uberkuh

Like I’m sure a lot of atheists out there, ever since George Carlin’s death, I’ve been asking myself over and over, “Why do you restrain yourself?” The last version of this site overflowed with sarcasm and frank expositions on religious nonsense, even if they were at times silly and ultimately futile. At the time I thought to myself, “You’re being too hard on theists. They’ll never deconvert if you act disdainful or belligerent towards them. Act nice and they’ll repent of their otherworldly inhumanness.”

Yeah, well, in the spirit of George Carlin’s beautiful rotting corpse, fuck acting nice. I’ve decided that deconversion is not even remotely the point of an atheistic blog or website. Why? Because theists, generally speaking, don’t give a fuck about what we atheists think or feel. They don’t listen to reason. They don’t care about truth. All they care about is their precious Teddy Bear of Hope in the Sky.

So what is the point, pray tell, of shouting my lungs out if it falls on deaf ears? It’s just preaching to the choir, in a manner of speaking. And, truth be told, neither I nor any of you atheist bloggers out there have a single solitary chance in Hell of deconverting these lost nonexistent souls until they are ready and willing themselves to listen to what reason and reality have to offer.

So, I say, screw this serious atheological or philosophical bullshit that I’ve been struggling to write for months now. This isn’t a thesis paper. No one is grading my grammar or spelling. Who cares if I plagiarize from Benny Hinn and command demons to flee in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? This is a goddamn atheistic blog, for Christ’s sake. And my audience, being the only ones who really give a shit about life, are all atheists just like me, looking for a sense of community and a few choice words about the shitty religious world in which they are forced to live until Jesus and Muhammad return and admit to being a homo and a nympho, respectively.

Screw seriousness and screw religion. I’m ready to resume having fun.

(Now watch. I won’t post anything for weeks.)

Atheists often complain that theists will not listen to reason and deconvert because emotion gets in the way. So, this complaint goes, there isn’t any hope of deconverting a theist until s/he feels like it.

Well, earlier today I read a few pages from D’Holbach’s The System of Nature. And I began to lose interest after only a few paragraphs. Part of the problem is that D’Holbach took a while to get to his point. He could probably expostulate for hours, deconverting his friends out of sheer exhaustion.

Yet, another part of the problem is that, put bluntly, I have shit to do. Life calls, in other words, constantly. It’s relenting in its request for attention. “You forgot to turn off the light.” “You need to wash clothes.” “Your lawn isn’t going to mow itself.” It’s so annoying!

So, if I put myself in the shoes of your average theist with lots of shit to do, it becomes abundantly clear that I will almost certainly never get around to reading critical commentaries on religion, much less thinking about religion critically, which takes more effort. No, instead, I will most likely spend my entire life struggling in a constant tug-of-war with reality to just get shit done. It’s not emotion. It’s not retardation. It’s just life. Life is the culprit.

Religions generally presuppose that humans have access to absolute truth. However, how do we know and, if we do, can we confirm that there definitely exists a strict division between truth and falsehood in all cases? The fallibility of perception and the limits of human ability seem to suggest that truth is not absolute.

In other words, if we define a lie as an intentional misrepresentation of the truth, then there seems to be a presupposition that truth can be known absolutely. So, if we extend the definition of truth to be contingent on human experience of reality, as a filter of sorts, and not truth as a direct statement about reality, then that seems to make truth a popularity contest, like a genetic variation of Wikipedia if you will. This makes religion’s presupposition naive.

You have to hand it to theologians for their typically brilliant explanations of biblical events. Here is a fine example of Anselm’s explanation for the division of good and bad angels in Heaven and Hell, respectively.

In On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli) Anselm extends his account of freedom and sin by discussing the first sin of the angels. In order for the angels to have the power to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake, they had to have both a will for justice and a will for happiness. If God had given them only a will for happiness, they would have been necessitated to will whatever they thought would make them happy. Their willing of happiness would have had its ultimate origin in God and not in the angels themselves. So they would not have had the power for self-initiated action, which means that they would not have had free choice. The same thing would have been true, mutatis mutandis, if God had given them only the will for justice.

Since God gave them both wills, however, they had the power for self-initiated action. Whether they chose to subject their wills for happiness to the demands of justice or to ignore the demands of justice in the interest of happiness, that choice had its ultimate origin in the angels; it was not received from God. The rebel angels chose to abandon justice in an attempt to gain happiness for themselves, whereas the good angels chose to persevere in justice even if it meant less happiness. God punished the rebel angels by taking away their happiness; he rewarded the good angels by granting them all the happiness they could possibly want. For this reason, the good angels are no longer able to sin. Since there is no further happiness left for them to will, their will for happiness can no longer entice them to overstep the bounds of justice. Thus Anselm finally explains what it is that perfects free choice so that it becomes unable to sin.

It was inevitable that the opening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a film starring former Nixon writer and game show host Ben Stein, would revive the Intelligent Design (ID) debate in the U.S. A quick search of Google News shows what film critics think of this film. And websites like Expelled Exposed show what atheists think.

The more I think about ID, the more it seems to be an inevitable reaction to two modern realities, science and technology. The evolution of science and technology is causing the extinction of older, less scientific beliefs and methodologies, like Biblical creationism and faith healing, for example. Because of this, those who hold less scientific beliefs and practice less scientific methodologies are being forced to either change their beliefs and habits or become essentially less fit to survive.

When I listen to Stein in the Expelled trailer, his words seem laughable to me. From the handful of reviews I have read, many people feel the same. I find his words laughable because, at the beginning of the trailer, he admits that he is equating ID with religious belief, while at the same time trying to resolve it with science. It’s like he just doesn’t get that religion isn’t science and never will be.

It also astonishes me that Stein is so grossly ignorant about evolution. He seems to think that evolution is a completely random process. And he jokingly (I think) equates it with causing life to exist from mud and lightning strikes. Why has he not learned about evolution before critiquing it or becoming a spokesperson for those who do? No, it must be the same old story. He has simply ignored the facts and presumed that his religious beliefs remain intact.

From what I have learned, I can confidently conclude that evolution is a fact of life. Evolution is life. Life evolves. If religious beliefs are incompatible with evolution, then those beliefs are wrong. Or, perhaps, they are misunderstood. We are imperfect creatures, after all.

If we cannot know everything, then can we know that something that seems impossible is, in fact, impossible?

Richard Dawkins says that we cannot be certain that God does not exist, only that this is very improbable. However, it seems to me that the very definition of a deity is inherently self-contradictory. For instance, any conceivable god is, by definition, supernatural and the supernatural is a self-contradictory concept. A supernatural being exists outside the laws of physics, but it is impossible to know this without also knowing that physics cannot possibly explain the supernatural part of the deity in question.

In other words, without being supernatural, yourself, it would be impossible to know that someone else is supernatural. So, while it might be possible for a being to be supernatural–assuming that eternally defying the laws of physics makes any sense–it is impossible to know this for certain.

The play-turned-film Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Trial in which a high school teacher from Tennessee is convicted of illegally teaching evolution in class. I saw the 1960 film version tonight for the first time and was struck by the profundity of the ending, which shows Henry Drummond, the defense attorney, deciding to jointly carry a copy of the Bible and Darwin’s Origin of Species with him out of the court room.

The message of this film’s ending and, thus, the overriding message of the film itself, seems to be that religion and science can and should coexist. This implies that religion should learn from science and that, conversely, science should tolerate religion. While Drummond is portrayed as an agnostic, his final action suggests that he believes that religion offers necessary hope to people.

However, another message leaps out in this film. It is that religion should not force people to believe or disbelieve anything, scientific or otherwise. In the film, Drummond questions the prosecuting attorney, Matthew Harrison Brady, and hammers Brady with questions about the reconciliation of Bible and science, such as how the Earth could have stood still without everything on Earth flying off and, more importantly to the case, how the first day of creation could be proven to have been exactly 24 hours if the Sun was not created until the fourth day.

This line of questioning leads to Drummond’s final question and final point. He asks why, if Brady can be allowed to interpret the Bible in a less than literal way, another person cannot be allowed the same basic right. This is the right to think independently.

Inherit the Wind brings to mind a basic problem with organized religions like Christianity in that they cannot force themselves on others and, at the same time, claim to be founded on faith. If Christianity, for example, could claim to be founded on science, then it could claim to have a legal right to coexist with science. However, because the basis of belief in Christian teachings is faith and faith precludes reason, no one has, or at least should have in any reasonable society, the right to force another into believing those teachings, either by law or custom.

Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty (PDF)

“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.” Thomas Paine

Atheism is a belief that a specific god does not exist, a belief that no gods exist, or a lack of belief in the existence of one or more gods.