Posted on 05/23/2009 12:15:01 PM PDT by rhema
I can't stand atheists — but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores.
Other people, most recently the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton in his new book "Faith, Reason, and Revolution," take to task such superstar nonbelievers as Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion") and political journalist Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great") for indulging in a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can't prove something, it doesn't exist.
My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What, did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?
Read Dawkins, or Hitchens, or the works of fellow atheists Sam Harris ("The End of Faith") and Daniel Dennett ("Breaking the Spell"), or visit an atheist Web site or blog (there are zillions of them, bearing such titles as "God Is for Suckers," "God Is Imaginary" and "God Is Pretend"), and your eyes will glaze over as you peruse — again and again — the obsessively tiny range of topics around which atheists circle like water in a drain.
First off, there's atheist victimology: Boohoo, everybody hates us 'cuz we don't believe in God.
Although a recent Pew Forum survey on religion found that 16 percent of Americans describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, only 1.6 percent call themselves atheists, with another 2.4 percent weighing in as agnostics (a group despised as wishy-washy by atheists). You or I might attribute the low numbers to atheists' failure to win converts to their unbelief, but atheists say the problem is persecution so relentless that it drives tens of millions of God-deniers into a closet of feigned faith, like gays before Stonewall. In his online "Atheist Manifesto," Harris writes that "no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that ... God exists."
The evidence? Antique clauses in the constitutions of six — count 'em — states barring atheists from office.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such provisions unenforceable nearly 50 years ago, but that doesn't stop atheists from bewailing that they have to hide their Godlessness from friends, relatives, employers and potential dates. One representative of the pity-poor-me school of atheism, Kathleen Goodman, writing in January for the Chronicle of Higher Education, went so far as to promote affirmative action for atheists on college campuses: specially designated, college-subsidized "safe spaces" for them to express their views.
Maybe atheists wouldn't be so unpopular if they stopped beating the drum until the hide splits on their second-favorite topic: How stupid people are who believe in God.
This is a favorite Dawkins theme. In a recent interview with Trina Hoaks, the atheist blogger for the Examiner.com Web site, Dawkins described religious believers as follows: "They feel uneducated, which they are; often rather stupid, which they are; inferior, which they are; and paranoid about pointy-headed intellectuals from the East Coast looking down on them, which, with some justification, they do." Thanks, Richard!
Dennett likes to call atheists "the Brights," in contrast to everybody else, who obviously aren't so bright. In a 2006 essay describing his brush with death after a heart operation, Dennett wrote these thoughts about his religious friends who told him they were praying for his recovery: "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" With friends like Daniel Dennett, you don't need enemies.
Then there's P.Z. Myers, biology professor at the University of Minnesota's Morris campus, whose blog, Pharyngula, is supposedly about Myers' field, evolutionary biology, but is actually about his fanatical propensity to label religious believers as "idiots," "morons," "loony" or "imbecilic" in nearly every post. The university deactivated its link to Myers' blog in July after he posted a photo of a consecrated host from a Catholic Mass that he had pierced with a rusty nail and thrown into the garbage ("I hope Jesus' tetanus shots are up to date") in an effort to prove that Catholicism is bunk — or something.
Myers' blog exemplifies atheists' frenzied fascination with Christianity and the Bible. Atheist Web site after atheist Web site insists that Jesus either didn't exist or "was a jerk" (in the words of one blogger) because he didn't eliminate smallpox or world poverty. At the American Atheists Web site, a writer complains that God "set up" Adam and Eve, knowing in advance that they would eat the forbidden fruit. A blogger on A Is for Atheist has been going through the Bible chapter by chapter and verse by verse in order to prove its "insanity" (he or she had gotten up to the Book of Joshua when I last looked).
Another topic that atheists beat like the hammer on the anvil in the old Anacin commercials is Darwinism versus creationism. Maybe Darwin-o-mania stems from the fact that this year marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth in 1809, but haven't atheists heard that many religious people (including the late Pope John Paul II) don't have a problem with evolution but, rather, regard it as God's way of letting his living creation unfold? Furthermore, even if human nature as we know it is a matter of lucky adaptations, how exactly does that disprove the existence of God?
And then there's the question of why atheists are so intent on trying to prove that God not only doesn't exist but is evil to boot. Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion," accuses the deity of being a "petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak" as well as a "misogynistic, homophobic, racist ... bully." If there is no God — and you'd be way beyond stupid to think differently — why does it matter whether he's good or evil?
The problem with atheists — and what makes them such excruciating snoozes — is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God's existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God's omniscience with free will or God's goodness with human suffering. Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity, the "flying spaghetti monster" of atheists' typically lame jokes. They think that lobbing a few Gaza-style rockets accusing God of failing to create a world more to their liking ("If there's a God, why aren't I rich?" "If there's a God, why didn't he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?") will suffice to knock down the entire edifice of belief.
What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn't rationalism but anger — anger that the world isn't perfect, that someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary. Hitchens thinks that "religion spoils everything." Dawkins contends that raising one's offspring in one's religion constitutes child abuse. Harris argues that it "may be ethical to kill people" on the basis of their beliefs. The perennial atheist litigant Michael Newdow sued (unsuccessfully) to bar President Barack Obama from uttering the words "so help me God" when he took his oath of office.
What atheists don't seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?
Charlotte Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus" and a contributing editor to the Minding the Campus Web site of the Manhattan Institute. She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.
No one is beholden your religious tests.
Look at it from the opposite direction: just because you’re a good atheist doesn’t mean that you’ll be good at science or math. When was the last time that Christopher Hitchens published research in a refereed scientific journal, or handled any math more difficult than that involved in figuring out his annual taxes?
A person’s ability in science or math is not determined by their status as a believer in God. Of course, this does not exclude the fact that in certain societies, like the old Soviet Union, publicly expressing faith in God may adversely affect one’s CAREER as a mathematician or scientist. Let’s pray that our country does not follow in the path of the USSR.
What is the moral absolutes ping list? I’ve seen it on the thread list from time to time, but never read one.
Upon what can they base their oath of office? To what external, objective, transcendent standard can they appeal in ordert to uphold the Laws of the Republic?
For the same reason, an atheist’s testimony should be inadmissible in a court room.
Your opinions on this would seem to be right at home in an Islamic fundamentalist state, but they are not what this country is supposed to be about.
Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry. -- Thomas Jefferson, Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers, 2:545
Congress has it set up so that these ACLU lawyers get paid even when they lose, so these clowns can file lawsuit after lawsuit forever. Local officials lack the balls to say, “Hell, no, we’re not going to pay a judgement” because they want to advance in their respective party’s political machine so that maybe they can be in Congress someday, serve a few terms and retire extremely rich and set for life.
Atheists demand proof that God exists and argue that He doesn't because theism hasn't proven it with science. Despite the fact that God is probably the most about written subject in human history with more evidence, esp personal, than anyone can amass, they claim that the evidence is "anecdotal" and not the result of a "double blind" test. However, when you note that science can't cure the common cold or that science proves and disproves long held theories and uncovers new ones, they concede that science hasn't proven God's existence yet, and therefore it is a possibility. When asked what the necessary evidence would be or look like, they draw a blank. Atheism has become a de facto religion that worships science.
Gods' existence is not dependent on our belief.
Not the GOD that the Born Again Bible Absolutist Triumphant cult insists must be followed.
> Your opinions on this would seem to be right at home in
> an Islamic fundamentalist state, but they are not what
> this country is supposed to be about.
Argumentum ad absurdum.
Only Islam is permitted in the Islamic fundamentalist state.
The US Constitution allows for all faiths, faiths that involve a belief in a source for external, objective, transcendent, eternal Truth. Atheism is not such a faith.
John Adams, one of the principal framers of the Constitution, wrote “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
As for your Jefferson quote, “Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry,” I submit that Jefferson was referring to sectarianism, as he was in his famous “wall of separation” letter to the Danbury Baptists that was also tortured out of context by the Warren Court to give us the ridiculous anti-faith situation we see today.
Here are some Jefferson quotes you may have missed.
“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern which have come under my observation, none appears to me so pure as that of Jesus.”[Letter to Benjamin Rush April 21, 1803]
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” [Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781]
It [the Bible] is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” [Jan 9, 1816 Letter to Charles Thomson]
As president, Jefferson:
* Put “God” in the national motto
* Exempted churches from taxes
* Asked Congress for money to fund Christian missionaries to the Indians.
That being said, I do not consider myself an atheist and would prefer they not try to impose their views on others. I expect the same from any and all religions including Christians, Islamists, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians and assorted pagans.
Upon what can they base their oath of office?
And believing that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree, is an acceptable basis for an oath of office?
Atheists exclude themselves by refusing to place their hands on a Bible, or raise their right hand (Heavenward) and take an oath (or affirmation) of office.
Here are some things the ACLU and the Warren Court did not tell you about Thomas Jefferson.
“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern which have come under my observation, none appears to me so pure as that of Jesus.”[Letter to Benjamin Rush April 21, 1803]
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” [Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781]
It [the Bible] is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” [Jan 9, 1816 Letter to Charles Thomson]
As president, Jefferson:
* Put “God” in the national motto
* Exempted churches from taxes
* Asked Congress for money to fund Christian missionaries to the Indians.
While you may think your sarcasm is funny, Christians are not the only “moral and religious people”. And according to John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
You are free to believe or disbelieve whatever you want. But if you do not have a Source for external, objective, transcendent, eternal Truth to which you can appeal when making promises before your fellow citizens, you are disqualifying yourself from leading them or from giving believable testimony in courts of law.
True enough that many who profess a Faith will lie, but the widely held belief is that the Truth will find them out, and their consciences will bother them. Unless, of course, they don’t really believe and thier oath or affirmation was a lie in the first place.
There is a saying among military chaplains, “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” While that may not be entirely true, I know a few military men whose belief in God started when they were under fire and continues in their civilian lives.
If the writer doesn't believe in God, then where does he/she come up with that theory?
I also tell people who believe in evolution, just when did God put the soul into man? At what stage? It can't be answered.
That’s because most atheists don’t believe in ‘souls’. They believe what makes us tick is chemicals swirling around in our brains and that we are no different than any other animal on this planet.
I can’t get them to explain to me why no other animal on this planet is using a computer to tell me this, much less invented it.
I reckon you could remind them that animals are unable to come to moral conclusions.
http://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Morals-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/1557091846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243193751&sr=1-1
That all being said, most of the founding fathers did attend churches of one Christian denomination or another at some points in their lives. Others, like Jefferson, also revered the moral teachings of Jesus, but most would not have been considered orthodox Christians. Jefferson, in fact, considered what has been done to the teachings of Jesus by orthodox Christianity to be rather vile as illustrated through some of the following quotes:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. " — Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites" –Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.
"Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus."
"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ."
"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." –Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
"Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies."
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
> “Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and
> mythologies.”
I agree with this, because true Christianity is based on a Relationship, not on Religion or priests or rites or hierarchies.
It is not difficult to reconcile Jefferson saying in his own handwriting, “I am a Christian,” with his disdain for orthodoxy and hierarchy.
Jefferson never says he is anti-Christ.
Neither do I see in any of the writings of Jefferson, who, after all, was ambassador to France and living in Paris when the Constitution was compiled, or any of the Constitutional framers any acceptance, let alone endorsement, of atheism.
As an aside, Jefferson was able to see with his own eyes what the rule of Godless, anti-Christian people would look like, as he oberved the French Revolution and wondered each morning if he would awaken with his head still attached. Perhaps that is why, as president, he promoted even the Catholic faith, asking Congress for money to fund Catholic missionaries to the Indians.
Where does he give voice to allowing atheists, who cannot take public oaths or affirmations before a power higher than man, to rule over us? Atheists are their own gods, determining for themselves what is good and what is evil.
The point remains, without an external, objective, transcendent, eternal Truth, good and evil are determined by either each person individually, or by some consensus. The former is anarchy, and the latter democracy.
A government that uses external, objective, transcendent eternal Truth, Natural Law, (”nature’s God”) as a foundation for its Laws, is a Republic.
See Blackstone, upon whom the Constitutional Framers relied for much of their understanding of Republican government.
wagglebee runs the list. It is a list of moral absolutes, most pings have to do with abortion and the radical homosexual movement, as well as euthanasia/assisted suicide, although a wide variety of issues also fit within this framework and are occasionally pinged.
Freepmail wagglebee or DirtyHarryY2K to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Hmmm. . .
rhema (a fine conservative) wrote:
...their fixation with the fine points of Christianity.
To which Birch T. Barlow (a newbie who despises social conservatives) responded:
Atheists hardly have a corner on this. On FR there are people who are guilty of the same, but from the other direction. They fancy themselves the "Moral Absolutes" crowd and have their own Ping list. This list is immediately pinged the second one of them engages in a thread. Cowards the whole lot of them.
Please explain how we are "guilty" of trying to defend six thousand years of Judeo-Christian teaching against the onslaught of leftist atheism.
What PRECISELY is wrong with having a ping list? There are hundreds of ping lists around here.
What do you mean by "this list is immediately pinged the second one of them engages in a thread"? A grand total of FOUR FReepers have this list, there are several hundred FReepers on this list, so your statement makes no sense.
Please define "coward", is it the humility which comes in having faith and dependence upon God? Is that "cowardice" to you?
That is a great question that Birch has been asked several times and REFUSES to answer. This is quite suspicious in view of his utter disdain for conservatives.
Thank you for so readily providing an example of exactly what the author was talking about.
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