Correcting the Atheist Myths

the ‘thoughtful, complex forms of serious modern theology’ is what’s left of a superstition that is being perpetually beaten back by science and enlightenment.

You are what you do, not what you say you are. If you behave most often stupidly and brutally, then you are a stupid brute, despite how much you say you’re wise and gentle.

So too is a religion what its practitioners actually do, rather than what some ivory tower theologians say it is. Look to the actual behavior of a person to characterize him, and look to the actual application of an idea to assess its value. Does the idea look good on paper but mainly produces suffering and strife when applied in the real world? Hmm. Guess it’s not such a good idea after all.

We have George H. Smith and we have Sam Harris. I’d say we’re arguing on both fronts.

A theologian will only increase the obscurity, the logical consistancy, the compatibility with our current scientific knowledge. That still leaves them plenty of room for dopey, dangerous, harmful beliefs. “Thoughtful”, “serious”, and “modern” aren’t words I would apply to theology.

Even the most absurd beliefs, like creationism, can be logically consistant with the evidence, if you don’t apply reason, especially Occam’s razor, to the premises. A god who is all powerful could place everything as if evolution happened without requiring it did. Others would say “that’s not a god I can believe in”, but that’s as much wishthinking as the god who hides bones for us to find.

The only protection we have from those theologians that say that hurricanes were caused by gay people or abortion, is from rationality, our reason and skepticism. Irrationality: faith, superstition, religion cannot argue against other forms because they rely on the same foundations.

Here’s a response I found interesting.

Dawkins makes the point that faith itself is bad, whether it makes you a conservative bible thumper or a soup kitchen worker. Or, rather, whether you use “faith” as an excuse to confirm your pre-existing bias. It’s not a surprise that conservative churches are in the south, and liberal ones are in Massachussets. It’s not the religion, it’s the culture it comes from. As such, I think we should probably cut religion some slack as a causative factor (for good or ill).

BTW – The “modern sophisticated” theology has been coined “the courtier’s reply” by PZ. I’m not sure of the origin, but I assume that you can call someone a whore or a courtier, it amounts to the same thing.

And atheists that quote chapter and verse usually do come out of the religious traditions they are attacking. I do think it’s handy to point out the internal inconsistencies of a religion, but none of those details really matter if you’re trying to establish the existence/non-existence of God.

Also — Catholics! Maybe you can answer me this: If you can’t recite the Nicene Creed in good faith, what the hell kind of Catholic are you? I know that if I went into a Catholic Church and said, “I don’t believe in the Virgin Birth, I don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God, I don’t believe in the ressurection, and I don’t believe confessing sins clears my soul, I don’t believe in the after life, etc,” that the priest would gently show me the door (or invite me to stay and see if I change my mind.)

Now imagine that I said all that, then concluded with, “And I’m a Jesuit theologian who has studied for 30 years in the Vatican.” I’d probably be treated to a fine dinner and invited to give the sermon on Sunday.

In my experience that comment no 7 is largely true. As with Pseudonym I find “…many atheists act as if they don’t give a rat’s arse about religion as it’s widely practiced in the real world, but rather as it’s practiced by a bunch of nutters pretty much confined to the US “Bible Belt” and some bits of the Middle East.” Small world syndrome. The world is bigger, America is bigger.

you shouldn’t go off on a “here’s why the rest of you are losers” tangent.

I re-read Harris’ piece and distinctly didn’t read this comment or anything like it. Talk about straw men…

I’m always amazed at the irony of the self-identified “positive” atheists who constantly turn around and attack the likes of Harris and Dawkins. Why? Because they dare hold religion up to scrutiny and point out its flaws. Welcome to the scientific world-view friends. If you want positively assert atheist views then do so, it is a valuable thing, but what Harris and Dawkins do has value too. And don’t put words in their mouths, natch.

I re-read Harris’ piece and distinctly didn’t read this comment or anything like it. Talk about straw men…

Not a straw man. Here are a few samples of what I’m talking about. From Harris’s piece:

“On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave.”

“An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous.” (Emphasis on the word “ridiculous” — unnecessary snark, IMO “mistaken” or “implausible” would have gotten the idea across just as well.)

“Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows.”

I’m always amazed at the irony of the self-identified “positive” atheists who constantly turn around and attack the likes of Harris and Dawkins. Why? Because they dare hold religion up to scrutiny and point out its flaws.

You haven’t read much of my writing, have you? 🙂

I love to criticize religion. I do it all the time. My most famous piece is a 4,650 word rant on why atheists are angry. In fact, I even said in this very piece, “I think religion deserves criticism.” And for the record, I like both Dawkins and Harris. I don’t agree with every word they’ve ever written, but I like them.

My point about Harris was not “That Sam Harris is a big meanie for criticizing religion.” My point, simply and entirely, was, “I don’t think criticism of religion was appropriate in this particular piece.” In a piece whose purpose is to explain and defend atheism, I think it’s a distraction.

Greta:

I’m sorry, but I just don’t think that’s true. The harmful influence of religion is very widespread.

I understand why you say this. You must understand that being outside the United States as I am, I don’t see this “harmful influence”.

With a couple of exceptions (same-sex marriage being the most obvious one), they do seem to be largely associated with US evangelicalism. I simply don’t see Methodists opposing science education or Hindus opposing stem cell research.

And, living outside the United States as I do, I see very little of this. OK, Australia has a Roman Catholic Prime Minister at the moment, and he is against same-sex marriage (though I have to wonder if this is for political reasons rather than his personal morals). On the other hand, he did remove pretty much every other legal inequality between same-sex and different-sex couples, so I can correctly identify this as “progress”.

Thousands of atheists — heck, thousands of believers who question conventional religion — can tell you horrible stories about being twisted and traumatized by religion.

I’ve heard plenty of such stories from ex-fundies, and few if any such stories from ex-mainline religionists. With a couple of notable exceptions, the latter tend to be more of the form “I just didn’t believe it any more”.

Aj:

Stephen Weinberg was, to put it simply, wrong. If we learned nothing from Josef Stalin and Stanley Milgram it’s that good people can be made, and have been made, to do bad things in the absence of religion. They can even be made to fly planes into structures, as occurred near the end of WW2.

His point is clear, religion motivates people to do evil.

What Weinberg (and, apparently, you) fails to appreciate is that religion is nothing special. Just about anything can and has been used to make people do evil.

The cold, hard fact is that people do evil.

I’m not a “religion apologist”. My problem is twofold:

1. The type of religion claimed to be “widely practiced in the real world” is not widely practiced and bears little resemblance to most of the real world.

2. The problems purportedly caused by religion are also, if not more so, caused by influences other than religion.

I think that this is important to know, because by blaming religion in a kneejerk manner, people miss the real causes of atrocities, which indirectly increases the chance that they will happen again. The fact that some are willing to point to any slightly religious overtone says more about the person pointing fingers than reality.

Incidentally, I once read an opinion piece by a gynecologist who interpreted Stonehenge as a model of the female reproductive system. Proof positive that if you’ve got female reproductive systems “on the brain”, you’ll see them everywhere. It’s kind of like how homophobes see the purported “homosexual agenda” everywhere, including in the Teletubbies.

Sam Harris blames 9/11 on the moderate theists. Pat Robertson blames it on lesbians and the ACLU. Both of these reactions come from the same place in the human psyche.

Some, like Hitchens, even go to the trouble of characterising everything that they dislike as “religious” and everything they like as “non-religious” which is why, in his universe, Stalinism is “religious” but Trotskyism isn’t.

You did mention that “Japanese imperialism and Stalin’s communism are […] like religions” (incidentally, it wasn’t just Japan which carried out aerial suicide raids in WW2; the Germans did it too). There’s an interesting discussion to be had there. It’s certainly true that ideologies like nationalism seems to hit the same triggers that certain types of religion does. Nonetheless, to say that religion (or quasi-religion) causes this is to ignore the fact that there is an underlying facet of human nature that allows it to happen. Milgram wasn’t studying religion.

The simple facts are this: Religion did not cause what happened in Abu Ghraib. Religion did not cause what happened in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, East Timor or Zimbabwe. Religion did not cause what happened in Stalin’s Russia. And for the record, atheism didn’t either.

Pseudonym,

Well that’s one way to dismiss Sam Harris’s arguments without attempting to address it in the slighest. There is a slight difference between Pat Robertson and Sam Harris. Harris uses reason to argue at length for his position, Robertson has faith that lesbians are evil and God punishes people.

Oh please tell me how Trotskyism is like a religion in the same way Stalinism is as described in God is not Great, I am in need of a laugh.

Religious apologists are inclined to disregard or not even see religious influence, dismiss arguments without addressing them. It really must take some creative brain power to deny religious influence in the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and East Timor.

Oh please tell me how Trotskyism is like a religion in the same way Stalinism is as described in God is not Great, I am in need of a laugh.

I’d rather not spend more time on Planet Hitchens than I need to. That stuff rots your brain. So to get back closer to the topic, let’s apply some good old-fashioned skepticism, and see what our bullshit detector kits tell us. We will apply the same techniques to Hitchens as we would to any other person who peddles bizarre claims.

We can’t definitively prove that John Edwards doesn’t get messages from dead people. What we can, however, say is this: Suppose I were to set myself up as a “psychic”, perhaps with good motives (I wanted to make people feel better), or perhaps with bad ones (I wanted to acquire money and fame), with a cold reading show. Then my show would look pretty much identical to that of Edwards. I would ensure that I always have an “out” should something go wrong, and I might even cheat with some “hot reading”.

So in a sense, John Edwards is what I would inevitably look like.

Similarly, I can’t definitively prove anything about Hitchens. But if I were to start with the premise that “religion poisons everything”, and had to maintain that belief at all costs, then some things would inevitably happen. For example, I would have to downplay any good thing that any religious person does. Anything that I had a soft spot for, I would have to a priori define as “not religious”, whether it was or nto. Anything that is objectively bad, I would have to define as “religious”.

If anything bad had even a slight religious or quasi-religious angle to it, I would have to emphasise that with as much rhetorical force as I could, and ignore any other forces. I would admit no scientific evidence whatsoever, because it might dislodge my premise. I would rely, instead, on anecdotal evidence and “proof by example” where possible, and pretend that this means “everything”.

In other words, God is not Great is pretty much the book I’d write.

Sam Harris is much the same. He has to define “faith” in a way that doesn’t apply to his postmodern version of Buddhism, otherwise he would “provide cover for” groups such as the Sinhala nationalists. What he believes and practices is good, therefore it isn’t a faith.

Yes, I realise that there are differences between Sam Harris and Pat Robertson. Sam Harris is more educated, much younger, and speaks to a more intelligent audience. But he’s still a primate.