Category: Religion

Best Letter Ever

I find this sad. And this is coming from a 14 year old girl that has been raised as a Christian. This is stupid. If you wanted to attract attention then do something else. But make up a religion and trying to find information to back it up is just sad. I wonder how you even thought about such thing. Was you bored in your room or something? I wonder how your parents think about this. And honestly why would you want kids or young adults to learn about such thing? Do you want to brain wash them or something with your made up theory? Seriously, just drop the whole thing & find something else to do.

Good day, anonymous

So what is the topic that this little (she may be 14, but little intellectually) girl is referring to? The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  I just found this too ironic.  I hope one day this girl can learn about what satire is and then learn what satire is.

(Source: FSM Hate Mail) also see RichardDawkins.net hate-mail

Dog eats homework analogy

So I came across this post (which itself is a good definition of what proof vs. evidence is and what a creationist would need to present to have any point to their arguments) which links to this post and more specifically mentions the following comment from that post (if you didn’t follow that just read the following gem):

Regarding evidence vs. proof, I do think this is sufficiently (or at least repeatedly) misunderstood such that a more detailed example might serve.

Your completed homework is missing. You think to yourself that there are several things that might have happened to remove your homework from the top of your bedroom desk. One is that the dog ate it. Another is that your brother stole it to make life difficult for you. Another is that God removed it from the universe as a test of your faith.

Before any other thought is put into practice, these are hypotheses.

Of the three hypotheses, the first two (Dog and Brother) can be considered theories, because presumably you could test those theories and find evidence for them. The third may be significantly harder to find evidence for.

So you look around and see a very few tiny pieces of paper on the floor. These shreds, when inspected closely, look like the paper you used to do your homework, and the edges of the shreds bear what look like tooth marks.

Your brother would probably have just swiped the whole sheet and thrown it out, but it’s not impossible that he used serrated scissors to destroy it. So the current understanding of the homework dilemma is that your dog probably ate it, but that there is some chance your brother swiped it. The God hypothesis is still possible, but looking somewhat less likely.

Finally, you corner your brother and threaten him with a beating and he insists he didn’t do it. An inspection of the house’s garbage cans yields no homework, and the dog doesn’t eat as much for dinner as he usually does.

You now have one very solid theory that the dog ate your homework, you have a minority theory that your brother swiped it (a few honest, and hard-working grad students at smaller colleges are working on tests that would bolster the brother theory and eliminate the dog, but most mainstream universities are heavily funded for additional research into dog-eating-paper studies).

One think tank in the Pacific Northwest maintains that there’s nothing to glean from shredded bits of paper or the *lack* of paper in garbage cans, so God must have removed the paper from the Universe. Reports of the weakness of the law of conservation of paper would lead one to the definite conclusion that God is responsible.

Finally, one field researcher finds a pile of feces in the backyard with tiny pieces of half-digested pieces of paper in it. Three years of labored study yield 30% of a formula that your teacher confirms was the answer to question #4 of the particular homework assignment in question.

Scientific consensus reigns, the few remaining Brother Theorists relent and move on to pursue degrees on who peed on the carpet and the Nobel Prize for Biology is awarded to the field researcher for the publication of “Formulaic Reproduction of Holistic Homework Reconstruction in Canine Fecal Substrate.” The Theory of Dog-Eats-Homework appears as a “fact” in textbooks across the country, and is regularly referred to as such by scientists.

The Discovery Institute announces the founding of the Journal of Alternate Homework Stealing where the Dog-Eats-Homework “theory” is regularly repudiated, papers are peer-reviewed which deny that paper partially decomposes in dogs’ stomachs, and the theory of Intelligent Homework Removal is developed.

Must Christians be Creationists?

I’m going to try to dissect my understanding of modern Christianity here, so if I get something wrong please feel free to comment and correct me.

Christianity is based on the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God / God Himself, that He came down to Earth 2000 years ago, had Himself persecuted and crucified so as to forgive the Original Sin, and all sin for that matter, for all of time, for all of humanity.

So to believe that you must believe the story of the Original Sin, why else would God feel the need to crucify Himself in front of His creation? (Ignoring the fact that if He’s infinitely forgiving He could just forgive without the whole need to sacrifice Himself).

The Original Sin (in my understanding) was Adam and Eve being tricked by the snake, who was Satan, (I guess God was looking the other way so that this could happen and He could be pissed at humanity for the next 2000 years until He killed Himself for us) in the Garden of Eden, to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that God had forbade them to eat from (even though being blissfully ignorant they couldn’t fathom the shit they’d get in – good trick there God).  This is all Old Testament folklore.

So to sum up: to be a Christian one must believe the Original Sin story so that Jesus would have a reason to sacrifice himself.  But to believe the story of Original Sin means that you have to believe in the Biblical creation story.  The best reconciliation with science a Christian can have then is that of fundamentalist creationists, since how can you believe only a part of the creation story (that conveniently fits the rest of your belief system).

So to all Christians: are you all Young-Earth Creationists, or am I misunderstanding something here (please inform me)?

Why is God ethical?

In response to why are atheists ethical I had the thought this morning:

If there is a God to derive all absolute ethics from, where does He derive His ethics from?

Now the only argument I can think to this is that the first basic assumptions of religion are:

  1. God exists
  2. God is good

But what if number 2 is wrong? Or what does God use to reference his goodness to? You can say he’s innately good, but without a reference that is meaningless (what does innately tall mean without someone short to compare too?). You may compare God to Satan and say He is better, but God created Satan, so He could be screwing with you and really be just as bad (but only a little bit better).

I still don’t quite get it. It just doesn’t seem like there is a good explanation for what God based His morals on.

So I’m going to stick with my ethics that came about from natural selection (read my last post), and perhaps someone can solve this conundrum I have.

Atheist Ethics Revisited

I probably didn’t do this post full justice on my first attempt, so I’m going to rewrite it more thoroughly here.

The question arises far too often from people of faith:

How can you be ethical without the belief in God?

Or there are some other misconstrued variants:

…for if there is no God our existence is based not on the law of God but on the law of evolution.

From James Bell the First

I don’t think one can claim ethics or our existence is based on the law of evolution. The Law (I appreciate James’ use of the word law instead of theory and I think I’ll put it that way, it’s much more accepted than the word “theory” implies) of Evolution is merely a scientific way to explain the diversity observed in nature. Evolution has no inherent ethics or morals associated with it. If anything evolution is a cold, harsh selection process that would be horrible to choose your ethics from. The obvious example is of “ethical cleansing” or the Holocaust, where certain people believe themselves to be of higher genetic quality than others, and seek to unnaturally select others. I for one do not base my life on that principle.

So again arises the question, where do ethics come from? To examine this, I like to look to science to provide some insight (it’s treated me pretty well this far). It has been observed in nature that chimpanzees (and many other mammals, birds, and other animals) are altruistic by nature. They treat their kin with respect, follow the Golden Rule, and the “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” principle. So to state that humans are only moral because of their belief in god is to leave the question of why are all of these animals ethical or altruistic? The reason for this can be explained by evolution (do not make the mistake to assume that evolution is what the animals are looking at to be moral) as follows: Animals that are more altruistic and moral with their kin tend to create a stronger and safer family unit. This close unit preserves its genes better (since the family is surviving well), and reproduces. This is natural selection at work. So we see altruistic genes develop in a group and flourish as the group becomes better adapted for working together.

If you accept evolution (which has yet to have even one scientific paper released doubting it), then its easy to see how our altruism and ethics could develop in our ape ancestors. This then gets passed down into us, where although we are not in as small of groups, still possess the general traits of our ancestors.

So it makes sense logically that we should be ethical by nature, without the requirement for any supernatural good buddy.

What we do tend to notice is that people who are heavily religious tend to find excuses to break from their genetic pre-programming and commit horrible sins: murder, rape, war, and any number of others you can think of.

I am an ethical and moral being without the need for any supernatural entity.

Take the Atheist Test

The full test is available here, and also shows up as a pocket-sized quiz book randomly in urban centres (I was given one by a friend who found it on a bus one morning). But don’t worry I’m going to go through the whole thing here. So let’s begin The Atheist Test (with an atheist commentary – quotes from other sources are in italics):

The theory of evolution of the Coca Cola can.

Billions of years ago, a big bang produced a large rock. As the rock cooled, sweet brown liquid formed on its surface. As time passed, aluminum formed itself into a can, a lid, and a tab. Millions of years later, red and white paint fell from the sky, and formed itself into the words “Coca Cola 12 fluid ounces.”

Of course, my theory is an insult to your intellect, because you know that if the Coca Cola can is made, there must be a maker. If it is designed, there must be a designer. The alternative, that it happened by chance or accident, is to move into an intellectual free zone.

Continue reading Take the Atheist Test

Irreducible Simplicity

The “theory” of irreducible complexity is that there exists biological features, systems, or organisms in nature that are too complex to be traced back through biological evolution. The claim is that anything that is irreducibly complex will shatter the theory of evolution. This fact is true, and was originally admitted by Charles Darwin:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

And fast-forwarding to the present, we still do not see any such examples in nature.

Creationists like to point to the eye (which can be found in simpler and more complex forms in nature then humans), the dragonfly wing (which again can be seen in simpler and more complex forms), the bacterial flagellum (of which they’ve identified many individual sub-components that could still exist without the entire structure), and likely many more in the future. The point is that every example brought up has been refuted thus far.

Micheal Behe who developed the idea of IC in the bacterial flagellum said in the Pennsylvania 2005 court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that he hadn’t read most of the fifty-eight peer-reviewed articles, nine books, and several textbook chapters that demonstrated that evolution could explain the complexity of the human immune system. If there were ever the ability to revoke a person’s PhD, I think it is warranted in Dr. Behe’s case. His glaring ignorance of the scientific method is appalling for someone who calls himself a scientist.

This all leads me to my idea of a new “theory”: Irreducible Simplicity. I’ll phrase it as follows:

Any idea, theory, or concept that is irreducibly simple and leaves no room for further investigation, thought, or a general advancement of human knowledge is utter rubbish.

I can further illustrate this through a few examples.

  1. In the late 1800s physicists were under the idea that they understood nearly everything. Had they held this belief more firmly all modern physics (quantum mechanics, photonics, relativity, etc.) would not have been developed.
  2. The theory of ID suggests that all of creation came about through an intelligent designer. Unfortunately it fails to explain anything about the designer, but merely that he/she/it was always there.

Any IS theory cannot be classified as science. Following any IS theory is dangerous as it leads the individual to easy and supposedly definite and final answers and truths. Science doesn’t provide any of these, but merely gives our best guess thus far. Surely this seems more reasonable than the easy solution of “oh because God said so.”

If I wanted to be really critical (and I see no reason not to be) I would suggest that all religions fall into the IS category. It’s just too easy to claim one (or multiple yet contradictory) holy book(s) hold all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. As Douglas Adams (author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) said:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

This post is my first that has been brought about through the God Delusion, and seeing as I’m only mid-way through chapter four, there will likely be more.

Things that scare me

So I came across this site called Battle Cry where Christian zealots make their pleas to save all our immortal souls.  I don’t understand why those who are religious feel compelled to force their beliefs on others like this.  If I don’t believe in an immortal soul I don’t need it save.  Even if I did believe, I wouldn’t disrespect it by believing what they believe.

Some of the stuff here seems almost pornographic too:

Oh Lord, make me heart BEAT for you and ONLY you oh Lord. I want you more then life, I need you and I want to do great things for you. My God, my Lord. I am your child, and I want you to look upon me with pride, I am your daughter. Lord, this life is about you, not about men, marriage, kids, not about anything but you Lord. Only you Lord.

(From CANADIANEH‘s battle cry)

And then I notice her status on her commitments and I realize that she could save 10 minutes a day right here:

I will spend at least 10 minutes praying for my generation every day

I will make this nice and clear to everyone out there: do not pray for me.  I do not want anyone out there spouting this as though it will help.  If I am in trouble and you want to help then actually help, don’t close your eyes and mumble some words, it will do me no good.  Save your breaths.

At times I can think religion isn’t so bad, or that I shouldn’t feel compelled to revolt like I do, but then I see these sites and I am fearful of the future.

My rationale for disbelief

The following is taken from a Facebook wall-to-wall discussion I’m having (and he keeps deleting mine and his posts so I’ve decided to re-transcribe this here). This is in response to his question:

i would like to hear how you rationally decided that god could not exist

I’ll start with the assertion evolution is scientifically accepted (in that no scientific evidence has been put forth to cast doubt on the theory). So let’s think back to the emergence of the homo sapien species. We see social groups start to form, language emerge, and tool use develop. Now questions start arising (why does the sun rise, what happens when we die etc.). Elders of the tribe are generally respected in their tribe and they attempt to come up with reasonable explanations – the sun god makes the sun rise and set – so the tribe makes sacrifices to the sun god (or harvest god or whatever) in hopes that everything will continue merrily. Superstition spreads in some tribes, and their beliefs bind them. Those with tight beliefs and better morals (like the old don’t eat seafood, raw meat, etc. – things that would kill the ignorant) are better suited to survival and flourish (evolution directly favouring the tribes with the best beliefs of the time). As time passes different religions come and go, and eventually we see Christianity (and the other modern religions) emerge. Finally scientific methods start to dawn (17th century), and notions of the sun circling the Earth (because of god or whatever) are demonstrated to be false. As more and more is discovered, there becomes less and less need for people to hold onto the superstitions that allowed our species to persist this long.

So from my view, religion is a byproduct of evolution. With this in my mind, I see no reason that god needs to exist in any sense other than a mystical belief that our ancestors used to explain the unexplainable. Right now we still don’t completely understand the brain/mind, but I believe that we will gain a much greater perspective on that within our lifetimes.

From my view, it seems illogical to require a god still, beyond holding onto archaic traditions. And if you do believe in a god, which one(s)?

And to me its not that god doesn’t exist, but more that its very very very unlikely that he doesn’t (see Russel’s Teapot argument).