| i think i shall start updating in here a bit more often considering life is a bit more interesting than this past summer. um...went to asheville last weekend. mucho fun! going to knoxville this coming weekend. probably going to the beach(florida)...again...for fall break with hannah and her mom. on to the entry! this is a long one. about 5,000 words. i actually think i may expand on this and other issues and write a book, and attempt to get the thing published. just an idea. here it is.....
comments appreciated. hopefully noone is offended by this post. that isn't my intention. i just sometimes feel the need to talk about WHY i, and many others, believe in the idea of atheism. that's all. so....hope you like it? :) ---------- THE CASE FOR ATHEISM
BY SEAN CANNON
You might not realize it, but secularism is destroying the foundation of America and rotting the innocent minds of it's youth. Pat Robertson, the grandfatherly patriarch of the Christian Coalition, reminds us that "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." The omnipresent Bill O’Reilly has released a new book, Culture Warrior, that attacks the "secular progressive" movement with his trademark populist smugness.
But what exactly are they so afraid of? Pat Robertson claims that Christians are in the minority in the United States. This is untrue in both quantity and quality. As of 2001, Christians make up about 77% of the US population. Only 14% don’t claim any religious affiliation. And on top of that is the fact that Evangelical Christians are more entrenched and proactive in the political domain than just about any other group.
Why then are today’s top Christian figureheads so worried about the erosion of the American culture they both cherish and control? In a certain way I can understand their frustrations. At one time in my life I was a born-again Christian. I believed in the basic tenets of salvation, resurrection, and most importantly the imminent return of Jesus Christ. My religious mindset informed my entire worldview and led me in 1999 to create VoxPox.com, a Christian-Conservative online portal and magazine. That website became more popular then I ever imagined and today one of my original staff members is working for MSNBC. However, today I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe the Bible, or any other book for that matter, was divinely inspired. And I don’t believe that faith is a good thing. I’m sure most people would observe this change and regard it as something quite negative. After all, what’s worse than being an atheist? However, my "conversion" to atheism has been an incredibly positive experience. My aim with this article is to shed some light on what atheism is, why it’s a very affirmative worldview, and how all of this plays into the social and political drama of the contemporary world.
Atheism is atheistic in regard to any religion that claims knowledge of a supernatural god. However, considering the fact that 77% of the American population is Christian (and that number is bound to be higher in Tennessee), this article will focus on that religion. This is not an "attack" on Christianity. Most Christians are moral and kind people. However, anyone who claims to believe something and then uses that belief to make decisions about how other people ought to live is obligated to produce sound arguments and evidence for their position. If you say that homosexuality is a sin and let that belief influence your decision at the ballot then you are a coward if you can’t justify that claim and simply point to the Bible as if that were all the evidence necessary to validate your actions. This article is an attack on the erosion of reason in society. And such an erosion should trouble both Christians and non-Christians alike.
~ FAITH ~
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."
- Richard Dawkins
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
- Benjamin Franklin
Faith, in our society, is a virtue. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that believing despite evidence is somehow noble and shows character. We assume someone who lacks faith must lead a terribly unfulfilling life. The faithful who cling to an idea despite a wealth of contrary evidence are praised for their courage and conviction. Why do we bestow such honor on such an illogical tradition? And what’s more disquieting is that most of the beliefs shrouded in faith aren’t based on an accumulation of prior evidence at all.
Young children are naturally quite curious about the world around them, especially in a tactile sense. So it’s no surprise that children soon discover what happens when you put your hand on a hot stove. In many cases they learn this lesson over and over until it becomes plainly obvious that stoves are often hot and that hot stoves really hurt. The belief that hot stoves hurt isn’t an inborn belief that forms our instinctual understanding of the world. We must learn, through interaction with the world, that hot stoves hurt. It’s entirely logical for a chain of evidence to herald a new belief. To believe on faith that stoves never hurt and to continue believing that despite a thoroughly scarred hand doesn’t show conviction. It shows a blind allegiance to belief and a conscious rejection of evidence. And in the case of the stove it produces harmful effects.
It is intellectually meaningless to cling to a belief and then work backwards to piece together a good back-story to support the belief. That can be done with anything. I could easily say, "Asians are murderous cannibals" and then seek out every news article that speaks of cannibalistic Asians. However, such a belief is entirely unjustified. A rigorous examination of available evidence will show that the large majority of Asians do no such thing. Why doesn’t this line of thinking work for belief in God? We are all born atheists. One year old babies don’t have the slightest clue what God is and if adults didn’t impose their beliefs they would grow up without ever coming across a shred of evidence that would lead them to independently conclude that there must be a God. However, children are brought up to believe in God. And as children, they believe every word that comes out of their parent’s mouth. Thus, once they reach adulthood they have a set of beliefs that weren’t arrived at due to accumulated evidence or curiosity about the world. And on top of that, these beliefs often have a strong emotional resonance making them doubly hard to challenge. And so, we assign the virtue of "faith" to these beliefs that would otherwise fall apart upon critical examination.
~ GOD ~
"Christianity has a built-in defense system: Anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism."
- Bill Hicks
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
- Stephen Roberts
It’s impossible to prove God doesn’t exist. As a supernatural entity, God resides outside of our sense’s ability to even detect him. It’s also impossible to prove that giant turquoise bunny rabbits don’t live in your bathroom while you sleep. You see, giant turquoise bunny rabbits only come out when you’re asleep. As soon as you wake up they disappear. Imagine a group of people mentally ill enough to believe in such entities. Now imagine these people tell you that the Supreme Turquoise Bunny Overlord demands that all people with blue eyes be denied the right to marry each other. Needless to say, having blue eyes is morally nauseating. Should you concede to the Bunny Overlord and to his flock or do you have a right to demand they provide an argument and evidence to support their claim? If you have blue eyes the answer is obvious.
The same holds true for God. God is, by definition, supernatural. If he exists, he exists outside of space and time and outside of our ability to test, measure, interact with, or sense him at any level. If we could do any of these things then God is simply a natural property of the natural world and no longer has the defining characteristics of God. Therefore, if your God tells people that homosexuality is punishable by death (Leviticus 20:13 KJV) you better have some incredibly powerful evidence to back up the claim. And if you don’t believe that homosexuality is punishable by death but still claim the divine authorship of the Bible then you’ve only dug an even deeper hole for yourself. However, that issue will be touched on later.
~ IN THE BEGINNING ~
"When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. "
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI
"Then he sent out a dove from him, to see if the waters were decreased from off the surface of the earth; but the dove found no rest for the sole of its foot, and it returned to the ark to him, for the waters were still on the surface of the earth."
- Genesis 8:8-9
If belief in God is based on faith then where did the original belief come from anyway? When I first began questioning my Christian beliefs this was the central question ringing in my head. This question eventually led me to the writings of comparative theologian Joseph Campbell. For the first time in my life I stopped looking at God as the God and began looking at God from an objective perspective in an attempt to figure out where he actually came from. To answer the question of the origin of God let’s pick a specific god. There are thousands upon thousands of documented gods throughout the world, however, I’ll focus on the Christian God of the Bible. Every Christian knows that their religion sprang from Judaism. Both faiths worship the same God, believe the same creation story, and so on. But where did Judaism come from? It obviously didn’t just "happen" one day when a bunch of people said, "Hey, let’s be Jews and worship the real God."
To understand the origins of Judaic theism it's necessary to first understand why people started believing in the very concept of god(s). As far as we can tell, humans are the only animal that believes in the concept of God. As our pre-human ancestors gradually became more and more self-aware and curious about the nature of reality they inevitably attempted to explain what was to them unexplainable. Why does the sun rise and set every day? Why do crops sometimes fail? Why do herds of animals sometimes migrate away? Why does disease corrupt the body? Why are some women fertile and others not? What is the purpose of the stars in the sky? Where did we come from? What happens after death?
Except for the last two, these questions no longer puzzle us. We know disease occurs because of microscopic pathogens and weak immune systems. But, to humans 10,000 years ago, these unresolved questions would have seemed terrifying. And since any answer is better than no answer, God filled in the gaps, hence the theory "God of the Gaps." It also explains why the earliest gods explained phenomena dealing with fertility, crops, and the sun. All things that were the lifeblood of early agrarian civilizations.
As the human population grew and different cultures started rubbing elbows the fertility goddesses of the past gave way to masculine war gods capable of defending the burgeoning Mesopotamian city-states. A pantheon of gods sprung up in the Fertile Crescent going by various names: Baal, Lotan, Ashera, Yam Nahar, and El. Each god protected a different race of people. Chemosh was the patron god of the Moabites, Melkart of the Tyrians, Milcom of the Ammonites, and so on. Added to this mix was the geographically isolated Egyptian empire to the South-West. In the southern kingdom of Judah the people worshiped a being known as Yahweh and their ancestral cousins to the north, the Israelites, worshiped El. El was the singular form "God" as Elohim (אלהים) was the plural morphological form and commonly denoted the Canaanite pantheon. Cross-pollination at this time was everywhere. One only need to look at the various Akadian, Babylonian, and Hebrew flood myths, each with their own Noah, to realize the common origin of each religion’s holy texts. Thus, early Judaism adopted the Judaic "Yahweh" as the sole God of the Jews and ushered in a new era of monotheism.
The history of religious evolution in the Middle East is incredibly rich with insight into how and why certain gods exist today, and why others do not. To think that Judaism sprang from an initially polytheistic worldview might be troubling to some Christians, however some have simply pointed to plural forms of God in Genesis as a convenient foreshadowing of the coming trinity.
~ MORALITY~
"But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."
- Gary Bauer
Suppose your best friend calls you up one day and invites you to attend a yoga class. The class will feature meditation, traditional yoga, mantras, and all sorts of other new age practices. What should you do? Should you go with them? Should you graciously decline? No. You should kill them. Preferably with stones. After you strike the first blow everyone else gets to join in the fun. According to the Bible (Deuteronomy 13:6-10 KJV) this is a just punishment. Anyone trying to lead you astray through the channel of another belief system is worthy of gruesome death, according to the Bible. What can Christians say to this? If you don’t stone such a friend then you’re going against God’s command. If you think that punishment is immoral then you’re saying that the word of God isn’t always moral. If the Bible is the divinely inspired infallible word of God, then this verse must be just. If the Bible is no such thing then what basis do we have to believe anything in it? At that point it just becomes a game of picking and choosing the parts that make you feel good and ignoring or explaining away the passages where God commands you to tear pregnant women’s bodies apart and dash their infants into pieces if they have rebelled against God (Hosea 13:16, KJV).
The time has come to face the facts. The Bible is morally corrupt. The Bible is morally corrupt because the men who wrote it had a warped view of morality. It’s hard to condemn people 3,000 years in the past for believing such hate, but it’s ridiculous to allow such beliefs to be praised as the source of absolute morality today. If these passages are true and just then God is a violent tyrant. If they are immoral or otherwise false then the Bible is riddled with contradictions. What is a believer to do when God commands you to kill the heathens in one passage and in the next encourages you to love your neighbor. Any moral person would pick out the moral passages and live a decent life. However the same book they use justifies the actions of the fundamentalist who in reality is a better adherent than the religious moderate. At least the fundamentalist reads and follows the entire word of God. Is it possible to glean positive morals from the Bible? Of course. Pick any book and you’re sure to find virtuous content, but the belief that the Bible is apart from other books in that it is supernatural gives those who cling to the violent and immoral passages the justification to go out and follow particular Bible verses to the letter. Just because the majority of modern Christians don’t behave in violent ways doesn’t mean the Bible must be moral. That same Bible gave the early Church a way to rationalize the Crusades and the Inquisitions. And the Koran is obviously fueling the current Islamic Jihad. The Koran may preach love and compassion throughout 90% of the text, but it’s the 10% that extremists are locking onto. And since they believe the Koran isn’t just a book, but rather, the Word of God, then you’ll have a very hard time convincing them to discount those particular passages.
When determining the true origin of moral norms we need to take into account the fact that humans are social animals. Wholesale gene war between humans at this point in our evolution is nothing short of maladaptive. We are a species that has advanced thousands of times further than the next most intelligent species: chimpanzees, dolphins, etc. We possess the means to destroy our entire species with weapons that we've created ourselves. Therefore ethical norms and morality arose among Sapiens out of necessity. Morals ensure that we all receive mutual benefit. Game theory and the Nash Equilibrium show how factions of people whose strategies are based on greed and self-interest tend to do very poorly in the long run while groups with a more collaborative methodology tend to do well. Human beings no longer have a need to adapt in purely biological terms through interspecies friction. Evolution now takes place in the arena of ideas with genes being replaced by faster replicating memes. And in this arena, altruism allows a species to fare better in the long run. This is the mechanism for the evolution of morality from factors that are initially purely selfish and governed by blind natural selection. Individuals or societies that endanger the common good are weeded out by natural selection in that they usually implode or face extinction by an outside society whose morals actually fortify that society over time.
Morality exists because of the persuasiveness of the golden rule. Most people don't want to be killed, so they generally agree to not killing anyone else. That is why killing is wrong. Not because God said so in Exodus. If religion had never developed on Earth, killing innocents would still be considered wrong, absolute morals or not. Naturally, there are those who lack either the ability or the discipline to recognize the beneficial properties of morality, and such people (or groups of people) are often excommunicated from the realm of ideas. Morality is an indispensable exobiological adaptive trait that has allowed humans to progress over other animal species that were, and still are, in-fighting. Morality is our true and unique salvation from the bleak notion of carnal animals granted moral insight at the discretion of a supernatural deity.
And in terms of our own society, there is no proof that atheists are any less moral than Christians. In fact, the numbers show that they are generally more moral than Christians. For instance, the book "The New Criminology" points to two surveys of American prison inmates that found 1/10th of 1% claiming to be atheists. In the general population that number is about 10%. Also, according to the July 1999 issue of the Scientific American, the United States has the highest crime rate per capita of any western nation. We also have the highest per capita proportion of Christians. The nations with the lowest crime rates (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland) also have the lowest number of Christians. In these countries, Christians make up less than 20% of the population. These and many other surveys deflate the idea that atheism is incompatible with morality. In many cases, atheism is the most moral belief system.
~ SOCIETY ~
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
- George Bush Sr.
"Worship with your vote."
- Roy Moore, Former Alabama Judge
"This country was founded on Christian ideas." This argument almost always comes up during religious debates. And at first glance it seems to make sense. After all, the United States has always been a heavily religious society, "In God We Trust" is stamped on all our coins, and the Pledge of Allegiance refers to America as "one nation, under God." However, it’s not that black and white.
First of all, the "In God We Trust" coin imprint was made mandatory not in 1792, but in 1955. The Pledge of Allegiance, originally written in 1892, tacked on the "under God" part in 1954. Even our nation’s founding fathers had very little to do with Christianity, aligning themselves, at best, with Deism.
Thomas Jefferson, our nation’s third President and the writer of the Declaration of Independence, was not only a tenacious supporter of liberty but held bitter contempt towards the Christian religion. He once wrote, "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies." And in 1814 he put it quite bluntly: "Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." This sentiment was expressed earlier in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. The treaty declares that, "The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." One of our nation’s most impassioned patriots, Thomas Paine, wrote that, "Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses." Even more, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter that gave insight into his take on Christianity: "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them." American patriarch Benjamin Franklin spoke of Jesus in a letter to Yale President Ezra Stiles, writing, "I have some doubts as to his divinity."
Almost none of the founding fathers would have agreed that America was somehow founded on Christianity. America was founded on the liberal philosophies of the Enlightenment. British Empiricists such as John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Sir Isaac Newton ushered in a new age of reason and secularism that moved away from both the religious tyranny and the faith-based rationality of the Medieval Age. America as we know it never would have come to be if it weren’t for the secular progressive ideas put forth by philosophers a century earlier. However, it didn’t take long for the Christian majority to begin to chip away at the secular foundation of America. Apparently such actions worried even George Washington when in 1792 he commented, "I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society."
The erosion of rationality by Christianity is spread across many different fronts. From gay marriage to evolution and stem cell research, issues are no longer debated based on truth and evidence but rather on conviction and popular rule. James Dobson, president of the Christian group Focus on the Family, is heard by more than 200 Million people every day in 164 countries. Dobson makes it quite clear how he feels beliefs should be propagated: "Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world." Apparently having sound arguments and good evidence don’t count. All you need is a stranglehold on the population. After all, who are scientists to say that evolution is true? The large majority of Americans believe in Creationism. Only about 10% of Americans believe in evolution. So, naturally, Creationism ought to win, right? Fortunately that is not the way science works. The general public doesn’t get to proclaim truth about the natural world based on popular consensus.
The same holds true for issues of morality. Most Americans oppose gay marriage with the large majority claming Biblical condemnation as the basis for their belief. It doesn’t matter that the Bible never once says "gays...don’t marry." It does command us to kill them, but apparently that’s too icky. So, today’s Christian does the next best thing by banning them from the right to marry. This is actually a very simple issue. If you believe gay marriage is wrong then state your case. If your case points to the Bible as a source of absolute truth on the matter then you now are obligated to convince everyone else that the Bible is something we ought to regard with such esteem. I believe that the Bible is a book. You, the Christian, believes it is a holy text from the ultimate authority of God. I form my belief based on evidence and reason. You form yours based on faith and tradition. You lose. And you also lose the right to force anyone else to be governed by your God’s rules unless you can supply the best argument for the issue.
~ ATHEISM ~
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
- Albert Einstein
The University of Minnesota's Department of Sociology recently conducted a poll to find what groups Americans considered most dangerous to American society. The obvious candidates came in with high numbers: Muslims, immigrants, gays. However, one group came in with even higher numbers and shot to the top of the list. That group: atheists.
Needless to say, this is an understandable result. Atheists, as we all know, hate Jesus, enjoy killing babies, think homosexuality should be taught to young children, and align themselves with the powers of Satan. Or so Ann Coulter might have you believe.
Atheism is not a negative belief system. Atheists simply refuse to believe in a God for which the evidence does not warrant the belief. That’s it. Carl Sagan famously said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. God is an extraordinary claim with evidence that is anything but extraordinary.
Contrary to popular belief, atheism is a deeply positive and life affirming worldview. Carl Sagan stands out as one of the most articulate proponents of this view and so I feel it’s entirely necessary to post a few more of his quotes. These quotes distill the beliefs of atheism and curious inquiry in a way I can’t.
"I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true."
"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence."
"Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy."
"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?"
My hope is that this article, if nothing else, gave you insight into why atheists believe what they believe. I wanted to write much more, but given space constraints, I’ll end it here. This is just a small sample of the many arguments for atheism. I have barely even touched on specific philosophical and empirical arguments that give support to atheism. We must, as a species, come to terms with the unreasonableness of faith and begin to see the value and positive outcome of a world based on the pursuit of truth. Only then will we be truly liberated. |
