define blatant disregard for science when most, including Einstein, have some sort of belief structure. Furthermore, you are assuming that religion or exposure to it will make people ignorant. I can tell you my friend, there is a lot more in this world (especially America) that makes kids ignorant. The fact 80% of history taught to young kids is incorrect and skewed is a sign of that.

Pick and choose? That’s somewhat true, and is the common line used against “buffet” catholics. But, morality is never absolute as you make it, and true Christianity is about the message. I am not saying I am a particularly religious person, but I am taking the vantage point for this argument’s sake.

Also, picking and choose what is “conflicting” in the bible is a matter of perspective. Who was Kaine’s wife? We will never know. But, even Jesus violated the Sabbath. See, with the bible, unlike the Tora, there is a “new” chapter–which separates Christianity from convectional orthodox Judaism. It’s not quite “fair” to pick out semantics in the bible. Just because on page 329402 it says one thign and page 239804932043290 it says another dosn’t make the thing as a whole crap. Again, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Do some people take it TOO FAR? Yes. Are there insane, zealous evangelists? YES! But, I highly doubt these people would be any more enlightened wether there was or is a religion at all.

If a child is so helpless they will never question god and make the choice on their own, they were incapable of independent thought to begin with. Just because there exists an “opiate” in your mind does not mean everyone needs to take it. You are insuinating that the pressence alone of religion will defile the otherwise enlightened and intelligent minds of people.

Yes, I agree, I dislike how integrated religion is in our government currently. But, the fact o fthe matter is this country has and always will be Protestant rooted. I really don’t think most human beings would disagree with most of the tenemants of religion (not killing, faithfulness, stealing, etc). And the fact Roe V. Wade allows a woman’s choice shows that the government is not a 100% theocracy. I just cannot except this “all or nothing” sentiment.

fort: There’s something I need to clear up with you, Gospel, about Einstein having a belief system. Dr. Hawking also is proported as to believing in a ‘God’ of sorts. Infact MANY highly advanced astro-Physicists of our time do not tote themselves as complete athiests.

There ‘God’ however, has nothing to do with personal morals, social codes of conduct, or the organization of an afterlife. They instead believe in the Universe as an alter-force; more then physical law, atleast human physical law, will ever be able to define.

Saying that they have some sort of belief system must be understood for what it is; a belief system. There’s no Bible for Einstein and Hawking, only scientific maturation. I have a belief system in the theory of gravity. It has no similarities in the slightest with dieism.

Furthermore, I’m sorry that this thread has developed in this fashion, though I must admit I foresaw a bit of it. Let me try to bring it back to its intended focus:

I hate the Pope. He is an outdated, archaic, dangerous figurehead. I hate Catholism, because they KNOW in their hearts that I’m lesser then a person for having critical thought. I hate Evangels, and nothing needs to be said furthermore about that. I hate Christianity as a whole, because it’s had it’s chance as a social control mechanism, and needs to proceed the way of the dinosaur, as fast as it possibly can. These are MY feelings. I reserve my right to feel them as passionately as I choose. I don’t care about evidence to the contrary. I shall stand as stubbourn as one of the bible-thumpers on this issue: The New Testament, in all of its forms and interpretations, is rediculous at best, murderous at worst, and arguably one of the largest wastes of collective human society’s time.

Let us not even begin to speak of Pan-Arabic Islam, because THEN I’ll get afluster.

But, then, a mystery poster comes and wins the internet…

yang: Because a group of people, albeit a scientific community, with a set system of belief isn’t a religion. . .
The religion of astrophysicists is still a religion and it is still ridiculously fallible. Hence why some of what Einstein and Hawking have already donated to the world of science is now wrong. No person is perfect, therefore no group can be perfect. And while Hawking himself is not a Catholic, there are many astro-physicists that are. There are many priests who are scientists and many scientists who follow the church.

Omg! How can this be?!!

You and every other person who hate Catholics and Christianity hate them because they have held back science, yet they have given much to its development. Genetics today owe their existence in essence to a Catholic monk.
The stream line thought of evolution and development also are in debt to the evil and oppressive Catholic church. While rooted in the Greeks, these theories probably would have been passed over and forgotten had it not been for a certain Dominican monk and his peers.
The church, and its doctors have been keepers of knowledge for thousands of years. Modern astro-physics, philosophy, modern science owes a great deal to Bonaventure, Augustine, Aquinas. Without them, Plato and Aristotle might have been lost for centuries. Kant, easily one of the greatest minds to grace this earth, while not a self-defined follower, admits to the great use and necessity of religion.
The Pope and many doctors of the church, both today and in history have been protectors of academics and have only sought to keep this vast wealth and give it to the community. The present pope is not the mystic his predecessor was. He is truly an academic mind, and if you had bothered to let fall your personal prejudices, you would have been able to discover this for yourself.

Perhaps you hate them because they limit your own personal code of ethics and beliefs because. . .they. . .um. . .beat you up for having them!
I see. Ok Fort, if this is the case, if you have encountered the modern inquisition, then I think you should notify the local authorities. (This might land you in a nice white cell with a pretty white jacket to compliment it. But! You will be safe from the Christian bullies.)

Because of their actions in the past?! I think it entirely fair to hold a group responsible for the actions of the fathers. So, let’s wipe out Germany and Japan, and every Native American Tribe. (Of course, they can wipe us out too.) Let’s also kill the remaining family members of Charles Manson and every serial killer. Because, they are responsible after all. My great great great great great grandfather was killed by a Viking, I think that means I can kill the descendants of the Vikings.

Or! You hate them because they believe in something you don’t believe in and they think you are wrong? Though, you think they are wrong. Um. . .well those SOBs! How could they be so mean and unfair?!!

To refer to the original article, the pope was entirely correct. “Unfettered capitalism and communism” are responsible for much of the poverty and destitution in Latin America. Any simple understanding of economics will tell you that. Of course, we must also attribute it to the corrupt governments and the narrow, irrational minds that continue to march on in their haze without accepting knowledge. (Perhaps we should hate them for their stupidity and lack of critical thought. . .)

While I agree (and you might claim I have no right to agree or make this agreement known to you) that it is by far and away your right to believe whatever it is you wish, I think for someone who values progressive thought and understanding so highly, you should take a look back at your own argument. By your own words, the parallel can be made for other systems, ethics, beliefs, etc.
Racism can be justified by your words:
X group of people have done this and some continue to do so. Thus, the group as a whole is bad and I personally hate them.
Genocide:
X group of people are worthless because in the past they have committed these sins, and I can and do continue to hold hate against them. Thus, wipe them out.

Hold onto ignorance and you do nothing but perpetuate the very same problem you claim to detest in the subject of your hate. Treasure your irrationality, and you further stem the sickness that infects humanity.
Your mode of thinking, while entirely within your rights, is horribly flawed, irrational, and a greater poison to society than the grand ‘injustice’ of a belief in God.
Clearly objectivity is not something you prize. Since that is the case, really you shouldn’t be arguing anything of import since you have proven yourself incapable of separating rational thought from your own personal bias. For shame. As Gospel said previously, many atrocities have been committed by every religion. Yet you choose Christianity as your target because it personally has affected you. Again, a narrow world view and extremely selfish. You care for your own personal grievances but not those of humanity at large.

The church has risen above, accepted its flaws, and will attest to its lack of qualifications (for instance) to speak on matters of science from the pulpit. Which is why evolution is a personal ‘belief’ within the church, not one of doctrine.

I find it very interesting that the institution you hate has risen above you in its ability to acknowledge its limitations and its quest to correct them.

I think the safer equation we should make is:

Those who desire to live in ignorance = Idiots. i.e. you

zomg!

Some food for thought, I suppose. Too many people taking asinine aspects of the Bible literally and losing the message. I think anybody who claims religion and/or Christianity does not understand it, nor does anybody who takes such clearly outdated aspects seriously understand it either. While there are theological points in homosexuality that does somewhat detract from this clip, I won’t get into that. And, oh, I know it’s been awhile.

I usually don’t harp on my views, simply because I try to keep this blog light-hearted and rant-tastic, but I felt since it is the “holly days” and people seem to forget what it is all about, I would share this video.

Oh, and to elaborate. I am saying, if one believes in God then it is then they must believe in Christ, unless they claim to be Jewish or Muslims. Otherwise, they might as well take a rock int he backyard and call it Jerry, Savior of Sins. In so far as that belief system, that you call yourself a Christian, then you must accept the tenements of the faith as well. NOT the religious aspects like the Catholic or Lutheran churches, but moreso what the Bible says–the scriptural authority on the religion.

Even an atheist can accept these terms: be STRONG in your beliefs and try to save people you see. It does not mean bible thump people to death, but try to introduce Christ to them, but you cannot FORCE it upon them. See, if you take a half-hearted approach to religion, and claim to believe in Christ, but do not take the scripture nor the concepts of heaven and hell seriously, you are a half-hearted Christian.

People fail to confront their own belief systems. You are either (a) agnostic - no-knowledge meaning “does not know” there if there is a god (b) atheist - no belief or “does not believe” in god or (c) a believer in a faith. Whatever it comes down to, do not be weak in your faith. I’m not saying to be stubborn, nor is this man, but being passionate about your beliefs is admirable, and if you cruelly believe you are right, then be passionate, why not? If you believed you had the answer to salvation, then would it not be best to spread it?

Oh and as far as the XMas crap goes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas

The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as 1021 AD. This X and P arose as the uppercase forms of the Greek letters χ and ρ), used in ancient abbreviations for Χριστος (Greek for “Christ”), and are still widely seen in many Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Jesus Christ. The labarum, an amalgamation of the two Greek letters rendered as ☧, is a symbol often used to represent Christ in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian Churches.[1]

Some people believe that the term is part of an effort to “take Christ out of Christmas” or to literally “cross out Christ”;[2] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas, as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers). It may also be used as a vehicle to be more inclusive, see political correctness.

The occasionally felt belief that the “X” represents the cross Christ was crucified on has no basis in fact; regardless, St Andrew’s Cross is X-shaped, but Christ’s cross was probably shaped like a T or a †. Indeed, X-as-chi was associated with Christ long before X-as-cross could be, since the cross as a Christian symbol developed later. (The Greek letter Chi Χ stood for “Christ” in the ancient Greek acrostic ΙΧΘΥΣ ichthys.) While some see the spelling of Christmas as Xmas a threat, others see it as a way to honor the martyrs. The use of X as an abbreviation for “cross” in modern abbreviated writing (e.g. “Kings X” for “Kings Cross”) may have reinforced this assumption.

I found two really great articles that open up the debate and somewhat counter-balance all the religious fanatics out there. Sadly, most believers are either too ignorant, apathetic, or too tired to play in the academic arena. I can’t blame them, academics is somewhat of a contrived thing in and of itself. Nonetheless here we go.

This first one is a long one, but it debases some common, weak atheist remarks. I have respect for a few atheists, just not most. I think most are actually agnostic, but I’ll get inot that with the next article.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110206C

The recent small spate of atheist writings by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, noticed in the pages of Wired and The Guardian, revives an old and rather quaint controversy. It is one which, I believe, is good for religion; but to unearth the genuine value of atheist beliefs we need first to dispose of the clutter of illogic and absurd claims that have washed up around them over the years.

The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word “enlightened” has now been replaced by the word “bright” as the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant of the “Cliffie the mailman” wonk who knows it all, or Sportin’ Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is Flaubert’s character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer. Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they have produced a group of arguments that should probably be taken apart.

One is that religious ideology is a unique inspirer of terrible wars. In the current perspective, such an opinion sounds plausible. But anyone with an historical sense will recognize that the few hundred people who die each month in religious conflicts are absurdly dwarfed by the tens of millions, almost all of them religious believers, who died, within living memory, under the savage atheistic regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the various dialectical materialist dictators of eastern Europe. We have seen what atheism looks like on the large scale, and it is not pretty: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Religion has indeed been a cause of appalling slaughter during the course of human history; but it must take fifth place behind atheist ideology, nation-state aggression, mercantile colonialist expansion, and tribal war in the carnage sweepstakes.

Another argument brought by the village atheist type is that to base one’s life on faith is intellectual suicide. This argument might be persuasive if there were any alternative, but there is not. Reason is not a basis for thought, but a method of thought. Kurt Gödel showed conclusively that every system of reasoning contains self-referential statements of the form of “This statement is unprovable”, which are correctly formed propositions that must be true or false, and must, if reason is fundamental, be provably one or the other. Analysis quickly shows that the statement must be true, but cannot be proved to be true. Reason is a process of proof, but reason is incapable of proving a certain true proposition, one that must take its place among the axioms of any logical system. Rationality cannot prove itself. The fundamental validity of reason therefore must be taken on faith; the only difference from a purely logical point of view between an atheist who believes in reason and a religious person who makes a primary act of faith is that the religious person recognizes the pre-logical basis of his beliefs, while the atheist does not.

If the village atheist dismisses this sort of thing as logic-chopping and takes his stand on the empirical down-to-earth evidence of the senses, the ground similarly disappears from under his feet. David Hume is rightly hailed as a hero of atheism, for his dismissal of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. But what his atheistic admirers miss is that his argument against empirical knowledge is even more devastating. Hume showed that the concept of cause has no logical necessity—that just because one event has often followed another, that does not mean that the same sequence must necessarily happen again, or that there is any necessary causal connection between them. Our expectation of causal connections in general, not just those that attribute the cause of events to God—is at best an emotional and practical habit. The religious person, by this logic, is actually more aware of the shaky basis of his commonsense than is the confident atheist.

Hume’s insight has actually proved remarkably prescient. In Hume’s time cause—courtesy of Newton’s magnificent discovery of the predictability of matter in motion—was seen by the scientific-minded as the only true relationship among events. In questioning cause, Hume anticipated the current multitude of relations now known to obtain among physical happenings. Quantum events, such as the emission of a particle by a piece of radioactive matter, are to a large extent purely random. Quantum coherence is different from cause—it is more like the existence of a harmonic between two vibrating violin-strings than like anything we would call cause. Nonlinear dynamical systems are so tangled and often so autonomous in their interrelations that any assignment of cause becomes virtually theological. For the initial conditions of the current state of turbulence are irrecoverable and irrelevant, and the outcome is, beyond the immediate future, increasingly unpredictable even if we had perfect knowledge, a condition impossible in this universe. And since the assignment of cause is in empiricist terms provable only by successful prediction, whatever cannot be predicted cannot be proved to be caused. And even prediction is tainted in some parts of the universe by second-guessing, rational expectations, theories of mind and self-fulfilling prophecy. Living social organisms are always involved in wildly idiosyncratic predicting contests with each other whose results are ecosystems that are both influences of their own and freely reinvented year by year. Human minds are causes of their own causes, or else the whole structure of legal and moral responsibility, which has built societies that have greatly altered the surface of the planet, is an illusion. And if something can be a cause of its own cause, the meaning of the word “cause” has evaporated. So cause, which is the basis of any empirical understanding of the world, must in itself be taken on faith.

The village atheist might still retreat to the pragmatist position, that though the rationalist and empiricist arguments for a basis in reason may be perversely twisted to question themselves, nevertheless the practical application of reason in the real world actually works and maintains our survival. We may never know exactly what electricity is, or what causes it, but when we turn the car key the engine starts. True enough, but even the pragmatist argument falls down in its own terms. For if in the absence of logical or evidence-based proofs of reason, usefulness and survival are adopted as the basic criteria of what is reasonable, religion actually comes off looking much more practical than unbelief. Almost the whole of the human race for all of its history has had some kind of religion or other, and has, triumphantly, survived and prevailed. As I pointed out in an earlier essay about demographics, societies with strong religious beliefs tend to reproduce themselves more robustly than societies without the hope and faith to sacrifice for the future. Societies that have developed sophisticated theological systems have tended to develop sciences and advanced technologies as well, because of a fundamental theological belief that things make sense and that there is an underlying order to the world. Thus from a strictly Darwinian perspective—the ultimate practical expression of pragmatism (and one to which I subscribe), religion is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, survival strategy. One can even set aside the statistics that show that religious people tend to be happier, more long-lived, richer, and get better sex. If, pragmatically, by their fruits ye shall know them, and truth is whatever gets you the goodies and continues your germ line, the atheist should try to hypnotize himself into being a believer.

But this is shooting fish in a barrel. There are, actually, many valuable correctives and important questions that are offered by the atheist perspective. One of them is an implication of one of Dawkins’ favorite arguments against the rather feeble theist objection that you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist—you can’t prove a negative. Dawkins triumphantly retorts that

“There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove, You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”

This argument actually isn’t an argument against religious belief as such, any more than the presence of thousands of myths about the invention of fire or the succession of the seasons or the phases of the moon casts doubt on the existence of a fire-inventer or the terrestrial or lunar orbits. In fact the multitude of divine myths could be taken as weak evidence that something divine must be going on, or else all those people wouldn’t have thought there was. There were thousands of beliefs about the healing powers of mosses and lichens and certain soils before penicillin and the antibiotic virtues of soil molds were discovered.

But Dawkins’ argument does cogently address the great scandal of religious differences, especially the fanatical clinging to one particular metaphor of mysterious unseen powers. What the atheist critique implies is that the religions had better seriously get together on their stories, because their insistence on the factual certainty of their own versions is both a cause of justifiable skepticism and a justification at the extreme of suicide bombers and the massacre of innocents.

Valuable also is the moral lesson of atheism. Virtuous atheists actually have a stronger claim to real goodness than virtuous Christians, Jews, or Muslims, because there can be no taint of cupboard love in their obedience to the moral law. They do not believe in a reward for goodness, and thus must love goodness for its own sake. The challenge to religious people is that they ought to do the good as if there were no afterlife, no heaven, no reward. God does not get a reward for all the good things he does, and if we are supposed to become as much the image of God as we can, as we are told in the scriptures, then we should seek out that life of love and service that is its own reward.

Atheism also challenges religious people to take nature seriously. Atheists like to point out that religious accounts of the creation and maintenance of the universe are often wretchedly totalitarian, and they find it easy to refute the idea of the first cause. If something ordered always needs a creator, and if God is ordered, they say, who created God? Was it gods all the way down? Can something reasonably create itself? Cosmological physics, as I pointed out some time ago in a piece on evolution here, has rather taken the wind out of the sails of this argument, because it is now forced to postulate trillions of universes with every possible set of initial conditions before the Big Bang—a mess perhaps even more in need of Occam’s Razor than the postulation of a self-creating creator. If indeed every possible configuration of universes must have coexisted with this one, presumably at least one of them must have been so put together as to constitute, by sheer chance, a gigantic beneficent Intelligence capable of manipulating all of its own constituents and creating from them an ordered universe like our own. So the only current viable non-theistic theory of the origin of the cosmos virtually mandates a beneficent creator somewhere that would look an awful lot like God.

But setting aside such rhetorical fun with our atheist friends, there is an imaginative delight in the naturalism of the atheists that has been lost to Christians, Jews and Muslims at least since the renaissance, and which maybe ought to be brought back. If religious people genuinely believe that God is responsible for the existence of the universe, then they must take into their religious consciousness and conscience, as the renaissance did, those aspects of nature that attract atheists away from any parochial little set of tribal myths. Religious people must undergo the shock of Job, who after those sophistical little squabbles about sin and blame and justification must suddenly see the universe in all its terrifying glory, the grandeur of Leviathan and Behemoth, the mysteries of the womb, the joy of the horse and the ostrich, the glitter of the Pleiades. We know now that there are millions of planets circling alien suns out there. Some, perhaps many, harbor forests, oceans where their own leviathan swims, perhaps even alien civilizations with histories and stories and religions of their own. Beyond the old question–What is man that thou art mindful of him?—there is the further implication that God has let everything go its own way, that the universe is free to create and generate itself, and that God values this wild autonomy. Evolution is not a disproof of God, but it may be an indication of the lengths to which he will go to let his creation live out its own genius and destiny. What generosity, to so delegate his creative power, to relish diversity and strangeness and above all freedom so very highly!

Now this one isn’t proof of creationism per-say either, but it’s a good argument similar to the above, but in a bit more friendly terms. Granted, yes, it’s on a religious “science” website, but give it some benefit the doubt. It at least opens the door that perhaps being agnostic is a lot more sensible than being an atheist. Actually, this one doesn’t copy well so I won’t copy it, but I’ll just link it.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i1/creation.asp

P.S. This article on the disparity in the studies claiming the link between chimps and humans is somewhat interesting. It furthers the gap in proof for evolution, IMO. Not saying there is NO proof, but it definitely furthers the room for debate.

So. Let’s look at America at a brief, shall we? Let’s start off by looking at how many people believe in evolution. I mean yeah sure, I undersatnd, we don’t wanna mess with your religion and all.

Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds

James Owen
for National Geographic News
August 10, 2006

People in the United States are much less likely to accept Darwin’s idea that humans and apes share a common ancestor than adults in other Western nations, a number of surveys show.

A new study of those surveys suggests that the main reason for this lies in a unique confluence of religion, politics, and the public understanding of biological science in the United States.

Researchers compared the results of past surveys of attitudes toward evolution taken in the U.S. since 1985 and similar surveys in Japan and 32 European countries.

In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.

In European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, more than 80 percent of adults surveyed said they accepted the concept of evolution.

The proportion of western European adults who believed the theory “absolutely false” ranged from 7 percent in Great Britain to 15 percent in the Netherlands.

The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey.

The investigation also showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years.

Researchers from the U.S. and Japan analyzed additional information from these surveys in an attempt to identify factors that might help explain why Americans are more skeptical about evolution.

Led by Jon D. Miller, a political scientist at Michigan State University, the team reports its findings in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science.

MOAR information

This chart depicts the public acceptance of evolution theory in 34 countries in 2005. Adults were asked to respond to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The percentage of respondents who believed this to be true is marked in blue; those who believed it to be false, in red; and those who were not sure, in yellow.

A study of several such surveys taken since 1985 has found that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among nations polled. Researchers point out that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory’s validity has increased over the past 20 years.

Chart courtesy Jon Miller, et al./Science

So, let’s look at something far more understandable: astrology. Because, the complete dictation of your life via planets (ignoring black holes and quasars/etc) is so sensable. At first, I thought the fact people neglected evolution was due to Jesus, but apperantly it’s due to Xenu and the galactic forces! (P.S. Sorry if you were born under the sign of any removed planets–I guess your life is meangingless). Isn’t there something in the bible about idolotry?

* 31% of the public believes in astrology including 36% of women and 43% of those aged 25 to 29 but only 17% of people aged 65 and over, and 25% of men.

MOAR religion stats

So, about the same ammount of people who believe in evolution believe in an equally creditable theory… astrology.

I love you Jesus.

Seriously, though, what the hell is wrong with people? Regardless if you have faith or not, I doubt anybody in their right mind would condone this. If only the millitant christians would kill off the millitant islamics.