TrueFreeThinker

Margaret Downey, formerly of the Atheist Alliance International (which I commented on here) and founder of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, is promulgating her particular and peculiar form of atheist unholiday cheer.1

Margaret Downey erected a tree, at the old Chester County Courthouse in West Chester Pennsylvania, adorned with copies of book covers amongst other things. The Bible and the Koran (Qu’ran) are hanging on the tree, which is referred to as the “Tree of Knowledge.” Yet, the focus of the tree is anti-theist rhetoric. The tree is peppered with covers from Ibn Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim” Christopher Hitchens, “A Portable Atheist,” Randel Helms, “Gospel Fictions,” Rene Salam, “The Myth of Nazareth,” Bart Ehrman, “Misquoting Jesus” (see Misquoting Truth and Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus) and from the photo I thought that I discerned Richard Dawkins, “Growing Up in the Universe” (which I reviewed).

An onlooker asked, “Why do they have do that now?” I suppose it is because while celebrators of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, Ramadan and even the Solstice and Festivus are merry making, Margaret Downey sect of atheist cannot go without expressing prejudice and they must be on the offense at all times and thus, be offensive.

Staks Rosch, a member of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, stated, “I’d like to break up that monopoly so we have a free market of ideas – just to balance things out.” Fair enough, but a majority is a majority and will have a majority showing. Also, have atheist not had their fair share of books, articles, movies, lectures, debates, TV and radio interviews, etc.? I say, again, let them have their own holiday although sadly the atheists on the forefront of pushing an atheist holiday are the militant-activist-anti-theist sect who give the friendly atheist next door a bad name-sorry.
Staks Rosch also stated, “This tree of knowledge is a celebration of good ideas, of science, of history.” Of course, it is more than that, it is about belittling and besmirching. For example, I have yet to see a Christmas tree with copies of Vox Day’s “The Irrational Atheist” hanging on it or anything of the sort. By the way “The Irrational Atheist” is available on Amazon.com or as a free PDF file-hey, this is not a Christmas tree :o) Nor have I seen a copy of Arthur J. Lelyveld’s “Atheism is Dead” hanging on a Hannukiah (aka: a Hanukah menorah).

It is rather interesting that Margaret Downey is promoting her own brand of prejudicial cheer and stated “We’d love to see Kwanza candles and a Buddha statue, too.” Yet, in 2001 she “sued the county to remove its large [81 years old], bronze Ten Commandments plaque from the face of the stately courthouse.”

As I have stated before, Margaret Downey seeks to put a happy face on atheist as a self-appointed PR agent-I say mazel tov, nice try but, and keep trying.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help. Here is my donate/paypal page.

Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page. You can also use the “Share / Save” button below this post.

“Goatheads hurt. Why did God make goatheads?” asked my son as he walked around our front yard in his socks. He wasn’t referring to a goat’s head but to a thorny sticker.

At the age of five he had conceived “the problem of evil.” I was ecstatic realizing that I had just saved thousands of dollars! He wouldn’t have to get a degree in philosophy to conceive this question or comprehend an answer.

“Do you know what a goathead is?”

“No.”

“A goathead is a seed with thorns growing out of it. When an animal or person walks by, the thorns stick to them and the seed is carried away to fall away from the parent plant so that it can grow somewhere else.”

In this way the plant had figured out a way to reduce competition for resources.

“We think that goathead’s are bad because it hurts us, but it is a good thing because a new plant can grow.”

It’s all in perspective isn’t it? He considered it bad because it affected him personally and because he didn’t have enough information by which to put things into perspective.

Of course, evil and suffering come in a range on expressions—much more severe.

Thinking back to a decade previous, I had been in a period of heavy musing and flux. Suffering concerned me greatly. Then an agnostic, my mind reeled as I considered the suffering of my people, the Jews. So much, so terrible, so often, oi vey! What is one to conclude?

I concluded that if there is no God then it was all guaranteed to have been for nothing—no greater meaning or purpose except for the enjoyment of the evil doers and, most importantly, no redemption.

No redemption, only suffering.

While perhaps not “answering our questions” about evil and suffering I came to consider that redemption may be the missing bit of information—it was the goathead’s greater purpose.

I realized that if there was a redeemer there was at least hope, hope for fuller understanding (at some point), hope for meaning, hope for justice, hope for redemption itself.

I had heard about this Jesus character who, although being Jewish himself, was my enemy, right? He was a goyim pagan religious character, right?

I slowly went through the stages of shock, from anger to the eventual acceptance, in realizing that Jesus, this forboden character, was the Messiah—the ultimate redeemer.

Studying the Rabbinic writings I found that virtually his entire life can be reconstructed from the Rabbinic texts. Even those written after his time expected the Messiah to be as he was as they drew inferences from the Tanakh.

As unlikely, and problematic, as it was, I found that Jesus is the Messiah, the ultimate redeemer, the one who saves us from meaningless evil and the rest of the story about a goathead that hurts.

If raising one’s child according to one’s faith is “child abuse” (as per very many militant activist atheists) what is raising one’s child according to anti-theism? “Re-education” seemed appropriate (de-education came is as a close second).

The UK Independent has reported on atheist re-educations camps for the children of parents who want their children to think exactly like they do.1

Atheists have become the latest group to cash in on Britain’s booming summer camp industry by creating the country’s first-ever retreat for irreligious children.

The camp, “Camp Quest,” was founded in 1996 AD and is a “godless alternative” the slogan of which is “Beyond Belief.”
The camp is for,

atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view.

Anti-supernatural and “Beyond Belief.” one can only imagine what those poor little children are taught. Actually, they are surely taught the same thing in public school classrooms where atheism is smuggle through the backdoor or, actually, directly in through the front. “That’s right kids, all that stuff about the supernatural is poppycock! Everyone knows that matter is the eternal uncaused first cause and that the universe and absolutely everything in it, including you, is a result of serendipitous coincidinc!”

Maybe they can be told what Prof. Richard Dawkins stated during his 1991 AD “Christmas Lectures for Young People”:

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA_It is every living object’s sole reason for living’_fulfilling a purpose of propagating DNA_There is no purpose other than that.2

Next we find that the adults who run the camp, perhaps commensurate to their level of emotional maturity and intellectual prowess, engage in debate with little children as the camp revolves around “discussions about religion and non-belief” and features:

The centrepiece [sic; UK sp] of the camp is an ongoing discussion where participants are encouraged to try to disprove the existence of unicorns, which serve as a metaphor for God.Campers are told that two unicorns live in the area and cannot be seen, heard or touched. The adult councillors pretend to believe in the unicorns on the basis that an ancient book handed down through the generations says they exist.

The children are encouraged to try to prove that the unicorns do not exist. If anyone is successful they will be awarded a £10 note which has a picture of Charles Darwin on it and is signed by leading atheist academic Richard Dawkins.

I thought that Charles Darwin was not used to promote atheism?!? See, I knew that promoter of youth rebellion against God promoter Prof. Richard Dawkins was involved somehow. But a £10 note reward? Please, the camp costs £275 to attend, what kind of deal is that?!?
Apparently, the adult indoctrinators do not know the difference between a necessary being and a mockery. Scientific observation and philosophic consideration of the universe infers a creator and can even alert us to certain characteristics while the mockery is a straw-horse readymade to be toppled (see here for a featured discussion of natural theology the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorns in the relatively near future).

Let us review: we have a “godless alternative” that is “Beyond [theistic] Belief” for “atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view” where little children are made to engage in sham debate adults and rewarded with a glorification of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins.

Get the picture?

Well, Camp Quest does not:

The organisers remain adamant, however, that the camp will not have a proselytising “atheist agenda”.
“We don’t teach children not to believe in God, we simply tell them it’s OK not to believe in God,” said Edwin Kagin_founder of Camp Quest_

“The idea of the unicorn debate is not to prove God doesn’t exist, it is to illustrate that having such debates with religious people is futile because in the end faith trumps everything,” said Miss Stein [Samantha Stein, organiser of the British version of Camp Quest].

Also, in keeping with the general intellectual prowess demonstrated by the Camp Quest crew we find some comments about attempting to talk children into believing, as stated by Samantha Stein,

that it is OK to be an atheist and that a lack of religion does not mean a lack of morals or ethics.

One parent, Crispian Jago, agrees with this goal,

“We’re a non-religious family but not anti-religion,” he said. “A lot of my religious friends insist their morality stems from a divine source rather than a natural one but I want my children to know they can have morals and ethics without needing to resort to a faith.”

Note that the premise of atheist morals and ethics is anti-theistic. Moreover, they appear to mistakenly correlate morals and ethics. While this is very common and ethics is sometimes defined as a body of morals; morals denotes mores and while ethics denotes the actual ethos. One is description of what is and the other prescription of what ought to be.

In reality this is another of the very many examples of Atheism’s Public Relations Problems in terms of the disparity between the atheist public relations claims and their actual modus operandi.

Why do professional atheist indoctrinators and parents simply admit that they too want their children to believe just as they do?

Since I have already written about this in another blog I will move that post over here in a few days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help. Here is my donate/paypal page.

Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page.

Tri-Theism? Nice Try
Prof. Richard Dawkins claims that the Nicaean Creed states that “there are three gods, not one. The virgin Mary, Jesus died…went to the…what was it?…down for three days, and then came up again?”
No, not one of the other three other Riders corrected him.

I would certainly be willing to believe that it was a mere slip of the tongue. As a dyslexic, I could more than empathize and perhaps the other three did not catch it or did not want to embarrass him. However, I also wonder what that was all about and I would not even mention it if it were not for the fact that Prof. Richard Dawkins wrote, not stated in friendly conversation but wrote in his book “The God Delusion,” that Mormonism is a monotheistic religion and Christopher Hitchens has stated the same. It simply makes me wonder at their lack of knowledge regarding the most basic of theological concepts such as simply knowing in how many gods a certain religion believes.1 And this is all that I am stating, I am not besmirching them for not being conversant regarding theological minutia.

Prof. Daniel Dennett states that he does not think that many religious people ever ask themselves “What if I’m wrong?” The context of the discussion at this point is the Nicaean Creed with which Protestants, Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Church agree. Therefore, it may be reasonably stated that Prof. Daniel Dennett is here addressing the overwhelming majority of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians. The greater context of the discussion, at this point, is that science is more humble than “religion.”

Yes, imagine that, “Hey, I’m humbler than thou!!!” How is that a scientific statement? Moreover, how is it humble to look at 2.5 billion people (give or take) and claim to know their inner thoughts?
Christopher Hitchens disagrees with Prof. Daniel Dennett and, of course, this is turned into another point against the 2.5 billion Nicaean Creeders. This is because, obviously, they are just sort of hypnotizing themselves with “a mantra,” as Prof. Richard Dawkins refers to it.

Fascinating: you are damned if you do not doubt and also if you do doubt. Speaking of hypnotizing mantras, I cannot help but mention Prof. Richard Dawkins’ recommendation to the effect of: ignore the evidence and maintain your materialism at all cost (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 1),

“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

Francis Crick likewise wrote (What Mad Pursuit, p. 138),

“Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

Interestingly, Prof. Daniel Dennett also stated that they, atheists, also should ask themselves “What if I’m wrong?” However, he will later state “Actually I can’t think of anything” when asked if there is “any challenge to your atheism that has given you pause.”

Not tri-theism.
Rather, try theism.

God is “He who sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22)

Cliff Walker has presented us with various logical fallacies and faulty inferences drawn from lack of knowledge of, and misunderstandings of, the Bible.

This essay, which is part 3, will focus on a very small but significant statement made by Cliff Walker. Note that I am not writing very much of this essay but will mostly allow the research of the late Stephen Jay Gould to respond to Cliff Walker’s statements.

Cliff Walker wrote:

People have been working for years to undermine any human progress which contradicts cherished myths…Since the myth they want to enforce cannot stand on its own merit, the only method left for them is to try to discredit any human progress which contradicts the myth.We must remember that in 600 B.C.E., philosophers (what scientists were called back then) knew that the earth is a globe (and is not flat, as it appears to a mind that is unaided by abstract thinking skills). In 400 B.C.E., philosophers had made a close calculation as to the size of the earth. By 200 B.C.E., they had realized that the earth is not a perfect sphere, and had made some concerted efforts to measure how far off from a perfect sphere this spheroid called Earth is…

Long after these accomplishments came the Dark Ages. Ancient science had become so completely forgotten, through the domination of the Christian religion and its flat-earth dogma, that we now speak of the Copernican Revolution — as if Copernicus was the first to discover and publicize heliocentricity. Galileo was persecuted in 1633 — fully 141 years after Christopher Columbus, in 1492, ‘discovered’ a land that had already been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. Galileo was persecuted fully 111 years after Magellan’s crew, in 1522, completed the first known voyage around the globe…1

This portion of Cliff Walker’s statements interested me because they are so brief and yet, contain a tightly packaged concoction of historical myths. This succinct package was the reason I referred to his statements as “small,” their significance will be drawn out as we proceed. I rely heavily on Mr. Gould’s essay not because it is the only source of refutation of the above ideas (in fact Stephen Jay Gouldcites various authors) but because he well encapsulated a response to the historical myth. I will now quote from The Late Birth of a Flat Earth.2

Stephen Jay Gould set the stage thusly:

I also once learned that most other ecclesiastical scholars of the benighted Dark Ages had refuted Aristotle’s notion of a spherical earth, and had depicted our home as a flat, or at most a gently curved, plate. Didn’t we all hear the legend of Columbus at Salamanca, trying to convince the learned clerics that he would reach the Indies and not fall off the ultimate edge?

This is basically what was described in Philip J. Sampson’s book 6 Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization as “ideas everyone believes that really aren’t true.” Stephen Jay Gould proceeds to explain how such historical myths came to be.

Stephen Jay Gould continues:

…the supposed Dark and Medieval consensus for a flat earth-is entirely mythological…the invention of this fable [is traced to] the nineteenth century…the nineteenth-century invention of the flat earth…occurred to support another dubious and harmful separation wedded to another legend of historical progress-the supposed warfare between science and religion.

Classical scholars, of course, had no doubt about the earth’s sphericity. Our planet’s roundness was central to Aristotle’s cosmology and was assumed in Eratosthenes’ measurement of the earth’s circumference in the third century B.C. The flat-earth myth argues that this knowledge was then lost when ecclesiastical darkness settled over Europe. For a thousand years of middle time, almost all scholars held that the earth must be flat.

Stephen Jay Gould had already noted that The Venerable Bede (673-735) “clearly presented his classical conception of the earth as a sphere at the hub of the cosmos…Bede then explicitly stated that he meant a three-dimensional sphere, not a flat plate.”

The inspirational, schoolchild version of the myth centers upon Columbus, who supposedly overcame the calumny of assembled clerics at Salamanca to win a chance from Ferdinand and Isabella. Consider this version of the legend, cited by Russell from a book for primary-school children written in 1887, soon after the myth’s invention (but little different from accounts that I read as a child in the 1950s):

‘But if the world is round,’ said Columbus, ‘it is not hell that lies beyond that stormy sea. Over there must lie the eastern strand of Asia, the Cathay of Marco Polo’…In the hall of the convent there was assembled the imposing company-shaved monks in gowns…cardinals in scarlet robes….’You think the earth is round…Are you not aware that the holy fathers of the church have condemned this belief…This theory of yours looks heretical.’ Columbus might well quake in his boots at the mention of heresy; for there was that new Inquisition just in fine running order, with its elaborate bone-breaking, flesh-pinching, thumb-screwing, hanging, burning, mangling system for heretics. [ellipsis points are here Mr. Gould’s]

Dramatic to be sure, but entirely fictitious. There never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology…This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet, at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but all assumed the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great…

Virtually all major medieval scholars affirmed the earth’s roundness…The twelfth-century translations into Latin of many Greek and Arabic works greatly expanded general appreciation of natural sciences, particularly astronomy, among scholars-and convictions about the earth’s sphericity both spread and strengthened. Roger Bacon (1220-1292) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) affirmed roundness via Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, as did the greatest scientists of later medieval times, including John Buriden (130(1-1358) and Nicholas Oresme (1320-1382)…

English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified major culprits in his History of the Inductive Sciences, published in 1837-two minimally significant characters named Lactantius (245-325) and Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his ‘Christian Topography’ in 547-549. Russell comments: ‘Whewell pointed to the culprits…as evidence of a medieval belief in a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent historian imitated him-they could find few other examples’…both men played minor roles in medieval scholarship. Only three reasonably complete medieval manuscripts of Cosmas are known (with five or six additional fragments), and all in Greek. The first Latin translation dates from 1706-so Cosmas remained invisible to medieval readers in their own lingua franca…

Where then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise?… None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists-not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin-accused the scholastics of believing in a flat earth, though these men were all unsparing in their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity…

Russell [Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians] did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat-earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth to the period between 1860 and 1890. Those years also featured the spread of an intellectual movement based on the second error of taxonomic categories explored in this essay-the portrayal of Western history as a perpetual struggle, if not an outright ‘war,’ between science and religion, with progress linked to the victory of science and the consequent retreat of theology. Such movements always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history…

I was especially drawn to this topic because the myth of dichotomy and warfare between science and religion-an important nineteenth century theme with major and largely unfortunate repercussions extending to our times-received its greatest boost in two books that I own and treasure for their firm commitment to rationality (however wrong and ultimately harmful their dichotomizing model of history)_ John W. Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, first published in 1874; and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896 (a great expansion of a small book first written in 1876 and called The Warfare of Science)…

Draper states his thesis in the preface to his volume:

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compressing arising from
traditionary faith and human interests on the other…Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place.

Draper extolled the flat-earth myth as a primary example of religion’s constraint and science’s progressive power:

The circular visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of theMohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency to that doctrine throughout Western Europe,

but, as might be expected, it was received with disfavor by theologians…Traditions and policy forbade [the Papal Government] to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures.

Russell comments on the success of Draper’s work:

The History of the Conflict is of immense importance, because it was the first instance that an influential figure had explicitly declared that science and religion were at war, and it succeeded as few books ever do. It fixed in the educated mind the idea that “science” stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of “religion.” Its viewpoint became conventional wisdom.

Andrew Dickson White…wrote: ‘Much as I admired Draper’s treatment of the questions involved, his pointof view and mode of looking at history were different from mine. He regarded the struggle as one between Scienceand Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic

Theology’…

Despite these stated disagreements, White’s and Draper’s accounts of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science.And both develop and utilize the same myths to support their narrative, the flat-earth legend prominently among them. Of Cosmas Indicopleustes’s flat-earth theory, for example, White wrote, ‘Some of the foremost men in the

Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty’…

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between two taxonomic categories labeled science and religion…

This essay has discussed a double myth in the annals of our bad habits in false categorization: (1) the flat-earth legend as support for a biased ordering of Western history as a story in redemption from classical to Dark to Medieval to Renaissance; and (2) the invention of the flat-earth myth to support a false dichotomization of Western history as another story of progress, a war of victorious science over religion. I would not be agitated by these errors if they led only to an inadequate view of the past without practical consequence for our modern world. But the myth of a war between science and religion remains all too current, and continues to impede a proper bonding and conciliation between these two utterly different and powerfully important institutions of human life. How can a war exist between two vital subjects with such different appropriate turfs-science as an enterprise dedicated to discovering and explaining the factual basis of the empirical world, and religion as an examination of ethics and values?”

As to these definitions of the roles of science and religion, keep in mind that Stephen Jay Gouldespoused the concept of NOMA (Nonoverlapping Magesteria).

Stephen Jay Gouldcontinues:

…a simplistic picture of history as continual warfare between science and theology. Exposure of the flat-earth myth should teach us the fallacy of such a view and help us to recognize the complexity of interaction between these institutions. Irrationality and dogmatism are always the enemies of science, but they are no true friends of religion either. Scientific knowledge has always been helpful to more generous views of religion-as preservation, by ecclesiastical scholars, of classical knowledge about the earth’s shape aided religion’s need for accurate calendars, for example.

Certainly, Cliff Walker is not to be faulted for lacking omniscience but it is perhaps as noteworthy as it is sad and unfortunate that Mr. Jeffrey Russell published Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians in 1991 AD, Stephen Jay Gould wrote the text above in 1996 AD and Cliff Walker in 1999 AD. A mere three years had passed since Mr. Gould’s essay and the activist popularizes of the myth were still hard at work confusing the public (having had eight years prior to become familiar with the historical facts, and this is not even considering other works on this subject). In light of Cliff Walker’s historical myth and Mr. Gould’s refutation of it, it is interesting to quote Cliff Walker again:

People have been working for years to undermine any human progress which contradicts cherished myths…Since the myth they want to enforce cannot stand on its own merit, the only method left for them is to try to discredit any human progress which contradicts the myth.

Would that Cliff Walker may cease to undermine human progress in the understanding of history which contradicts his cherished myths. Since the myth he wants to enforce cannot stand on its own merit, the only method left for him is to try to discredit any historically accurate rendering which contradicts the myth.

God is “He who sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22)

Amazing PerplexityChristopher Hitchens states:

“I didn’t expect, when I started off on my book tour, to be as lucky as I was and I, Jerry Falwell died my first week on the road, that was amazing.”

Sam Harris, very enthusiastically and laughingly,

“Yes, that was amazing luck!”

This must be far too erudite and or in-house atheist humor because I am simply perplexed. I just do not understand what was “amazing.”
I have asked for elucidation at Prof. Richard Dawkins’ website (487. Comment #130681) and am currently awaiting a response.
In the meantime, and I do mean “mean,” it may be of interest, or morbid curiosity, to note the following report by David Limbaugh from, The Paradoxical Hatred of Christopher Hitchens:

“Hitchens refused to back down from his excoriation of Falwell on the very day of his death, saying, ‘I don’t care whether his family’s feelings are hurt or not. But if they are, they can take comfort from the extraordinary piety and stupidity, and generally speaking, uniformity of the coverage of the man’s death.’ Hitchens’ response to CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s question of whether he believed in heaven and whether ‘you think Jerry Falwell is in it.’ Hitchens said he did not believe in it, but ‘I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.'”

Anonymous Confession of an Atheist Clergyman
Prof. Richard Dawkins mentions that Dan Barker is compiling a “collection of clergymen who have lost their faith but don’t dare say so because it’s their only living, it’s the only thing they know.” Sam Harris claims to have been in contact with precisely ONE such person. This is as fascinating as Sam Harris’ ability to name precisely ONE secular charity as a counterbalance to the hundreds of thousands of religious ones. He is aware of precisely ONE single clergyman out of all of the clergymen on the planet and this is supposed to make some sort of point.

Well, it actually does make a point: the book will be about dishonest and hypocritical unbelievers. Yet, between Prof. Richard Dawkins’ statement and today Dan Barker published yet another book based on his old, tired and only self-appointed claim to fame the good old , “I’m an ex-preacher” routine.

Faith, Evidence and Doubting Thomas
Sam Harris stated,

“…this idea that you start with a premise that belief without evidence is especially noble, I mean, this is the doctrine of faith, this is the parable of doubting Thomas…”

I found it fascinating that he correlates “belief without evidence” with doubting Thomas since that “parable” makes precisely the opposite point. But I will divert your attention to my essay responding to Prof. Richard Dawkins’ claim that the apostle Thomas should be the patron saint of scientists since I have corrected this notion there-for now, note that not one of the apostles took Jesus resurrection on “faith.” This is merely indicative of Prof. Richard Dawkins’ lack of knowledge with regards to that which he seeks to discredit.

It’s Absolutely RelativeSam Harris stated:

“And I think we make a very strong case when we point that out, and point out also that whatever people are experiencing, in church or in prayer, no matter how positive, the fact that Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and Christians are all experiencing it, proves that it can’t be matter of the divinity of Jesus, or the unique sanctity of the Koran.”

According to various theologies this actually proves no such thing. For instance, according to the theologies of various religions there are many paths to God even though specific religions may not believe so. This would not even prove that it cannot be the divinity of Jesus, or the unique sanctity of the Koran (Qur’an), since God would be reaching people thorough various means.
Even according to Christian theology there is no reason to deny that religious people of various theologies, or atheologies, have “mystical,” or “spiritual” experiences. The God of the Bible may be using their contemporary beliefs in order to eventually draw them to the true theology. God may have been giving them over to their own passions if they are so free-willingly following their own way (Romans 1:26).

Ex-atheist C. S. Lewis wrote:

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.”1

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help. Here is my donate/paypal page.

Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page. You can also use the “Share / Save” button below this post.

At least, some treat the First Law of Thermodynamics as a sort of commandment which they seek to employ in a self-serving manner. Such was the case with Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad (during his, and Kelly’s, debate with Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron).

Two quick things to point out: he made the slight misstatement of referring to the Law as being the Third rather than First. Also, some mistakenly claim that he argued that the universe is eternal but he did not. Rather, he argued that eternal uncaused energy/matter brought our universe into being. Thus, according to his argument our universe is finite but energy/matter is infinite.

Here is the crux of his statements in this regard:

“Science has a law, it’s called the third law of thermodynamics; which shows us, and it’s one of the most tested laws in science, that matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That we always have the same amount of matter and energy.

We could blow up this building, and while it would look completely different, there would be the exact same amount of matter and energy in the universe.

That tells us scientifically, if we were to use a more scientific approach, that the components of our world today, our universe, have always existed.

And we have real science to lend credence to that.”1

It was evident that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron were simply unprepared to even attempt to respond to this point.

Yet, the crucial non sequitur here seems to be that the First Law is relevant to the universe in which it functions. As obvious as this seems, it does appear as if this is what is being overlooked: “we always have the same amount of matter and energy.” Who is “we”? It is us, here, this, universe.

Thus, the disconnect, the non sequitur, is to conclude that “the components of our world today, our universe, have always existed.” This is sort of like sealing a box and stating that nothing can go into the box and nothing can come out. Yes, but this is within the box. Let us think outside of the box.

We know that within the universe energy/matter is neither created nor destroyed but only changed. We are dealing with conservation of energy within a system. We have real science to lend credence to this but not to the assertion that energy/matter is the uncaused eternal first cause.

The fact that the universe is not eternal leads us to the rational conclusion that energy/matter came into being at the moment of the universe’s inception (along with space/time). Furthermore, it is reasonable to conclude that whatever existed “before” that, whatever brought the universe into being, was without matter, or immaterial, or spirit (and timeless, or eternal and space-less or without spatial restrictions).2 Thus, we have real science that supports the conclusion that energy/matter came into existence at a finite point having not existed previously.

Therefore, real science does not demand that energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed any”where” any”time” but only within our universe, within the box in which the Law functions.

The Bible predicted the First Law of Thermodynamics:

Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”

“beginning” = time.

“heavens” = space.

“earth” = matter.

“In the beginning” = the finite creation of the universe.

“God” = a preexistent time-less, space-less, matter-less being or; eternal, not confined to locality nor subject to natural laws, immaterial or spirit.

“created” = brought into being, infused with energy/matter, designed.

Genesis 2:1-3

“Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.”

Thus, the Bible stated that energy/matter were brought into being, placed within the box (the universe) and that no more energy/matter is being created.

Moreover, due to entropy, the amount of usable energy is constantly being depleted so that if the universe was eternal the usable energy would have been depleted an eternity ago. This is another way of knowing that the universe had a beginning.

This, the first installment of The BOBA Digest will focus on an argument that surely proceeds forth from the murky depths of atheism’s barrel (see our definition of BOBA here).

The argument that I wish to present is one that claims that Christians demonstrate that they do not really believe in all of this stuff about a supernatural afterlife in heaven with God because Christians cry and or mourn at funerals.

Can you imagine being so malicious, so filled with hatred, so joyful of another person’s misery (schadenfreude) and so self-congratulatory? Can you imagine seeing people mourning and crying and mentally highfiving yourself and stating, “Look at ’em, just look at ’em! Hypocrites! Just look how they cry, they obviously doubt the existence of God! This is great! Oh, oh, look at that one – wah, wah, wah – you can actually pinpoint when their faith failed, it’s when the tears started falling!”
What depths of depravity would turn human being into such vicious and malicious inhuman, inhumane, subhumans?

Seriously, there are various people out there in the blogosphere who are really pseudo-pontificating on this issue. They are really having a go at Christians who are careless enough to show emotions at funerals and patting themselves on the back in the meantime (and I do mean “mean”).

The prisoner who now stands before youWas caught red-handed showing feelingsShowing feelings of an almost human nature;This will not do.”-Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin

From Pink Floyd‘s song The Trial,

from the album1 The Wall

It is actually pretty simple: if you want to know why Christians cry at funerals you should ask them. For instance, I can tell you that I cried when my father-in-law died. I can also tell you that crying was a purely emotional reaction and I did not stop to construct thoughts around my mourning, I just mourned. But if you must know, I believe that he is enjoying an afterlife with God.

Imagine that someone told you that they were going to take your spouse or child to the most wonderful country. This country is on the other side of the planet. In this country there is no war, no disease, no poverty, etc. Your spouse or child will live a perfectly healthy and happy life there. And in a year, or a decade or eighty years you will also be taken there to join them. What would your reaction be? I would guess: joy and sorrow. The same joy and sorrow as Christians experience upon the death of one of their loved ones. Joy because they are happy for them and sorrow because they will miss their love one until such time as they are reunited.

Also, these BOBA atheists are so quick to take delight in another’s suffering that they do not consider that some deaths occur due to tragic or violent occurrences. If your loved one died after years of suffering from a physical disorder you may weep from a sort of emotional release. If your loved one was beaten to death you may mourn that their life had to end on such a brutal note. Having received an urgent phone call that woke me up, I ran into my father-in-law’s house and felt his wrist for a pulse. Upon touching his skin I could tell already that he was gone since his skin was unnaturally cold. The feeling of a human body being so unnaturally cold stays with you. Seeing someone you love laying there like an unanimated slab of meat does as well. Today I still think about him, I miss him and think that he has not yet met two of his grandchildren but I do not mourn or weep.

The bottom line is that atheists can pretend to know why I wept and mourned. They can pretend to know my thought. They can pretend to know my doubts. They can put me on their metaphoric Freudian sofa and psychoanalyze me. Yet, in the end I know why wept and mourned and they do not. They have no evidence for claiming that a Christians who weep and mourn at funerals doubt their faith. Simply because Christians believe in an afterlife does not mean that we are somehow robotic processors of purely information based theology. We are also complex creatures who function at various levels of belief, intellect and emotion.

This cheap shot, consisting as it does of non sequiturs and schadenfreude, certainly earns those who make the argument a place in the bottom of the barrel.

On very rare occasion I decide to pull an interesting article from directly from another website and repost it here.

Such will be the case in this post as I will quote, in its entirety the UK Guardian‘s Madeleine Bunting‘s April 6, 2009 AD article “Real debates about faith are drowned by the New Atheists’ foghorn voices-More thoughtful sceptics warn that we should fear the consequences of the swift collapse of Britain’s major belief system“

Following is her article:

This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only presume that the New Atheists are organising a fabulous party to celebrate. Richard Dawkins could stump up for the crates of champagne out of his sumptuous royalties from The God Delusion.

But I’m curious as to how many of the country’s finest minds would join the celebrations. Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion: what it is, the loss of it, whether it matters, and what happens in a post-religious society? From sometimes surprising quarters there is an anxiety about the evangelical fervour and certainty of the New Atheists: they are so sure they are right, but there are plenty of people – and many of them would not count themselves as believers – who can’t share their contempt for religion.

Just this week, AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, “I don’t believe in God – though I wish I did, and I can’t stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?” Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British – many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that – than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

What many argue is that the New Atheist debate has ended up down an intellectual dead end; there are only so many times you can argue that religion is a load of baloney. Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”. Both are deeply frustrated by a debate inflated by the media that generates heat but no light. They see the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith. In common with their Christian opponents, they share “the inner glow of complete certainty” – as Wilson describes his atheist conversion.

Armstrong and Gray converge again on where they pinpoint the key mistake. Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What “belief” used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of “love”, “commitment”, “loyalty”: saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.

“We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.

From a different perspective, Alain de Botton, the philosopher and writer, has also been trying to broaden the conversation. He has founded a School of Life in London, which runs courses and events reflecting on how to live. He describes himself as “definitely an atheist”, but readily admits he borrows plenty from religions. His team have instituted the idea of Sunday sermons, and organise contemporary “pilgrimages”. “Even if you’re an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion,” he says. “We’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

De Botton argues that the decline of religious faith has left behind a real and widespread need for wisdom and insight; the media offers only a “cruel sentimentality” and gives little space to the most difficult of our life experiences, such as failure, death or envy, nor does it offer ways to deal with them. The author Mark Vernon teaches on some School of Life courses. A former priest and atheist, he now advocates a principled agnosticism rooted in an understanding of the limits of human knowledge. He argues that the most interesting conversations about faith are among those just outside religious traditions and those just inside – along the borders of belief, if you like.

It’s a perspective that Gray shares. Describing himself as a sceptic, he looks to another border of belief for deeper insight into the nature of faith: the dialogue between the theistic and non-theistic. Intriguingly, where Gray, Armstrong and Vernon all end up is with the apophatic tradition of theology. Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it’s a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: “In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice.” It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

But the modern distortion was to make God into a proposition in which you either did or did not believe. He was turned into an old man in the sky with a long white beard or promoted as a cuddly friend named Jesus. Arguing about the existence of such human creations is akin to the medieval pastime of calculating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

So the media has been promoting the wrong argument, while the bigger question of how, in a post-religious society, people find the myths they need to sustain meaning, purpose and goodness in their lives go unexplored. What worries Gray is that we forget at our peril that all systems of thought rely on myth. By junking the Christian myths, the danger is that the replacements are “cruder, less tested, less instructive”. At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on. The consequences of that will certainly not be cause for celebration, he warns.

The End
I, Ken, did want to offer one note on the point about the “old man in the sky with a long white beard” and the “cuddly friend named Jesus.”

I know of no Christian based religions that consider God to be an “old man in the sky with a long white beard.”
The “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” or “Mormons” certainly do hold to this view but it is one of the reasons that they are considered a pseudo-Christian cult. Moreover, they are henotheists (yet, even though Prof. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not know this very basic fact and refer to them as monotheists).

As for the “cuddly friend named Jesus” I do not know about the cuddly part but Jesus did say, “I have called you friends” (John 15:15).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help. Here is my donate/paypal page.

Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page.