Geology Professor: Why Religious Believers...

[Illuminatus Primus]

A Note to Visitors

I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games. Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all you have to do is commit to a criterion for testing. It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Why This Page?

Several times in my life, I have been in the position of knowing people on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and I keep seeing similar patterns on both sides. First of all, both sides picture themselves as powerless in the face of an oncoming avalanche. You can't stand two people back to back and have both of them twelve feet taller than the other. Obviously one side or the other, and usually both, have serious delusions about how powerful and malevolent their opponents are. Generally both sides are grossly misinformed about what the other side believes, and when I have tried to communicate between sides, I find an identical response. I get arguments so specious that it's obvious the clear intent is to frustrate understanding. It's not that one side cannot understand the other - they will not understand.

So, in the spirit of Rhett Butler, who joined the Confederate Army after the fall of Atlanta, saying he could only get attached to a cause after it was really good and lost, this page and its companion are an attempt to tell intellectuals and religious believers what each side thinks of the other.

If you're an intellectual who is embarrassed by the specious reasoning that is rampant in academia, or a conservative Christian who is appalled by the awful reasoning spouted from many pulpits, I am not writing about you. So you're wasting our time by writing and saying that you don't commit any of these sins. But if you blissfully assume that your side is good and the other side is evil, and you're shocked and offended by what I say about you, good.
Stop

Dollars to doughnuts you are reading the wrong page. If you style yourself a religious believer and are looking for more reasons not to take intellectuals seriously, you are on the wrong page. Go read Why Intellectuals Don't Take Religious Believers Seriously first. Then, when you have cleaned up your own act and don't practice any of the fallacies described there, you can read this page. This page is meant for intellectuals who wonder why their dealings with religious believers are so unsuccessful.

Also, please don't waste your time and mine trying to rebut the points presented here. If you choose not to understand why you can't communicate effectively with your opposition, and why you're not being taken seriously, that's your choice and the other side's gain. You're only demonstrating that you missed the point. You are free to visit all the Web sites you like that cater to your preconceptions.
The Bottom Line

* Blatant Stereotyping
* Ignorance of Even Basic Facts
* Intellectual Dishonesty and Specious Reasoning

If you read this page and its companion, you will note they follow almost identical structures. This is because intellectual dishonesty is pretty much the same regardless of who commits it. On both sides of the divide between religious believers and intellectuals, we find intelligent people who, instead of using their intelligence to seek the truth, and allow the evidence to lead where it will, have already decided what the truth is and use their intelligence to rationalize preconceived ideologies.
Stereotyping

Myth: Religious believers are dour, unhappy and sexually inhibited.
Reality: The ones I meet don't seem any more or less unhappy and sexually hung up than the population at large.
Myth: Religion is just a means of avoiding the reality of death.
Reality: How come Judaism lacked any real concept of an afterlife for millennia? And how come religious martyrs faced death willingly?
Myth: Religion is rigid and doesn't recognize that right and wrong depend on context, the way modern thinkers do.
Reality: Actually, it's the other way around. Religion distinguishes between murder, war, and capital punishment. It's the modern thinker who says "all taking of human life is wrong." Religion distinguishes between marital sex and adultery. It's the modern thinker who says "all sex is right."
Myth: Religion is wish fulfillment
Reality: Who exactly wished for restrictions on personal conduct? And can't the absence of any final accountability serve every bit as much as a wish fulfillment?
Myth: Religion serves the interests of the power elite
Reality: How come Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism arose and grew in the face of persecution? Nazism, which really did propose a religion based on the worship of power, dismissed Christianity as a vehicle by which the weak hobbled the strong.
Myth: Religious believers once taught the earth is flat and the universe was tiny.
Reality: Ptolemy's Almagest, the definitive model before Copernicus, states explicitly that compared to the sphere of the fixed stars, the earth is merely a point. When Ptolemy's Geographia resurfaced around 1400, its description of a spherical earth and map projections aroused not a flicker of opposition. The myth of the flat earth seems to be largely the result of a 19th century slander campaign (in part a reaction to anti-intellectualism among Christians, but that's a topic for the other page).
Myth: Religious believers lack a social conscience.
Reality: Who runs the food pantry in your home town, a church or the ACLU? If someone in your town needs help in a hurry, are they most likely to get it from a social agency or the Salvation Army?

I got an angry response from one reader who offered detailed critiques of each of the above points. That's a total waste of time, since I already believe all stereotypes have a basis in truth. Every one of the above stereotypes has some historical truth. There are also people who cheat social programs, but that doesn't make the stereotype of welfare recipients as cheats legitimate.
Ignorance of Even Basic Facts

It's astonishing how often people who would never dream of uttering an uninformed remark on art or politics seem to feel they can talk knowledgeably about religion without bothering to acquire even a smattering of knowledge first. Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in Hollywood, where films like Contact or Solaris will routinely feature dialogue about religion that is so blatantly uninformed that it's obvious the writers don't have a clue what any serious theologian ever said about anything.

Back in the Bad Old Days of Politically Incorrect Westerns (and long before Dances With Wolves) it was common in Hollywood for Westerns to employ "hugga-mugga talk." This was random gibberish passed off as Indian dialogue (Hollywood had not yet discovered that Indians were physically capable of acting.) Most theology in the movies and on TV is theological hugga-mugga talk, apparently created by the Great Big Random Theological Buzzword Generator. Viewers got a double dose in the 2005 TV mini-series Revelations, where both the theology and the science consisted entirely of random buzzwords.

One example is the oft-repeated canard that religious believers rely on the fear of hell as the underpinning of morality. Or as the blog site Progressive U put it (October 26, 2006): "Ah, the old without fear of hell, there would be nothing to stop people from being bloodthirsty monsters argument. It may come as a surprise to most Christians, but there are reasons for being good other than fear of punishment.." It's no surprise to Christians (or other believers) at all, and betrays a complete failure to understand the argument. It's like claiming that doctors use the fear of heart attacks to try to get people to live healthier lifestyles. They do, but doctors didn't make up heart attacks as a bogey man. Most religions describe God as the author or creator of moral principles, that is, as the ultimate explanation for why the principles exist at all. They view their dogmas as describing the actual consequences of disobeying moral law, not as threats. The moral criticism of disbelief stems mostly from the logical problems inherent in claiming to have meaningful standards that are not grounded in some extrinsic basis independent of feelings, cultural conditioning, social consensus, and so on. If Adolf Hitler were to say "screw you and your social consensus, and I have the storm troopers to impose my standards," what can the values-as-social-construct philosopher answer? "You're a bad, bad man, and I don't like you?" (Notwithstanding my criticism on this point, the Progressive U piece "16 Common Myths About Atheists" is a good complement to my companion page Why Intellectuals Don't Take Religious Believers Seriously)

Consider the following often-posed questions:

* How can a good God allow evil to happen in the world?
* How can religious believers reconcile war or capital punishment with the commandment "thou shalt not kill?"
* Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating new life forms?

If you have ever asked any of these questions, or if you can't summarize the major schools of thought on these questions, you are theologically illiterate. You have no business in any debate involving religion because you simply know nothing at all about the subject.
How can a good God allow evil to happen in the world?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has done all that he or she personally can do to prevent evil. If you're concerned about oppression, go to some oppressed country and help people fight, like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade did during the Spanish Civil War. If you're concerned about justice then go into law or politics and do something about it. If you're concerned about sickness then go into medicine. I know a retired doctor who spent his life dealing with cancer in children. He's entitled to ask why God would let a child get cancer; idle bystanders aren't. If you're concerned about homelessness then raise capital and build low-cost homes, or at the very least join Habitat for Humanity.

Most people who ask this question glibly really want to know why a good God would invade their comfort zone; why a good and loving God would force them to think about unpleasant realities.
How can religious believers reconcile war or capital punishment with the commandment "thou shalt not kill?"

Ever wonder why it's "Thou shalt not kill" but "David slew Goliath?" Because once upon a time before we got intellectually sloppy, we had two words for taking human life. Although there's some overlap in usage, generally the Bible uses "slay" for things like killing in battle, and "kill" for murder. To this day we preserve the use of "slay" in terms like "manslaughter."

Anyway, people who wouldn't dream of using "neither a borrower nor a lender be" as an indication of Shakespeare's own opinions, seem incapable of realizing that the real meaning of "thou shalt not kill" has to be sought in the totality of Biblical teachings on the taking of human life, including the numerous passages that command capital punishment for certain offenses. Fundamentalists aren't the only people who wrench Biblical quotations out of context.
Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating new life forms?

Most religious believers don't have a problem with this, but asking it in connection with debates on evolution reveals an utter ignorance of what creationists think. To them, the issue is preserving a literal interpretation of Genesis. Anything not consistent with supernatural creation a few thousand years ago is "evolution." In creationist parlance, the idea that God used evolution to create life is called "theistic evolution." Asking this question is on an exact par with attempting to publish a research paper without looking up a single reference.
Intellectual Dishonesty and Specious Reasoning
"Blaming the Victim"

Perhaps no single concept illustrates the pervasive speciousness of some intellectuals than the phrase "blaming the victim." You can't hope to find a more explicit platform for intellectual dishonesty than this quote from Jack Levin and William Levin's The Functions of Discrimination and Prejudice.

Victim-blaming is the tendency, when examining a social problem, to attribute that problem to the characteristics of the people who are its victims. In contrast, a non-victim-blaming perspective would focus on the social forces that deny opportunity to the victims of a social problem, while ignoring any apparent differences in them that might be caused by such treatment.

It's good that I can cite such a reference, because I'd be accused of making up a straw man otherwise. For openers, there's the word "victim" which clearly indicates that the individual is the innocent target of hostile outside forces, as opposed to a neutral label like "person affected by a problem" or "person in a problem situation." Then there's the label "blaming" which automatically attributes hostile intent to anyone attempting to question whether individual values and attitudes might contribute to the problem. It is already predetermined that the root cause is "social forces that deny opportunity to the victims of a social problem," that any individual differences are only "apparent" (we won't ask why some people from the most hostile environments avoid crime, drug abuse and poverty). Indeed, it's considered intellectually responsible by these authors to "ignore" potentially relevant data.
"Simplistic"

Hard on the heels of "blaming the victim" as a beacon of specious thinking is "simplistic." The reasoning is wonderful: an idea that explains the data simply and economically is wrong for that very reason, and the better the idea explains the data, the greater the evidence that it's wrong. All ideas of any value are simplifications; the problem with oversimplifications is not that they're simple, but that they're wrong. And though social problems are very complex when activists critique ideas they oppose, the problems crystallize into marvelous simplicity when activists propose solutions of their own: more money and regulatory power for themselves.
"Epiphenomena"

Epiphenomenon is a popular buzzword used to describe a phenomenon that is merely a surface event on top of a more significant phenomenon. Generally, it's used to assert that whatever the user doesn't want to deal with isn't significant. Frequently, it's used to deny the significance of moral issues in society, as in the claim that the root cause of the Civil War was the growing disparity in economic power between North and South, and that moral indignation over slavery was merely an "epiphenomenon."

All you need to do to make that claim stick is deny tens of thousands of statements, letters, articles and books by people who saw the Civil War from Day One as about slavery. More interestingly, if the Civil War wasn't about slavery, how can the Confederate flag be a symbol of slavery and racism? As an interesting sidelight, a local mini-mall flies a collection of historic American flags. The Confederate flag has generated some controversy and been stolen a couple of times. Nobody has said a word about the other Confederate flag. See, there were two of them, a battle flag and a national flag, and most of the people who make noise about "the" Confederate flag are too historically illiterate to know there were two flags, or recognize it when it flaps in front of their faces.

Just how far some people are willing to go to avoid addressing values as a root of social issues is illustrated by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in Understanding Words that Wound. They note (p. 23) that black college students are targets of racial slurs several times a month, and if the term is broadened to include "code words" the frequency might be as often as every day. One of the "code words" they mention is "inner city culture." So a term specifically formulated to address value and behavior problems across racial lines while avoiding racial implications as much as possible is twisted around by Delgado and Stefancic to become a synonym for racism. It becomes very clear that authors like this will not tolerate any attempt to explore values and attitudes as a root of social problems, but will always disparage them as racism.
"False Consciousness" and "Internalized Oppression"

People in democratic societies often end up using their empowerment to make choices that intellectuals hate. How can we reconcile the fact that the masses, whom intellectuals profess to support, keep making wrong choices? I've got it - they've been duped somehow. Those aren't their real values; they've been brainwashed into a "false consciousness" by society. If they were completely free to choose, they'd make the "right" choices. But of course we have to eliminate all the distractions that interfere with the process: no moral or religious indoctrination, no advertising or superficial amusements, no status symbols, no politically incorrect humor. "False consciousness" is a perfect way of professing support for the masses while simultaneously depriving them of any power to choose; a device for being an elitist while pretending not to be.

The post-Soviet version of "false consciousness" is "internalized oppression." If you're a woman who opposes abortion, a black with middle class values, or a person with a lousy job who nevertheless believes in hard work, those aren't your real values. You've internalized the values of the white male power elite and allowed yourself to become their tool. You don't really know what you believe. When the enlightened elite want your opinion, they'll tell you what it is.
The Cost of Intellectual Dishonesty?

Almost anyone who has debated with ideologues has encountered behavior like this:

The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. [He] had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.

Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck. I didn't know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

The author was a young, probably somewhat naive idealist who certainly underestimated the complexity of ideas and just as certainly overestimated his own intellectual sophistication. Nonetheless, the intellectual dishonesty he describes, and his outrage, is real. The author was Adolf Hitler, describing his student days in Vienna (Mein Kampf, Chapter 2).

The Holocaust has been attributed to the historical conditioning of Germany, the harsh terms of the Versailles peace treaty, the destruction of Germany's middle class by the hyperinflation of 1923, the failure of the Vatican to speak out, the failure of the Western Allies to speak out or bomb the gas chambers or the rail lines leading to the death camps. Alice Miller, in For your own good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence, even attributes it to child abuse. But the excerpt above raises a provocative question: to what extent was Hitler shaped by repugnance at the intellectual dishonesty he saw in the intelligentsia? Might the Holocaust have been avoided if young Adolf Hitler had encountered intellectual honesty instead of sophistry among the intellectuals of pre-World War I Vienna?
The Single Greatest Obstacle

Religious believers will never take intellectuals seriously as long as intellectuals deny the existence of absolutes.

What is truth? How do we know it when we see it? How can we be sure our interpretation of it is valid? What about rival claims of truth? These are difficult questions, challenging questions, wonderful questions. They tell us a great deal about the limitations of our methods of inquiry. The one thing they cannot do - what I call the Fundamental Fallacy of Philosophy - is tell us anything at all about the nature of reality or the existence of truth. Philosophy since the days of the ancient Greeks has focused on the grand questions and the limitations of what and how we know, and as a result has remained stagnant. Science focused on what can be known and mushroomed.

Throwing up your hands in despair over the tough questions in epistemology is a grand version of the argumentum ad ignorantiam. Pseudoscientists use this argument all the time, usually prefaced by "Science can't explain..." Most of the time science can explain the "mystery" but the pseudoscientist doesn't want to believe the explanation. But even when the answer to a question really is unknown, that proves only that the answer is unknown. It doesn't justify interpolating some belief of your own preference, or denying that the question has an answer.

But of course no philosopher totally denies the existence of absolutes, either in theory, or in practice. Instead they resort to weasel words. Typical is an article by Bruno Latour called The Science Wars (Common Knowledge 8.1, 2002, pages 71-79). He asserts "I ...reject an absolute point of reference." but then goes on to say that post-modernist philosophers study "how human beings can speak truly about events" and "The difference between departments of geology or geoscience and the curio cabinets of the creationists ... is so huge that I don't see the point of adding an even more absolute distinction between true and false."

So Latour wants to have it both ways. He wants not to be bound by an absolute framework but he also wants the power to judge ideas as true and to differentiate between standard geology and creationism. Especially the latter. Latour's article is peppered with enough gratuitous references to the Religious Right that it's clear he confuses the existence of truth in general with accepting the agenda of the Religious Right. If the difference between standard geology and creationism is anything other than the preferences of two rival groups, there must be some directional standard that puts one closer to truth than the other.

In practical terms, people who deny that there are any moral absolutes are nevertheless quick to assert that it's "wrong" for one group to impose its views on another, generally while attempting to impose their own views on society. If moral beliefs are merely a result of socialization, wouldn't it be a lot easier simply to socialize oppressed groups to accept their fate, and socialize everyone else to go along with prevailing norms?

Pseudo-relativism seems to spring from three roots:

* Laziness: sorting out complex issues or researching how thinkers in the past sorted them out is way too much like work. It's much easier simply to dismiss any moral claim you don't like by temporarily putting on the cloak of relativism. You can take it off when you want to impose your own ideas on others.
* Cowardice: if you accept the existence of absolutes, you may eventually be confronted with the possibility that something you want to do is forbidden, or something you dislike is permitted, even obligatory. Maybe extramarital sex is wrong; maybe war or capital punishment are right. An ad hoc value system frees you from such inconveniences.
* Authoritarianism: you can not only deny the validity of any standard you disagree with, you can make up new standards of your own to impose on others. You can, for example, pull the idea that animals have rights out of thin air and use it to push for legislation restricting the rights of others to hunt, trap, or eat meat. Perhaps the most absurd extrapolation is the notion that the term "pet" is demeaning and our dogs and cats should be called "companion animals." As Dennis Miller noted, when he cleans up my messes, he's a companion animal; until then, he's a pet.

Finally, in any ostensibly intellectual discussion about the existence of God or moral absolutes, watch how quickly sex pops to the surface. It's astonishing how many people who have been prominent militant religious skeptics have also been outspoken advocates of free sex (what's the fun of being a prominent iconoclast if you can't have groupies?) Looking at the criticisms that have been raised against religion, I would estimate that the real motivation for religious disbelief breaks down about like this: sex, 75%; hatred of authority in general, 10%; economic injustice, 8%; war and oppression, 6%; serious intellectual concerns, 1%; serious intellectual concerns based on actual study of what theologians have said: too small to register.

To say some folks went ballistic over that paragraph is an understatement. They did so with a vehemence that suggested I had hit a sore spot. "Stereotypical" sniffed another recent reader, but since all stereotypes have at least some basis in reality, the issue isn't whether the comment is stereotypical (any generalization, no matter how valid, can be blown off as a stereotype), but whether it's valid. Mindless opposition to authority? I submit the "under God" issue: court challenges to the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. An utterly pointless exercise in petty harassment of religious believers, and one guaranteed to keep the Religious Right mobilized. What else can you say about people who are so stupid they work directly against their own interests, solely to lash out at something trivial they dislike?

As for sex, why are restrictions on abortion or homosexuality any more an invasion of privacy than forcing people to keep records for the convenience of the government? Why are so many of the people who are militant about restrictions on abortion equally willing to defend the government's right to invade all sorts of other equally private matters? Why are sexual interactions between consenting partners any more private than financial interactions?

I cannot decide if this guy is a Mindless Middle agnostic or moderate religious man, or whether this is addressed to left-wing philosophers who abhor religion and right-wing politics but lack their own rigor.

[K. A. Pital]

Why are sexual interactions between consenting partners any more private than financial interactions?

Violating sexual and economic privacy obviously have the same degree of suffering brought for the people... or not.

But the excerpt above raises a provocative question: to what extent was Hitler shaped by repugnance at the intellectual dishonesty he saw in the intelligentsia? Might the Holocaust have been avoided if young Adolf Hitler had encountered intellectual honesty instead of sophistry among the intellectuals of pre-World War I Vienna?

Good god! "Hey, let's talk about a fantasy I made: Hitler meets a good man, no Holocaust". Yeah. That's some solid scientific history there.

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has done all that he or she personally can do to prevent evil.

The guy seriously does not understand the dilemma of omnipotence and malevolence, or denies the concept of neglience. "All we can" to prevent evil? How is it even fair to compare human beings - limited in their resources - with an allegedly omnipotent being? And yet, the omnipotent being did 0% to prevent evil, humanity did the other 100% acts to prevent evil in history. How is it then "not serious" to ask why a being claimed to be omnipotent cannot, or will not, prevent evil, when it takes nothing to do it, or at least negate the consequences of evil?

Seriously, that person doesn't understand the concepts and goes on a moralistic rant ("they don't understand religious people!") about pretty damn fundamental questions.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The guy seriously does not understand the dilemma of omnipotence and malevolence, or denies the concept of neglience. "All we can" to prevent evil? How is it even fair to compare human beings - limited in their resources - with an allegedly omnipotent being? And yet, the omnipotent being did 0% to prevent evil, humanity did the other 100% acts to prevent evil in history. How is it then "not serious" to ask why a being claimed to be omnipotent cannot, or will not, prevent evil, when it takes nothing to do it, or at least negate the consequences of evil?

Seriously, that person doesn't understand the concepts and goes on a moralistic rant ("they don't understand religious people!") about pretty damn fundamental questions.

Probably one of the biggest weak spots in the whole essay. The guy dismisses a rhetorical question as irrelevent unless people meet a moral threshold of worthiness. That's called the argumentum ad hominem. Even if the people so concerned about God's morality as slovenly, hypocritical, rage-cases, that does not make the question begged any less pertinent.

[Coyote]

Here was where I quit reading:

Myth: Religion is just a means of avoiding the reality of death.
Reality: How come Judaism lacked any real concept of an afterlife for millennia? And how come religious martyrs faced death willingly?

A handful or red herrings tossed out to confuse the trail of bloodhounds.

And then:

Myth: Religion is rigid and doesn't recognize that right and wrong depend on context, the way modern thinkers do.
Reality: Actually, it's the other way around. Religion distinguishes between murder, war, and capital punishment. It's the modern thinker who says "all taking of human life is wrong." Religion distinguishes between marital sex and adultery. It's the modern thinker who says "all sex is right."

So "modern thinkers" think that pedophilia, incest, rape, bestiality and necrophilia is "okay"? Those are types of sex that could be rolled up into "all sex" being "good".

Where have we heard this before? Oh, yeah-- the slippery slope spouted by fundies that warn us that if gay marriage is legal, soon it'll be legal to have sex with children and animals as a "lifestyle choice".

As fallacies go, this whole thing is very poorly disguised.

[M]

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.

[...]

Also, please don't waste your time and mine trying to rebut the points presented here. If you choose not to understand why you can't communicate effectively with your opposition, and why you're not being taken seriously, that's your choice and the other side's gain. You're only demonstrating that you missed the point. You are free to visit all the Web sites you like that cater to your preconceptions.

Apparently he wants his readers to examine their beliefs, but he himself has no need to do so. Because everybody who doesn't agree with him chooses not to understand. Hypocrisy, thy name is Steven Dutch.

Amusingly, on the corresponding page for religious people he claims Number Theory in Mathematics is (only) true "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a paragraph on the arrogance of talking about subjects one does not understand.

[Thanas]

I especially liked this part:

I got an angry response from one reader who offered detailed critiques of each of the above points. That's a total waste of time, since I already believe all stereotypes have a basis in truth. Every one of the above stereotypes has some historical truth. There are also people who cheat social programs, but that doesn't make the stereotype of welfare recipients as cheats legitimate.

Which is when I stopped reading.

[Morilore]

How can a good God allow evil to happen in the world?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has done all that he or she personally can do to prevent evil.

This is where I decided that this person is a moron, although I was pretty sure when he claimed Nazism was opposed to Christianity after saying he didn't want anyone to try to rebut his points.

Why haven't we intervened in Darfur?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has joined the Peace Corps and personally volunteered to go to Darfur.

Why doesn't America have a better economic safety net?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has given away all their property to charity and dedicated his life to working with the poor.

Why should America still be addicted to foreign oil in the face of all economic and political consequences?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has sold his car.

This thread should be subtitled "Why No One Takes Steven Dutch Seriously."

[Anguirus]

As an interesting sidelight, a local mini-mall flies a collection of historic American flags. The Confederate flag has generated some controversy and been stolen a couple of times. Nobody has said a word about the other Confederate flag. See, there were two of them, a battle flag and a national flag, and most of the people who make noise about "the" Confederate flag are too historically illiterate to know there were two flags, or recognize it when it flaps in front of their faces.

I slogged on a little further than most of you for the lulz, and this passage really stuck out. First of all, it's a complete and total sidetrack to what he's actually trying to make a point about, which seems to happen frequently in this passage. Next, it's textbook missing the point. Sure, a lot of people don't know that there are two Confederate flags. That's why only the battle flag is universally recognized as a symbol of white supremacy. Nobody puts up the Stars and Bars to piss off their black neighbors. The Stars and Bars didn't fly on top of the South Carolina capitol building.

I am annoyed at historically illiterate people as well, but the Confederate national flag (which looks very similar to the Federal flag of the time) is not an important historical fact, it's trivia, and it is not considered a relevant symbol in race relations in this country. Not that that stops this guy from waving his own supposed intellectual superiority like a flag in order to hide his own tossing out of fallacy after fallacy.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I think his intentions are good, since he wants to promote understanding between believers and intellectuals, but his own understanding of religion seems to be pretty much limited to Christianity and his understanding of "intellectuals" is not nearly as deep as he thinks. He also dismisses several points without really making any kind of logical argument, so it appears that he is guilty of plenty of intellectual dishonesty himself. His apparent unwillingness to accept strong critique is not very forthcoming either. I would summarize that he does not achieve what he sets out to do, which is to convince the "intellectuals" (whatever that means) that an honest discourse with religious believers is possible and worthwhile.

And as for theology... The problem of suffering and evil is still very much a problem for many theologians. That problem is of course closely connected to the concepts of punishment, justice and Hell. I wonder if this guy for example knows that the majority of early Christian theological schools did NOT believe in perpetual hell and some Eastern Orthodox theologians still do not believe that there is such a thing; they say that the Hell is more like the Purgatory in Roman Catholic theology. Or that the vengeful God of the Old Testament was such a major problem for Marcion (ca. 85-160 C.E.) and his followers that they wanted abandon the Old Testament completely.

[Junghalli]

The guy seriously does not understand the dilemma of omnipotence and malevolence, or denies the concept of neglience. "All we can" to prevent evil? How is it even fair to compare human beings - limited in their resources - with an allegedly omnipotent being? And yet, the omnipotent being did 0% to prevent evil, humanity did the other 100% acts to prevent evil in history. How is it then "not serious" to ask why a being claimed to be omnipotent cannot, or will not, prevent evil, when it takes nothing to do it, or at least negate the consequences of evil?

Yeah, this is the point where I concluded this guy was obviously just another Mindless Middle moron. It's a complete red herring to point out that humans don't do everything in their power to help others because:

A) Humans are limited in their resources. God is supposed to be omnipotent. For an omnipotent being, it would take no effort whatsoever to simply wave away all the suffering in the world. He could do it with a thought.

B) Nobody sane has a problem with acknowledging themselves as imperfect people. God, on the other hand, is supposed to be a perfect person.

The Problem of Evil is why a perfect person with unlimited resources permits suffering to exist. Especially suffering like old age, disease, and natural disasters which can't be handwaved away with the "free will" dodge. He spectacularly fails to address this, beyond trying to guilt us with a really irritating "lololol ur a hypocrite if you criticize God for allowing suffering but don't spend every waking moment trying to alleviate it yourself" dodge.

[Junghalli]

Also I don't really see how animal rights is "pulled out of the air", seeing as it's a very logical extension of humanist ethics (suffering is bad, animals can suffer, therefore it's bad to cause them to suffer).

[Morilore]

I think his intentions are good, since he wants to promote understanding between believers and intellectuals

I got exactly the opposite vibe. His tone drips condescension, and at least once he all but tells readers to go fuck themselves. This reads to me like a guy so full of hot air he just has to blow some at you.

[Stark]

I don't understand his 'myth' of religion being a way to avoid death. Martyrs faced death willingly... BECAUSE RELIGION IS A WAY TO ESCAPE THE REALITY OF DEATH. I don't see how this point refutes his 'myth' at all. People die for all kinds of causes, because if you die in glory you live forever.

[mr friendly guy]

I stopped reading only a few paragraphs into it. By then he already sounded like he was going the way of the golden mean.

[Medic]

Some points were definitely better than others (I read about half-way so far; actually I agree with a fair bit, especially about the sloppy use of language we know practice) but this:

One example is the oft-repeated canard that religious believers rely on the fear of hell as the underpinning of morality.

struck me as at least, apologetic. That is as charitably as I can put it.

I can't accept that. This "canard" is no-less-than the redoubt of religious proponents. Intellectually-limited persons start from here and get worse (or better, considering the pitifully weak weight of the argument to begin with) and in debates between any "New Atheist" and some religious-talking head or another, or for that matter any interview on television or radio news programs, this almost INVARIABLY comes up. MOST people are not intellectual juggernauts and this argument is utterly accessible to even the most meager simpletons. It is not a canard but a pillar of the religious mode of thought, especially among Christianity.

[Medic]

Finally, in any ostensibly intellectual discussion about the existence of God or moral absolutes, watch how quickly sex pops to the surface. It's astonishing how many people who have been prominent militant religious skeptics have also been outspoken advocates of free sex (what's the fun of being a prominent iconoclast if you can't have groupies?) Looking at the criticisms that have been raised against religion, I would estimate that the real motivation for religious disbelief breaks down about like this: sex, 75%; hatred of authority in general, 10%; economic injustice, 8%; war and oppression, 6%; serious intellectual concerns, 1%; serious intellectual concerns based on actual study of what theologians have said: too small to register.

To say some folks went ballistic over that paragraph is an understatement. They did so with a vehemence that suggested I had hit a sore spot. "Stereotypical" sniffed another recent reader, but since all stereotypes have at least some basis in reality, the issue isn't whether the comment is stereotypical (any generalization, no matter how valid, can be blown off as a stereotype), but whether it's valid. Mindless opposition to authority? I submit the "under God" issue: court challenges to the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. An utterly pointless exercise in petty harassment of religious believers, and one guaranteed to keep the Religious Right mobilized. What else can you say about people who are so stupid they work directly against their own interests, solely to lash out at something trivial they dislike?

The 1st statement's simply his own bias. Evolution by natural selection adequately explains life on earth, in addition to abiogenesis. Religion's alternatives have NO supporting evidence. Exactly where you might expect to find evidence of "God," god isn't there but science is. Hence, I'm an atheist. Open-shut case; I couldn't give a damn what other people think of my (or other people's) sexual lives and proclivities. If anything, I'm annoyed it's at all an issue, and the opposition to theistic restrictions on it this guy wrongly interprets as insecurity on the part of disbelievers.

Although the 2nd point IMO is valid. This is a losing battle -- "Under God" is 2 words, will not ruin your day if you utter it aloud and does, in fact, keep the Right mobilized. On the one hand, I DO agree that the Moral Zeitgeist is against Christianity on the whole anyway, so there's not too much harm in keeping the Christian Right unified, so long as the mindless middle doesn't flock to them (though with a slumping economy, their ranks will evidently grow for a time) but on the other, it lessens the inevitability of it all or perhaps lessens the blow.

I'm reminded starkly of Jonathan Miller's "A History of Disbelief" on BBC. In one part of this documentary, it's a round-robin discussion about discussion at a restaurant and in it he describes what god typically amounts to in British dinner-table conversation, (this is an EXTREMELY loose quote -- the spirit is the same but the wording is no doubt extremely off) as something of "an old, crazy uncle you ought rather not talk about; it's embarrassing, even bringing him up." Most of Western society (Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada) is presaging America's eventual moral compass and in Britain, if admitting to an ardent, Christian faith is of this nature, then we should just let the zeitgeist do it's work. The Christian Right's mobilization means that they automatically get huge swaths of the lesser-educated or not-impressively-intellectually-capable population. Just for showing up at people's doors, being there when the economy goes South and by doing a conspicuous, good deed in front of the right person, at the right time. Though even the Christian Right steers away form the "Mindless Middle's" comfort zone, they nevertheless bring VOLUME (in noise, such as press time and mass, in number of believers and locations, churches and charities) and money to the arena of idea's. Quality counts for only so much; quantity, to quote Stalin is a quality all it's own though and nonbelievers remain a vanishingly small minority, by any honest measure. (I'm going to IGNORE polls that claim that atheists believe in "god" for example; they're obviously poor polls)

And if the moral zeitgeist of America ONLY prescribes a "spiritual" if not "Christian" population, at large, and retains a vanishingly small, bonafide secular or atheist population, how is that not an improvement anyway upon the current situation? I'd argue that in the absence of explicit, religious motivation, opposition to gay marriage for example, will plummet dramatically. I'll be the 1st the agree that there's a certain, natural, visceral and even vehement dislike of gays among heterosexual men (it's called HIGH SCHOOL -- rampant and nearly unrestrained testosterone) but it's only Christian rhetoric which drives that vehicle in the voting booth.

[Medic]

*sigh* in the large paragraph above "discussion about discussion" in the 1st line should read "discussion about god" or God -- I'm confident in mods choosing the former, should this be edited at all (all 3 posts were made buzzed, if not drunk, so I absolve myself of not being perfect)

[Akkleptos]

I know this has been a thousand times over, but nevertheless I pray do allow me to cry "Sources! sources!". This chap is ready to spill so many numbers off the top of his head, or downright anecdotal "evidence", it makes me sick.

This guy's rants sport such logic flaws it's not even funny taking on the task of cataloguing them and refuting then one by one (though I do fully appreciate other members' gallant strides).

I guess the bottomline, IMHO, is: "Why this is still such a big issue in some civilised countries is a mystery to me, honestly".

[Pablo Sanchez]

I cannot decide if this guy is a Mindless Middle agnostic or moderate religious man, or whether this is addressed to left-wing philosophers who abhor religion and right-wing politics but lack their own rigor.

From the other related articles on his homepage it's clear that he's a mindless middle agnostic who relies extensively on sophistry to justify his untenable position. Honestly, his essays are a good demonstration of someone excelling in a technical field apparently without actually learning the principles of sound reasoning. For all the whinging about intellectual dishonesty in the quoted essay, just look at the second to last paragraph, which is packed fit to burst with the stuff. This is not to mention his admonition, which my skimming of his other essays indicates is oft repeated, that people who disbelieve religion are under some onus to read the copious works of theologians. As if I'm intellectually bound to read the Book of Mormon or "Dianetics" before I can dismiss Mormonism or Scientology!

[Samuel]

To say some folks went ballistic over that paragraph is an understatement. They did so with a vehemence that suggested I had hit a sore spot. "Stereotypical" sniffed another recent reader, but since all stereotypes have at least some basis in reality, the issue isn't whether the comment is stereotypical (any generalization, no matter how valid, can be blown off as a stereotype), but whether it's valid. Mindless opposition to authority? I submit the "under God" issue: court challenges to the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. An utterly pointless exercise in petty harassment of religious believers, and one guaranteed to keep the Religious Right mobilized. What else can you say about people who are so stupid they work directly against their own interests, solely to lash out at something trivial they dislike?

Like the display of the Confederate flag over the state capital of SC?

[K. A. Pital]

As if I'm intellectually bound to read the Book of Mormon or "Dianetics" before I can dismiss Mormonism or Scientology!

Yeah. That's like "Well, you can't say Hitler is dumb. You should read Mein Kampf. Only then you dare criticize him."

[Junghalli]

I can't accept that. This "canard" is no-less-than the redoubt of religious proponents. Intellectually-limited persons start from here and get worse (or better, considering the pitifully weak weight of the argument to begin with) and in debates between any "New Atheist" and some religious-talking head or another, or for that matter any interview on television or radio news programs, this almost INVARIABLY comes up. MOST people are not intellectual juggernauts and this argument is utterly accessible to even the most meager simpletons. It is not a canard but a pillar of the religious mode of thought, especially among Christianity.

Technically he's right in that religious people don't think of themselves as threatening people with Hell. From their perspective saying you'll go to Hell isn't them making a threat, it's just them saying a statement of fact.

The whole Hell concept does, however, give a rather disturbing glimpse into the "ethics" these people claim to live by. By any rational ethical system, the Christian-Muslim conception of Hell is a monstrously unjust system. It has the same punishment for all sinners, regardless of the degree of the offense* (everything from adultery to genocide will get you there), and the punishment is out of proportion to even the worst offenses the condemned could possibly have committed (we're talking about a literal eternity of torture here, I really don't think anybody deserves that, not even the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot). Worse, one of the "sins" that will get you sent there is not believing in the prescribed religion. In other words by any sane standard this God of theirs is an incredibly egotistical and vindictive cock who will torture you forever simply for having the temerity to not kiss his ass.

These people believe that this is a perfectly just system, set-up by a perfectly just person. The mind boggles at what a warped idea of ethics you'd have to have in order to actually believe that. It's absolutely terrifying.

*Yes, I realize some conceptions of Hell like Dante's involve graduated levels for different sinners, but honestly, while Dantean Hell is enormously more ethical than everybody going to Fire And Brimstone Hell it's still ridiculously horrible. As I remember, they cremate you alive forever for being a homosexual, or was it a heretic?

[K. A. Pital]

...we're talking about a literal eternity of torture here, I really don't think anybody deserves that

[...]

I realize some conceptions of Hell like Dante's involve graduated levels for different sinners

Dante's Hell is still an eternity of torment. That's an incredibly broken moral system - eternal suffering for failing to believe in the correct "faith".

Also, the concept of faith forgiveness means a person who murdered someone but "repents and believes" will go to Heaven while some unsuspecting atheist who didn't hit a man in his life gets shipped straight to Hell for eternal torture, regardless of where he is tortured exactly, it's still "gnashing of teeth" for eternity no matter how one puts it. Also, a soldier who killed an enemy to protect his people would get shipped to Hell regardless, as say a paedophile who carved and hid the bodies of his underage victims, even in a Dantean Hell they would end in a similar place, for formally similar offensives ("murder").

Also, it hardly matters if there's an eternity of intense or less intense torture, soon the mind will go insane and the continued torture of the body would simply be a gigantic theme park for sadism. If that's a concept of "justice", says volumes about the Abrahamic religion in general.

[ray245]

One thing that got me annoyed in a religious/ 'moral' debate is, a lot of people love to use Christianity alone as a point of reference in their arguments and debates, when they are finding the 'middle-ground' so to speak.

I don't think that guy argument is middle-ground at all. It is funny to see people tying morality into religion. Can't people on both sides choose to ignore the morality issues in regards to religion? Accept the fact that Religion has nothing and totally nothing to do with Morality at all!

However, I find that is is more plausible to let people who are more religious to listen to his argument first before anything else. If you don't want people to be too religious and want to aid them in changing their views, it is better to take things slowly.

Let them read about the 'middle-ground' first. I find that to most people who are religious, tearing down their viewpoint of the entire world in one go is a very bad thing to do. You would left them traumatized and unable to cope or adjust properly. Let them be prepared to change their personal view points first.

Trying to be too aggressive in your argumentation isn't going to convince your opponent to come to your side.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Also, it hardly matters if there's an eternity of intense or less intense torture, soon the mind will go insane and the continued torture of the body would simply be a gigantic theme park for sadism. If that's a concept of "justice", says volumes about the Abrahamic religion in general.

This isn't quite fair to Abrahamic religion in itself, since in fact eternal punishment is never explicitly described in either the Jewish or Christian scriptural tradition. Hell in the fire and brimstone sense simply does not exist in Judaism, and the closest the New Testament ever gets to it is calling Hell a fire that is never quenched, and the references to Hell in Revelations heavily imply that the "lake of fire" is a place of final annihilation rather than eternal suffering. I don't know about Islam.

Hell is essentially an extra-scriptural tradition that became super-popular among Christians, because it is a revenge fantasy, reward, and final refuge for the faithful. The revenge element is obvious, the reward is that some (such as the eminent Aquinas!) asserted that one of the pleasures of heaven will be watching the damned suffer in Hell--so I guess sadism is not a sin--and the final refuge is the faith that if you ever get in an argument with somebody about religion, you are going to heaven and he is going to Hell. Even if Richard Dawkins completely humiliates you in a debate on live television before millions of people, as long as your faith is unshaken you still win, because he's going to Hell and you're not.