Atheism's Army Of The Smug

This time of year makes atheists especially cranky; O Little Town of Bethlehem, played in a shopping mall, does nothing to lift the spirits of an unbeliever. But even by seasonal standards, the letters attracted by my column last week on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, demonstrate astonishing vehemence. They leave the impression that atheists are sensitive about their non belief and easily hurt by criticism.

A friend of mine, who used to run a radio program about religion, noted recently that "militant atheists were our most intolerant and angry listeners." The atheists I've lately heard from bring such passion to their hatred of religion that they can be fairly classed as religious fanatics.

Dawkins and people like him pour ridicule on believers. But, as evolutionists, they can't credibly explain why hundreds of different civilizations across the globe have felt the need to believe in a divine force. Billions of people have accepted what Dawkins considers are stupid, easily refutable and harmful ideas. How did those beliefs evolve? Were they an evolutionary advantage?

Dawkins thinks they may be the result of a misfiring or by-product similar to the reason moths immolate themselves in candles. Over eons, moths evolved a system of navigation based on light from the moon; this still usually works, but sometimes light from a candle (or another source) fatally tricks them. In the same way, Dawkins suggests, humans evolved a system of thought that has led them astray.

Children who obey adults have a "selective advantage" in evolution. They are more likely than disobedient children to survive because they won't have to learn on their own that, for instance, crocodile- infested rivers are dangerous. "Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them." But this valuable quality can go wrong, allowing parents to pass on their crazy religious ideas to the young. Dawkins has more trouble explaining how, in each civilization, the first wave of parents acquires religious convictions.

Atheists (my atheists, anyway) think that if you do not accept atheism outright then you're likely to accept the Bible literally -- which hasn't been true, in the case of most Christians and Jews, for generations. One reader demands to know whether I believe human life began 6,000 years ago when God created the first man and woman. No, I don't, and I hardly know anyone who does.

Atheists are arguing against a literalism that has never been accepted by anyone who is likely even to hear of Richard Dawkins. One reader demands I ask myself why I'm so sure of my beliefs. But I'm not. In fact, my beliefs hardly deserve the word "beliefs" and I'm certainly not religious in any traditional sense. My strongest belief is that a gigantic mystery still dominates this entire realm of thought.

Dawkins, and apparently most militant atheists, don't seem even slightly interested in the fact that something almost inconceivably mysterious happened at the birth of the universe. As a result, they can bring little of interest to any conversation about the origins of life.

Last March, astronomers (working with data from a NASA satellite circling the Earth since 2001) concluded that time began 13.7 billion years ago, a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At that instant the universe (as a New York Times writer put it) expanded "from submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye." Why would it want to do that?

I have no idea, but we now know that at least one planet that developed in the universe, Earth, would develop elements of genetic material that would make life possible though not, of course, inevitable.

Thomas Nagel, the philosopher, recently pointed out that if we are to believe evolutionary explanations, and therefore that the necessary seed material existed at the time of the Big Bang, we have to realize that there is no scientific explanation for the existence of that material in the first place. A complete understanding of evolution would involve answering a question as complex as evolution itself: "How did such a thing come into existence?" We have done nothing but push the problem one step back.

Or, as Stephen Hawking put it, "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" On that point we are all ignorant -- and only a little closer to knowledge than our ancestors who believed that sacrificing a goat would bring good crops. The profound intellectual failure of atheists lies in their fundamentalist-like aversion to the words, "We don't know."

On the contrary, your counterargument is so stupid it's surprising to see it presented seriously. You should have given a moment's thought to your examples; you didn't, because you haven't even considered the original argument. Here's a clue: it's not simply "they died for it, so it's true". For what it is, you could try reading. Or just go on making a fool of yourself; your choice, really.

<Yawn>

Joseph Smith never recanted even when faced with death by an angry mob.

He went to his death shooting and shouting the Masonic distress call,

Regardless, previously he and his followers were chased from place to place, and they even had for all intensive purposes the whole state of Missouri declare war on them. By your logic why would JS and the rest of them go through all that based on lies?

and the crowd never offered the chance to recant anyway.

Same is true of the apostles.

No where does it say they were persecuted for their beliefs, they were more in trouble for their political acts, primarily the refusal to pay homage to the emperor and their tendency to incite the public to rebel against civil authority. Anyone who was arrested and charged with civil disobedience, treason, inciting riot, or other such crimes couldn't avoid punishment simply by recanting. In the other cases, the crowd turned on the apostle and kill him before any chance to recant.

Why did Jim Jones kill himself, when he knew that all he had been preaching was false?

And how do you know he did? More relevantly, if every single follower had known he was preaching falsehood, how do you suppose it would have went?

They most likely wouldn't have killed themselves

What about the early Muslims who volunteered to die in Muhammad's cause (i.e. The Battle of the Trench), according to your logic they wouldn't have if they knew that Muhammad had not been visited by Gabriel

Now explain how they would have known.

Here's a list of some of The Miracles of Prophet Mohammad as his companions witnessed

Now again, according to your logic if Mohammad's followers didn't see him do such things like crack the moon or have flowing water out of his fingers then they wouldn't have fought and died for such lies, so these miracles must have been true!!

No, don't. Just throw up some more non sequiturs.

Sorry but I need more than everyone else's ancient desert wandering goat herders were tricked or delusional but my ancient desert wandering goat herders were correct.

< Yawn >

Perhaps the most cogent thing you've said.

He went to his death shooting and shouting the Masonic distress call,

Regardless, previously he and his followers were chased from place to place, and they even had for all intensive purposes the whole state of Missouri declare war on them.

You mean "all intents and purposes".

By your logic why would JS and the rest of them go through all that based on lies?

Just Smith -- "and the rest" is your lack of comprehension. One bold impostor makes sense. Smith was the only one who ever saw the plates; at least one of the "witnesses" later admitted they saw it with "spiritual" rather than literal eyes and his translation procedure involved reciting letters he saw in a peepstone rather than directly handling the plates in front of his collaborator.

You need everyone who would have had access to the tomb including the Pharisees to be in on it.

Every single claim in that paragraph is wrong.

In Acts 4:17-21 the Sanhedrin dragged them in and threatened them unless they stopped preaching and doing miracles in the name of Jesus. Then in Acts 5:17-18 they were arrested, and in 5:40 they were beaten and again told to stop preaching. In Acts 7 they killed Stephen for describing a vision of Jesus at the right hand of God. In Acts 8 Saul persecutes all the Christian he can get to precisely because of their beliefs.

I assume by "pay homage to the emperor" you mean the pinch of incense. This is badly anachronistic; the mandatory pinch of incense was instituted several centuries later as a specifically anti-Christian measure. Christians did refuse to participate in the then-existing civil rites, but Christianity was at that time considered a sect of Judaism and Jews were exempt.

Finally, the Apostles told people not to rebel against civil authority, most famously in Romans 13.

You are not entitled to your own facts.

They most likely wouldn't have killed themselves

Now run with that thought a little.

Here's a list of some of The Miracles of Prophet Mohammad as his companions witnessed

All citing hadiths. Hadiths are oral history collected well after the original generation died. (And no, the New Testament isn't.)

Not to beat a dead horse (very bad pun... 8^), I found this an interesting account. I received it as a link in an email just today:

(In the spirit of full disclosure, the author's background is believer-athiest-believer)

-snip-

Skeptical Arguments: Some of the Worst and Most Biased Scholarship

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments—arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if hew knew about it—that the whole picture which has floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made. I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.

I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later ”communities.”

Contempt for Jesus & the Sneer of Secularism

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation.

They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually no the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I’m not arguing for censorship. But maybe I’m arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I’m arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all.

-snip-

Link

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