Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts

Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Religion-Table Analogy



Last month when I was visiting my family we got into a conversation about what gives our lives purpose. I mentioned to my mother and sister that helping rid the world of religion gives my life purpose, and my sister, who is not religious in a traditional sense but very spiritual, shot back and said that there is a lot of good in religion. I agreed with her that all religions have some good in them but that the metaphysical beliefs that justify the good things in religion, also justify the bad things in religion, and I came up with what I call the religion-table analogy to try and explain it a bit better.

It works like this. A table is held up by its legs. On the table you can have good things and bad things, like, say, healthy food, and poisonous food. That represents the good of religion and the bad. The legs represent the metaphysical beliefs of religion that support all of its claims. The same metaphysical arguments that liberal Christians like former president Jimmy Carter can use to justify the truth of his god, are also used by the members of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Westboro Baptist Church, the KKK, and many others, to justify their god and their bad theology. Moderate and liberal theism provides cover for conservative and fundamentalist theism. Instead of just criticizing the fundamentalists, I'm focusing on refuting the metaphysical claims of religion altogether because chopping off the legs of the table takes down everything having to do with the religion. Keeping the legs of the table intact will always allow for the extremist to metaphysically justify their claims. Furthermore, anything good from religion can be justified without it. No one needs to believe Jesus was divine in order to see that helping the poor is good. No one needs to believe Mohammad spoke to the angel Gabriel to see that there is something wrong with charging excessive interest. But many of the bad things that religions have can only be justified with religion. ISIS' despicable theology of rape for example, cannot be justified without a belief in god.

And that's why religion has to go—all of it. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a debate with a hardcore religious fundie and they've tried to trot out the cosmological argument, or the moral argument, in an attempt to justify and lend intellectual credit to their extremist and absurd ideas. Destroy the legs of the religion table, and you destroy all of religion. This is not to say that I believe religion should be refuted because it can do bad things. I primarily believe religion should be refuted because they're all false. But to be responsible, you cannot just stop there. Since religions provide for many comforts in the lives of people, like giving them a sense of meaning, purpose, morality, community, and so forth, religion needs to be replaced with secular alternatives. When this is done, there is little to no difference in the ethical behavior and well-being of an atheist over a theist. And the lives of hundreds of millions of atheists around the world can attest to that.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Is·lam·o·pho·bi·a — Some Thoughts


I felt like I'm long over due for a blog post about Islamophobia. It's is nooo secret on this blog that I am deeply critical of Islam. I think that Islam is the most dangerous religion in the world today and the greatest religious threat to liberalism and Western Values. This can be thought of two different ways. The first way is that I think the ideology and morality within Islam is more violent than most religions. As far as I can tell, only the Old Testament rivals the Koran in brutality. The second is that I think Muslims today are committing more violence in the name of their religion than any other religion's adherents. And I think this is due, in large part, because the principles of Islam are more violent than most other religions.

When you compare Islam and Christianity for example, when you put the two of them side by side and compare their moral values, I will be totally honest with you, I think Christianity starts looking pretty damn good compared to Islam. (And anyone who knows me or who's read this blog knows I'm not at all a Christian sympathizer). Just about everything bad that Christianity has, Islam also has, and then Islam just adds more bad shit on top of that. And it is in no way "Islamophobic" or "racist" to say say this, or point it out.

It has become a thing now to label all people critical of Islam Islamophobic, or even racist. The racist accusation is obviously nonsense. Islam is a religion and a religion is not a race. There are Muslims of every color around the world. The Islamophobic accusation though, has a racist implication to it. There is, it seems, an implicit assumption that "Islamophobic" can mean the same thing as anti-Asian, or anti-Middle Eastern, or even anti-Muslim. These are often conflated, but they are not the same.

Let's look at a few definitions of Islamophobia. Wikipedia says, "Anti-Islamic sentiment or Islamophobia is a term for prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam, Muslims, or of ethnic groups perceived to be Muslim." According to UC Berkely's Center for Race & Gender, a 1991 Runnymede Trust Report defined Islamophobia as "unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims." These are two interesting definitions. Wiki's definition focuses more on the religion of Islam, and CR&G's definition focuses more on the followers of Islam. Therein lies an important distinction. Now, I'm not going to fuss over definitions here — that's not the point. The points I want to focus on regard the problems I see with the term Islamophobia and its usage.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

An Atheist Reviews The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism


A Christian that I often debate with was kind enough to buy me a book that he thinks makes a good case for god's existence and addresses many of the arguments made by the so called New Atheists. In return, I promised to actually read the book (of course) and write a chapter-by-chapter review of it here on my blog.

Well the book, called The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheismwritten by a philosopher named Edward Feser, arrived a few days ago. I've read the first chapter and the preface and I have to say that the book seems like an interesting read. I like Feser's writing style. He's very polemic and clear about articulating his point of view and he's able to keep my attention while reading (which is very important). And at 267 pages of content, the book isn't too long.

I had very little knowledge of Feser before being told of this book. He's an associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College according to Wikipedia. There are thousands of professors like Fesar who stay under the radar and never make a whole lot of noise outside of esoteric philosophy circles, and one can make a name for themselves by criticizing or debating big name philosophers and scientists, like those that comprise the New Atheists. But so far Feser is still relatively unknown, even to many theists and atheists active in the debate over god, religion, and secularism.

Feser's book is a critique of what's become known as New Atheism, and I'm told it's a very good one. Here on this blog I will be critiquing Feser's critique of New Atheism. But here's the problem. I don't always agree with many of the New Atheists myself. And to be honest with you, the only two books I've read in their entirety made by a New Atheist author is Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (which I still regard as an excellent critique of Abrahamic monotheism and its social effects),* and Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. I've read part of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is arguably the most famous of the New Atheist's books, and I've read excerpts of Sam Harris' The End of Faith (which is the book that started the "New Atheism" phenomenon) and Daniel Dennett's, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I agree with these guys on a lot of stuff, but not on everything. So when I criticize Feser it won't necessarily be from the perspective of the New Atheists, it will be from my perspective. And that means I might at times agree with Feser and not with the New Atheists, or I might disagree with them both.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

The Great Religion Debate Part 3: Is the world better off without religion?


Religion is a notoriously difficult word to define. For the purposes of the Great Religion Debate I defined religion as "the belief in, worship of, or obedience to a supernatural power or powers considered to be divine or to have control of human destiny." Although it may be impossible to find a perfect definition of religion and many will find some issue no matter what definition is provided, this definition differentiates religion from things like philosophy, worldviews and politics.

Although every religion is a worldview, not every worldview is a religion. Under this definition Christianity is a religion, Judaism is a religion, and so is Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Scientology, and some forms of Buddhism and Confucianism. Political ideologies, theories and philosophies like liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, socialism and communism are not religions. Neither are naturalistic philosophies such as existentialism or determinism.

One of the best orators against the social effects of religion was the late Christopher Hitchens. He put forth four basic reasons in the beginning of his best seller God is Not Great indicting religion as a poison to the enlightened world. Religious faith he argued:

1) wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos
2) because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism
3) it is both the result and cause of dangerous sexual repressions 
4) it is ultimately grounded in wish-thinking

Many argue that it's not religion in and of itself that causes any harm, it's people acting wrongly in the name of religion that results in this harm. This is usually coupled with the view that it's only some versions of some religions that can be harmful, but that religion as a whole is not to blame. There is no doubt that we must consider nuance when dealing with a concept as complex as religion. I do not in any way think all religions are equally harmful. The term "religion" is like the term "sport," to use Sam Harris' analogy. Some are much more prone to harm than others. To think all religions are equally harmful (or equally good) is therefore naive.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Why Is Debating Morality With Theists So Fun? (Hint: Because They're Wrong)


Like Christopher Hitchens, I'm in love with debate, and debating morality with theists is probably one of my favorite debate topics. The reason why I enjoy that debate so much is because I know they're simply wrong on about it. Case in point, theists must simply assert that god is identical to "the good" or moral perfection itself but cannot justify whether god's goodness comes logically prior to any attributes that might constitute god's goodness or not.

Now perhaps I might not be writing here anything that I haven't already done before on numerous other posts, but since the moral debate is one atheists will find themselves confronted with time and time again, it might be worth repeating. When a theists asserts that god is identical to moral perfection he or she isn't doing anything other than playing word games. I can simply define the word "God" as being a synonym of goodness, but I certainly haven't demonstrated that an actual being exists that is ontologically identical with goodness, let alone been able to conflate that being to the deity of a particular religion. All I've done is played words games with you and claimed victory (ha ha!). But it's a premature calculation.

Seriously though, for any theist who does this, the next trick up their sleeve (if they see you're not convinced) is going to be something like, "It is impossible for God to be evil or command something evil, like rape, because God's intrinsic nature is that of moral perfection. God is necessarily morally perfect." The theist here is trying to get all philosophical on your ass: God is necessarily perfect because he can't be any other way. But I still find it hard to palate the idea of how the theist can know or can determine what a perfect moral being is without appealing to some standard that exists independently of such a being. Otherwise, if the being itself is what determines moral perfection, then is it not the case that one can appeal to the logic that what ever that being does or commands is perfectly moral by definition, no matter what that is? How do we determine that god is morally perfect? If god is simply just being defined as such, then following this line of reasoning allows Islamic fundamentalists to stone to death adulterers and jail/execute blasphemers - hardly something we in the West would consider moral.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

A Few Of The Evil Deeds Done By Protestants


A Christian linked me to a blog in order to provide arguments that the Spanish Inquisition was not really all that bad, but what caught my attention was that it contained a list of some of the evil deeds done by Protestants that I was not aware of. Now I don't blame religion on all of the world's problems, and I don't think that every conflict between two groups of people who are of different religions or religious denominations is always entirely a religious conflict. But I do think that whenever there is a conflict between two groups of people, if they differ in religion, the problem is almost always made worse.

Take the 17th century English military leader Oliver Cromwell for example. After he rose through the ranks during the English Civil war, he invaded Ireland to help spread Protestantism after some of the Irish Catholics there killed some Protestants, and in effect lead to the deaths or exile of anywhere between a quarter to a third of the Irish population. Was it religion or was it politics? There's no doubt that even if given the most charitable assessment, there's a religious component that made the situation worse. Cromwell believed his military campaign in Ireland was a judgement from god, as he thought pretty much everything that happened was. And to this, I'm reminded of the words of Christopher Hitchens who asked, when you sincerely believe you've got god on your side, what amount of violence are you not capable of accomplishing?


  • John Calvin not only banished dissenters from Geneva, some were tortured and/or executed (e.g. Jacques Gouet and Michael Servetus).
  • The Protestant Council of Zurich decided to put Anabaptists to death by drowning.
  • On the advice of Philip Melancthon, three Anabaptists who refused to recant under torture were executed.
  • Henry VIII, the original English Reformer, executed 72,000 people.
  • Henry VIII’s Protestant daughter, Elizabeth I, executed more than the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions combined.
  • Oliver Cromwell killed or exiled between 1/4 and 1/3 of the population of Ireland in an attempt to establish Presbyterianism. In one massacre alone he had 3,500 people (including women and children) murdered in a church.


Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Why Ted Haggard's Sexuality Is Symbolic Of The Relationship Between Christianity And Facts


Back in 2006, we all got to witness the spectacular decline of conservative anti-gay Christian pastor Ted Haggard, who it turned out was secretly paying a man for gay sex. I remember what a ride that one was to watch. Watching religious hypocrites fall from grace is first class entertainment for atheists. I mean, what atheist wouldn't want to hear about some ridiculous religious figure turning out to be doing the very thing they spent so much time railing against in the name of their god?

If Haggard's initial fall from grace wasn't enough, we were all further given an encore not long after when it was announced that he was declared "completely heterosexual" after being "cured" of his homosexuality through counseling. It was hilarious because any educated person knows that sexuality cannot be cured or repaired by mere counseling or therapy. Sexuality is innate. All ex-gay therapy can do is teach a gay person how to repress their desires and live in dissonance with themselves. That's all the evidence has ever shown it capable of doing. (See here.)

Ted Haggard's cognitive dissonance on his sexuality forced by his Christian belief that being gay is a sin is symbolic of the kind of cognitive dissonance Christians in general must endure in order to maintain their religious faith with the constant sting of the secular sciences and politics challenging them. Suppressing scientific facts and the moral atrocities of god in order to maintain the faith is a lot like gay Christians suppressing their sexuality. I debate with Christians all the time online and I'm always entertained by the kind of cognitive acrobatics they must deploy in order to maintain that the Bible is the word of god, and that their god is good. I've dealt with so many Christians for example who will deny the evidence for evolution at all costs to the point where they will compromise logic and sanity in order to do so.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Cognitive Acrobatics On Slavery & Killing Naughty Kids, Once Again



The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.

- Christopher Hitchens


This quote from Hitchens shows why I could never be a Christian. (And I've seriously tried to consider what it would be like.) As soon as I were to adopt any belief in god, I'd immediately be fraught with massive cognitive dissonance. Even the idea of a jovial god of pure love and peace wouldn't fare any less problematic. And considering my deep philosophical nature, trying to reconcile the existence of a god with the facts I'm aware of would drive me insane. Belief in god can only work if you don't think, or if you surrender your mind and adopt the mentality that whatever god does is perfect by definition, thereby alleviating you from the stinging questions of suffering and evil. But I just can't surrender my mind to anyone; I'm a thinker.

I've been debating this harebrained Jehovah's Witness recently, whose church is arguably a cult. JoHos are fundamentalists who take the Bible more or less literally. In addition to prohibitions on smoking and drinking, they believe we all descended from Adam and Eve roughly in the last 6-10,000 years, that Noah actually literally put two of every animal (including dinosaurs?) on a boat, and that every other miraculous claim in the Bible is true.

When debating Biblical morality over on Unreasonable Faith, it just amazes me what kind of cognitive acrobatics fundamentalists like JoHos have to do to keep composure. Consider this dialogue:

JoHo: God wills something because He is good. 
Me: I already refuted that and your response was that being loving compassionate and fair is good because god is loving compassionate and fair, and god is good because he is loving compassionate and fair. It's a circular argument. 
JoHo: You're conflating moral ontology with moral semantics. Our concern is with moral ontology, that is to say, the foundation in reality of moral values. Our concern is not with moral semantics, that is to say, the meaning of moral terms. We have a clear understanding of moral vocabulary like “good,” “evil,” right,” and so on, without reference to God. Thus, it is informative to learn that “God is essentially good.” 
Me: I know perfectly well the difference between moral ontology, moral semantics and moral epistemology. You're just cutting and pasting other people's arguments without even reading my responses to you because you know you will have to make a circular argument to get out of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

"Don't be a fan." - Christopher Hitchens


I've been on a role blogging everyday this month, sometimes twice a day. In fact, I've written more posts this month than I did in all of 2011 (36). That's because that year I was working a really stressful job over 60 hours a week and I was often working 6 days a week. I have so many ideas in my head that I want to commit to print. I want to write more about what secularism means in practical terms. I want to take on more criticism of atheism and non-belief and take on more arguments for theism. The problem is finding the time and the patience. Most of my free time now is spent blogging. It's highly addictive. I can sometimes stay up for hours at night finishing a nice blog. And once I get started, I sometimes just can't stop until I'm done. I don't like leaving unfinished business.

That being said, I just noticed that I never wrote about the time I met Christopher Hitchens. By the summer of 2010, I had become completely obsessed with Hitchens. I had watched all his debates, interviews, and appearances on YouTube and everyday I was looking him up to see when a new video had been unloaded. I went out and bought his best seller God is Not Great. Through my obsession with him he had a profound impact on my life. I wanted to be an intellectual like him. I wanted to be an antitheist like him. I wanted to drink whiskey and smoke and be cocky like him. I was already a smoker, and somewhat of a drinker (although not an alcoholic), and I was already into politics and intellectual discussions. I had a knack for being a natural debater but I wanted to be a full on polemicist, like Hitch was.

Then came the news that he had gotten cancer. I was on vacation in Asia at the time. At first I didn't realize how serious the cancer was, because people get cancer all the time and live. But then when I returned home the news of his cancer, esophageal cancer, was grim. Only 5 percent of those diagnosed with it survival when it's in stage 4, as was the case with Hitchens. So when a Google search of his name landed me on a page that said he was going to have a debate in town on whether Islam was a religion of peace, I ordered my ticket immediately. The debate eventually sold out quickly and I got lucky because had I been another day or two late, I wouldn't have made it. The thought had also occurred to be that this could be the only chance I get to ever see him, my intellectual hero.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Vicarious Redemption And Masochism


In almost all ancient cultures you had the idea that humans or animals could be sacrificed, and that this sacrifice would somehow make your situation better. The ancient Aztecs were ripping out human hearts and offering them to their sun-god in the hopes that it would keep him happy and he would continue to rise everyday and provide them with warmth and nourishment. The ancient Jews would pile all of the townspeople's sins onto an animal, and send that animal out into the desert to die of thirst and hunger, atoning for the sins of the people in the process.

Sacrificial offerings are an ancient relic of our primitive past. There is a reason why no one in the modern world sacrifices people or animals anymore: it doesn't work. Nature doesn't give a crap one way or another whether we offer it a lamb or a warm, beating heart.

That brings me to Christianity. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice. Christianity is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. Jesus dies for the charge of blasphemy under the Jewish high court, and his followers begin believing that his death on the cross was a vicarious redemption for the sins of all mankind. Now let's set aside arguments for the historicity of this event for now, let's focus on the story. As kid growing up hearing of the crucifixion I always thought it was kind of silly. I mean why would god sacrifice his own son to us, and why would we all need a sacrifice anyway? Then I came across Hitchens' critique of the crucifixion and it got me thinking even more about it. Hitch said the vicarious redemption was the sickest aspect of Christianity, which I thought was ironic in a way, because it's the one thing Christians must believe in to be properly called Christians.

Hitch argued that the abdication of moral responsibility through being thrown onto Jesus' torture and death was morally reprehensible. I don't disagree with him that the idea of thinking you can be purified of all your faults via a human sacrifice is a gross perversion of morality and is also a relic of our superstitious and ancient ways of thinking. But talk to a Christian about this, and it all makes perfect sense. They'll say it was necessary and was an act of grace and love on god's part to sacrifice his only son for our sins. And they'll say that we all deserve to have been sent to hell in the absence of this offer without hesitation.

That's what years of religious brainwashing will do to you.

But looking at this attitude from another angle, the ease with with Christians justify our lowly state and deserve of eternal punishment kind of reminds me how many abused wives will justify their husband's abuse by saying that they deserve it, and that their husbands beat them because he loves them. And they'll say things like, "It's all my fault for not pleasing him properly." This to me sounds exactly like the excuses many Christians make for god's anger, wrath and judgement. "It's always our fault," they'll say, "we deserve his judgement and punishment." "We're sinners." The similarities here between abused wives and Christians are amazing. This all to me sounds like they are products of the masochistic aspect of the human personality. There is a part in all of us, to varying degrees, that wants us to feel like a lowly, unworthy, piece of crap that is always wrong, and in need of discipline and correction. That's ultimately where the masochistic aspects of religion and abuse comes from.

One of the reasons why Christianity was so successful, I think, is due to its amazing ability to capitalize on the guilt and masochism that lurks in the minds of its followers. It is thoroughly imbued with guilt, and what more could the masochistic aspect of the mind want more than to find an outlet to justify it's feelings of unworthiness and desire for punishment?



Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Why The "Inner Witness To The Holy Spirit" Is Evidence Of Nothing


When all else fails for the theist, many decide that they can always fall back on the "inner witness to the holy spirit." This is true among Christians but other theists and New Age types that I've debated with in person have similar justifications for their beliefs. For example, I remember one time talking to this woman who described herself as "spiritual" who told me she knew for a fact that the spiritual force behind the universe had put certain situations into her life for a purpose. All attempts to inject a little skepticism to the conversation were futile. But people like this I think highlight what is at the core of religious/spiritual belief  that there is at heart, primarily an emotional basis for belief in god or one particular religion and things like the "inner witness to the holy spirit" are really just manifestations of strong emotional triggers contextualized in a Christian environment.

It seems that some people just "know" that god or some higher power exists because they "feel" it, and nothing can come in their way. But it always seemed obvious to me that the fact that Christians, Hindus, Mormons and New Age spiritualists alike can all have these amazing emotional/spiritual experiences, that their experiences were indicative of nothing more than just our natural tendency to attribute deeper meaning to our emotional experiences and hallucinations. For example, if the Christian god existed, why would he be giving Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims amazing transcendent spiritual experiences when they meditate, chant and pray? These experiences often lead to the faith of those believers increasing, and as a result often takes them further away from ever becoming a Christian. It seems odd that the Christian god would give any non-Christian a spiritual experience that strengthens their non-Christian faith.

Christians have two general answers to this dilemma: (1) The spiritual experiences of non-Christians are mistaken or are possibly caused by the devil; or (2) in the Calvinist tradition, these people are being purposely mislead by god because god has predestined them to hell where he wants them. Since I think Calvinism is intellectually bankrupt, I will focus on (1).

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Do Atheists Have Faith?


We hear a lot about faith today – from pious politicians, to small town preachers. One of the goals of the New Atheists is to turn the word "faith" into a dirty word. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking Bill Maher said in Religulous. Christopher Hitchens wanted to attach a negative stigma to anyone who professed to be a "person of faith." I'm definitely on board with the mission of creating a culture based on reason and evidence and not faith. But, theists often accuse atheists of being just as faithful. They say atheism takes just as much faith as theism, maybe more.

So is this true? Does it take more faith to be an atheist than a theist?

Let's look at some definitions of "faith." From dictionary.com we get a few answers:

1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
5. a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.

For the atheist, it's definitions 2, 3, and 5 that are the most controversial and the kind of faith that we would like to see eradicated. Certainly we can all say that we have faith in a friend, faith in humanity, or faith that the economy will recover. This kind of faith is informed trust in a person or a thing when we are not certain what will happen. That's definition 1 – uncontroversial. Definition 4 kind of pushes the meaning of faith and conflates it somewhat with belief. But, it is still dealing with things that exist, such as a code of ethics, or values.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Hitchens' Debating Style


I was rereading Christopher Hitchens' best seller God is Not Great recently and going over some of the arguments he makes. I first read his book in the summer of 2010 when I was on vacation in Asia after I graduated college, and since then I've acquired a great wealth of information learning about religion and debating with theists.

One interesting thing about Hitchens' approaching to the debate was that unlike Richard Dawkins, Hitchens was not all that concerned with disproving god. It was religious belief, and its ill effects that Hitchens was primarily after, not so much the ontology of god. That's why when he debated religious opponents, he did a much better job when the debate was centered around the social effects of religion such as, "Is Christianity Good for the World?" or "Is the Catholic Church A Force for Good?" or "Is Islam A Religion on Peace?" However, since Hitchens wasn't a scientist, or even a philosopher technically, when the debate was entitled, "Does God Exist?" he sometimes didn't fare as well because when it came to disproving god's existence, one needs a considerable amount of knowledge of cosmology, physics and biology.

Monday, June 17, 2013

The Burden Of Proof


Who really bears the burden of proof when debating? Traditionally, debates are either centered around a proposition or a question, and whoever argues in the affirmative bears the burden of proof. I would essentially agree with this principle because when it comes to debating the existence of god, usually it's the theist making the affirmative argument and I've consistently noticed an abject failure by most theists to demonstrate the truth of their theological beliefs.

However, although the person arguing the affirmative bears the initial burden of proof, any counter argument made should be backed up with evidence as the burden of proof lies on them to make the counter argument plausible. For example, if a debate is centered around creationism, and one makes the counter argument that evolution can explain away the need for a creator, then the evolutionist has the burden of proof to explain and show the evidence for evolution, or at least be able to produce evidence when prompted.

Also, the standard for the level of evidence required to back up a counter argument should be about equal to the level of evidence that was produced for the original argument. So if the evidence produced for the affirmative argument was circular, fatuous, or illogical, then the person making the counter argument need not stress over producing exceptional evidence. As Hitchens said, "What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Why Would We Invent Hell?


Many theists have brought up the question from time to time that if heaven can be explained because it bares the hallmarks of wishful thinking, then it seems at odds with human desire why we would've invented hell.

Dinesh D'Souza made the following argument in a debate with Christopher Hitchens:


I can totally see why in a wish fulfillment world we would invent heaven...I don't think I would have made up hell. Hell is more severe than diabetes. It's a little tougher than death. So why would [the] wish fulfillment inventors of religion come up with the rules of self denial and so on that make our life more difficult, more sacrificial?


Hitchens has at another time responded to this by saying that hell is the place we've conjured up where we'd desire people that we don't like to go to. I agree. When we're full of hateful emotion towards someone, we tell them to go to - hell. Right? Hell is where we wish those we don't like can spend an eternity being tortured. It comes from the sadistic side of the human personality to enjoy the torments of others, and religions like Christianity and especially Islam, capitalize on it very well.

But also, on the flip side to our sadism, we're also sometimes masochistic. We want to be abused and punished and humiliated for our shortcomings. Religion aptly capitalizes on this side to our personality as well. If you look at virtually every religion, it enjoins the believer into thinking that they're a subhuman, filthy, wretched, worm, who's not even worth of the life they didn't even ask for. You see this in every religion. You see this amongst Christians and Muslims flagellating themselves; you see this amongst Jews forcing themselves to live according to absurd rules and regulations. Religious belief is partly a manifestation of sadomasochism.

I can almost guarantee you that many of the writers of religious doctrines that bare masochistic tendencies would be the kind of people paying to be whipped and beaten if they were alive today.


Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 10



The Journey Ahead

This blog originally was part of a school assignment for an English class I had after I decided to go back to college and get my bachelor's degree. The assignment required that I create a blog and write 5 weekly posts about anything I wanted. This is why if you look at my early posts from 2009, you'll notice that many of them are hastily written and are not concerned with religion. This blog was originally called "Mike's Mandatory Blog", which was my way of making it known that my hand had been forced. Slowly it grew on me to write about what was becoming my obsession - my atheism and philosophy.

Looking toward the journey ahead, as a passionate secularist, atheist and humanist, I know the challenges people like me face. Our agenda is to preserve secular democracy here at home, and to help nourish it abroad. We want a fair, just, and humane society for everyone. We want peace - but we're not afraid to fight for it. Fundamentally, we feel that a reasonable and just society is possible, and it's only when we succumb to ignorance, superstition and ill-conceived ideologies that we impede its progress. And no, there are no hollow dreams of a perfect utopia that we are chasing after. We are not communists. We support freedom and individual rights, and the sincere democratic process.

I have many lucid fantasies of becoming a skilled debater and counter apologist for the atheist and secularist movement. I've joined a debate meetup group in my area and have learned that I'm pretty good at it. Over the past few years I've become more active in my local atheist and skeptic communities, and I look forward to further contributing to the cause for reason. I was also thinking of making videos and become an active YouTuber like so many other atheists since video as we all know can more easily reach a wider audience. I will certainly continue to keep writing about my philosophy and my journey where ever it takes me.

Perhaps it's best that I leave this part of the journey with a quote from the late Christopher Hitchens' untimely memoir Hitch-22. In the closing page he summarizes the noble struggles of the rational non-believer:


The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time, and I feel absurdly honored to be grouped in the public mind with great teachers and scholars such as Richard Dawkins (a true Balliol man if ever there was one), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. To be an unbeliever is not merely to be "open minded." It is, rather a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that's my Hitch-22. I have already described some of the rehearsals for this war, which relativists so plainly call "endless" - as if it were not indeed the latest chapter of an eternal struggle - and I find that for the remainder of my days I shall be happy enough to see if I can emulate the understatement of Commander Hitchens, and to say that at least I know what I am supposed to be doing.




Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 5


The Road Towards Antitheism

I didn't immediately become the antitheist that I am today after studying philosophy in college. After my lapse into hedonism, I gradually reignited my interest in philosophy, but the process took years. As late as my mid-twenties I was more or less still an atheist who kept his beliefs largely to himself. As I had done in my teens, it was relatively rare when I spoke out on atheism and I usually only ever exposed my beliefs in a reactionary fashion, such as when I was confronted with someone else’s theistic or supernatural claims that I thought was nonsense. Over the years however I did seem to increasingly enjoy initiating conversations about politics, science, god and religion and began enjoying the challenges of pitting together antithetical worldviews. I also briefly became an agnostic for a short while when I began concluding that knowledge of the existence of god was unknowable. I guess you can say that agnosticism was the closest I ever veered away from atheism. This foray was short lived however because I came right back to atheism when I realized that agnostics are really just atheists, since anyone who doesn’t actively believe in god is technically an atheist. I also had a lot of trouble reconciling the seemingly contradictory properties of the concept of god, along with what we would expect to see in the natural world if there was a god.  

With my passion in philosophy and science having been reignited, I began seeking out like-minded company. It was shortly thereafter that I caught wind of the creationism vs. evolution debate that was raging across the US and my red flag went off. I suddenly became aware that various states and school districts were trying to get creationism taught in science classrooms under the new guise of “intelligent design”. I thought to myself, “Haven’t we been there before? Wasn’t this issue of teaching evolution in school settled in like the 1920s or something?” I vaguely remembered reading Inherit the Wind in high school about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee when they put evolution on trial, but I had completely forgotten that the teacher who was accused of teaching evolution actually lost that trial. It wasn’t until 1968 in the Epperson v. Arkansas case that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the banning of the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional. Slowly after this, school districts across the US replaced biblical creation with evolution in the science classroom, but the creationists were always at it trying to get forms of intelligent design taught alongside with evolution. Personally, I never recalled anything but evolution being taught in biology class, but I of course grew up in liberal New York.

Upon realizing that in the twenty-first century there were young earth creationists at it again trying to get their faith-based nonsense rebranded under a different name and taught in public schools, I felt in a sense a call to arms. I started taking my atheism a lot more seriously. I started researching into all the old tactics theists were using to advance their theistic agenda. I began reading about atheism and watching lectures and debates between creationists and evolutionists, and between atheists and theists. I became obsessed with all the arguments made for and against the existence of god, and realized that there was an enormous amount of people engaged in public debates on the matter. And then I came across Christopher Hitchens who I would come to greatly admire. He’s the polemic type of militant atheist who is actively opposed to religious belief and argued that religious belief, far from being benign and humble, is actually a very harmful and negative belief system. His arguments resonated profoundly with me and introduced a new word to me: antitheist. He was the voice I was looking for; he was the person I wanted to be. He articulated many of the negative views I already held about religion (albeit better): its appeal to authority over reason; its ignorance to scientific facts; its misrepresentation of the nature of our origins and the truth; its emphasis on faith and dogma over evidence; and its primitive ethical systems developed by stupefied iron age desert dwellers who didn’t even know the earth was round. I can go on and on, but you get the point.

Having never been religious myself, and having never spent any significant amount of time around religious people, I began to fully realize just how dangerous the religious way of thinking potentially was. I had a few run-ins with stereotypically ignorant religious types over the years. I knew I didn’t agree with them or particularly like them, but their effects were always at an arms-length from me, never able to wield any significant power in my domain. I had now known exactly what they were capable of when they worked together. It wasn’t just trying to get creationism taught in school that bothered me, the religious right in the US was trying to erode away hard won civil liberties that formed the pillars of our secular democracy and the separation of church and state. I became more political and realized that most who debate on behalf of religion were also against secularism – the one condition I draw that I cannot tolerate being violated. I realized that there was also an opinion war at stake here: the more religious someone is, the less likely they are to support a secular government and the separation of church and state. Therefore, I realized that it was vital that atheists, agnostics, skeptics, freethinkers and anyone who supports the preservation of the Establishment Clause and a society that uses reason and evidence, needed to continue fighting the good fight and make the case for a rational, secular, humane society where its citizens are free from the tyranny of dogmatic religious belief being imposed on them by their own government.  

And thus, the road towards antitheism was paved.



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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Road Towards Antitheism


Christopher Hitchens introduced the word antitheist to me years ago when I began listening to his debates. It struck me kind of oddly at the time for me to consider if I was one myself. I've always been an atheist or an agnostic as far as I could remember, and I always remember being highly skeptical towards religious claims whenever they confronted me. Before my mid-twenties though, I cannot remember being openly hostile towards religious faith other than simply being skeptical. I did occasionally at times mock the creationist viewpoint of religion but I don't recall ever going out of my way to chastise the religion or its believers.

That is, until I started paying attention to creationism/evolution debate, which sparked my interest in the theism/atheism debate, to which I naturally sided with the atheists. Around this time I began reading the Bible and the Qur'an, which I had several copies of thanks to my religious mother. It was only when I began familiarizing myself with what religions actually say, that I began travelling down the road towards antitheism. Perhaps I could say that the Bible and the Qur'an made me an antitheist, but I don't think that's the full story. Christopher Hitchens' and Richard Dawkins' polemics helped give me the final push. Considering these religions are pushing to create a world that I do not want to see actualized at any time while I'm alive or even after I'm dead, I was naturally destined towards antitheism.

So you could say that before when I was ignorant towards what religions actually say, I was merely an atheist, but after having known what they're about and what they stand for, I became an antitheist.


Thursday, February 7, 2013

Unfalsifiable Claims


The late Christopher Hitchens was always entertaining to listen to (and to read). During his many debates with theists his critique of Christianity's negative social effects was superb. But one point he made about how theists react to scientific progress strikes me as more important than ever in light of how many theists are finally starting to embrace evolution in large numbers.

Most Christians not too long ago outright rejected Darwinian evolution on the grounds that it was incompatible with the Bible's telling of the history of life and man. They felt evolution degraded mankind as well as god. But now, after 150 years of evolution since the Origin Of The Species, after the evidence keeps building up and is undeniable, more and more theists are coming to the conclusion that evolution is true. And the position they're taking after this, is that evolution actually proves how much more amazing god is for creating such an intricate and highly complex process that brought about the various species of life, including man. Many Christians are also now saying that these natural explanations are designed by god to test our faith. So after denying evolution and the big bang for decades, suddenly they're both adopted as truth and now are being used to make the case for god.

Hitchens argued that to retroactively assimilate new scientific discoveries that were previously denied so that scripture is reinforced to make perfect sense befitting the new information, is to argue an unfalsifiable claim. How do you falsify something that "evolves" so to speak, to adapt to unfavorable conditions? Perhaps the answer is that religions like Christianity are unfalsifiable. In my mind, unless Jesus' bones are discovered, I think we'll just continue to see camps within Christianity adapt with the strategy that each new piece of data that removes the need for god's intervention is actually designed by god to test our faith in him. But they'd probably just claim that was another test of faith by god.

I suppose the ultimate unfalsifiable claim will come with the cosmological argument. But if it ever becomes provable that a universe can pop into being uncaused from nothing, theists will simply assert that it's all another test from god to demonstrate our faith in him. If someone wants to cling to a god because they feel it gives their life purpose, meaning and direction, I'm fine with that. The only place I draw the line is when belief in god violates secularism and causes stupid wars, ignorance and hatred.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Communism: The Blood Stain On The History Of Atheism




One of the most common arguments made by theists against atheism is that atheism inevitably leads to communist style dystopias where all commonly good moral values are eroded away and replaced with one person's vision of madness. They point to the horrible social experiments of the 20th century in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and Vietnam where religion was eradicated and millions ended up being murdered and forced into labor under the direction of the State. There is this ongoing conflation of atheism with communism that each of their existences necessarily requires the other as if they're two in the same. While it is true that communism requires atheism, atheism itself implies no political connotations at all whatsoever. And atheist can be capitalist, or a Marxist, or a libertarian, or be completely apolitical. All atheism itself implies is the disbelief in any gods.

Atheists will probably never be able to clean the dark stain of communism off of its history. But it is worthwhile to note that even if we successfully educate the masses that atheism doesn't equal communism, we are still in a position to have to explain the failed communist experiments. I agree with all the critics that the communist regimes of the 20th century were absolutely horrific crimes against humanity. I'm a critic of communism both in theory and in practice. In theory, the idea that society should be controlled and centrally planned so that individuality isn't recognized and people are turned into nothing more than worker bees and forced to build the State's vision of what a civilization should look like, is like as Bill Maher recently said, trying to make the river flow upstream: It goes against our natural need to be recognized as individuals and to be able to pursuit our own goals and happiness. Communism can only really work on small scales and when it is completely voluntary.

It is also important to note that although communism is atheistic and suppresses religious freedom, communism is not done strictly in the name of atheism. The primary goal of communism is not to eradicate religion, the goal is the establishment of the common ownership of property and the means of production for the State. From the perspective of communism, religion was seen merely as an inconvenient obstacle in the way of achieving this dream that had to be taken out.

The main problem of communism is that it is totalitarian - it allows one person to have total power. Total and absolute power, as they say, corrupts its individuals absolutely, that's why monarchies have waned and democracy is on the rise. Most people recognize that power must have checks and balances to ensure that the power is shared amongst different minds. Without this, the citizens of a communist republic are at the mercy of one person's will, and if that person is psychopathic, like Stalin was, unmitigated cruelty is almost inevitable.

Christopher Hitchens argued that when Stalin took the reigns, he was merely exploiting a vacuum of power left over by the Czars of Russia who for centuries were regarded by the Russian people as being somewhere between human and god, and who conditioned the people to credulously obey their authority without question. In other words, according to Hitchens, religious thinking and unquestionable obedience to authority enables dictators like Stalin to come to power, and that the main culprit in all of this is the willingness itself to submit to authority. I think on that he makes an excellent point.

Not that the numbers of the massacred are the most important thing to focus on, but religion itself has been the cause of much unnecessary killing and suffering specifically done in its name. Now I agree with many others that the social consequences of a belief say nothing about whether that belief is true of not, but I am also not ignorant to the role that the ugly stain of communism has on atheism. Thus, the primary reason why the word atheism in the West has had such negative connotations, is because of its association with communism, and to a lesser extent with Darwinism. In the future, as atheism becomes more closely associated with secular humanism and secular democracy, which by all measures represents a more humane and tolerant system of ethics and government, the word atheism or atheist will no longer arouse such fears as it used to.

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