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Hey I need some help eroding the church/state separation. Lets ask the experts!
I’m not really sure what is so shit-hot about the attitudes and conventions of the Dark Ages, but Harper and his government have decided to fecklessly dive into the land of pants-on-head stupid and establish a official government bureau of “Religious Freedom”. Let’s be clear, not something useful like an office sponsoring freedom FROM religion, so sorry Rishma of Pakistan, you still get be sentenced to death for allegedly burning pages from a magic book. Because, obviously we need MORE religion in the world because rational thought is too fucking hard to deal with.
“The federal government’s long-awaited Office of Religious Freedom will be unveiled soon, officials say, after months of delays caused by difficulty in finding the right person to head the office.
The new body, which will be housed within the Department of Foreign Affairs, was expected to be up and running earlier this year.
But a senior government official told CBC News that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has had a hard time finding someone to fill the role of ambassador to head up the office. Two people who were approached ultimately turned the post down for logistical and personal reasons.?
Reasons why? Because being head of the Canadian christian god brigade overseas is not appealing. I’m really flabbergasted at my government right now. I’m imaging that in some meeting some wonk pops this ass-blister of a suggestion and throws it out there –
“Hey, you know that separation of church and state thing, its dumb, lets set up an office and get the government officially involved in delusional religious shit”. Ohh the meetings goes quiet. “But where are we going to get the money?” says Economic Wonk, our resident member of brain trust of turdistan says, “oh, well we closed a bunch of science and research down there is plenty of money saved from that…”.
And then there was cabinet/Harper approval. Yes, lets close down scientific research on one hand and fund the promotion of stale religious brain-flatulence from the bronze age. Brilliant! How can we lose? It is astonishing that people voted for people that actually endorse this sort of thinking.
“Some supporters of the idea have grown frustrated with the long wait. The $5-million office was first announced during the May 2011 election campaign as a centrepiece of the government’s foreign policy.”
A vesitgal bone thrown at the dumb-as-dirt religious value voters that worked. Apparently jebus said lower corporate tax rates so we can screw the rest of society over. To my idjit right of centre commentators, did you notice that you only get lip-service paid to your nuttily-regressive ‘social conservative” goals all the while the economic conservatives who hold the real power happily continue to gut the bastions of the social democratic state? You think getting screwed over would become tiresome after the nth time, apparently you thought in 2011, *this* time it would be different.
Bhatti argues the new ambassador must be objective.
“The person shouldn’t be one-sided,” he said. “He doesn’t focus on the one religion, or one persecution. He will treat every religion equally and give his recommendation to the foreign office and government regarding truth and reality.”
I don’t even know what this means. But I think I would be a good candidate for the job. I all religions the same, with contempt, would this make me a good candidate for the job? Probably not since the ability to think clearly is not selected for when trying to get a job within a religion.
“As CBC NEWS reported last year, internal Foreign Affairs documents showed nearly all of the panellists who participated in a closed-door consultation with Foreign Affairs last fall in Ottawa were drawn from Western religions, primarily Christianity. Few Muslims were in attendance and there were no Muslim panellists.
Arvind Sharma, a Canadian scholar of religion, has been carefully monitoring the government’s plans, and says the idea presents a great opportunity for Canada on the world stage.
But the McGill University professor warns that’s only if Canada avoids promoting proselytization.”
Yep, Canadian Christians for Christ, sponsored by the secular government of Canada? *sigh* Canada is a secular democracy and really needs to axe this crumby idea.
Giving government support to mythology is stupid and needs to stop before even more people get that idea that religion is an still acceptable choice in the 21st century.
You would think that after your Dad has been thoroughly trashed by making bogus claims you would, oh…I dunno… learn from his mistakes and not repeat them? Frak the facts, (creationist SOP btw) lets get the good word out there accuracy be damned.
“Do you believe in god?”
“No.”
“Well, do you believe in love?”
“Sure.”
“Then you must believe in god, as god is love”
“Wha…?”
I’ve heard the ‘god is love’ bit quite a number of times, but never as a proof for its deistic existence. When it is merely an assertion about a god already presumed to exist, it is easy enough to show that ‘god is love’ is an absolutely ludicrous notion. One merely needs to point to deeds/positions attributed to the god in question that cannot be seen as loving. In the case of christianity, the bible helps us out immensely with tales of murder, rape, slavery, genocide, and human sacrifice, all in the name of their god, to make this a very easy task. In addition, one could also point to the innumerable atrocities committed by those closest to god. Indeed, the degree of horror believers can enact seems directly related to the level of zeal they possess. Or, if one took ‘god is love’ to be a part of omni-benevolence, then one could point to the problem of evil to show how god cannot exist. But in this conversation, all this doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t work because a particular god has not been identified. The only characteristic mentioned is that ‘god is love’. To be sure, the person who presented this argument to me had a specific god in mind. If they were to have gone so far as to start describing other attributes of their god, then the thoughts in the previous paragraph would surely destroy their position. But that’s not the point. While the posited syllogism is vague, maybe even a bit flaky, if it works, then the belief in god is validated and the little details about the surrounding nature of god (everything he is that isn’t solely love) can be hashed out later. The important thing is that god has been proven and all us atheists are just being fussy about superfluous factoids.
The thing is, the details may be superfluous, but that these details exist at all is not. If one wants to say that ‘god’ is exactly synonymous with ‘love’, then the concept of ‘god’ is completely useless. There is no reason for there to be two words when one will do. And as ‘love’ is a much more flexible term (how weird would it be -even for theists – to replace the word love and say something like “I’m deeply in god with you, darling”), the term ‘god’ ought to be discarded. Of course, the theist resists this, not only because they don’t want to give up their delusion, but also because, at some level, they are aware of the little dishonesty in the assertion ‘god is love’.
It is dishonesty in omission. No theist ever would ever say ‘god is love and only love’. If they did, as I showed last paragraph, ‘god’ would be rendered meaningless. What they are not saying is “god is love and some other things I’m trying to illegitimately sneak into this argument so I don’t have to go through the impossible task of justifying those extra attributes.” Even if the only thing they wanted to add was ‘god is love and a sentient entity that exists outside of humanity’, they would be right back where they started, with no evidence, no proof, and no reason to think that god exists. Nothing addresses always-unmentioned second half. But theists are never that honest, least of all to themselves.
But hey, I was wrong that one time before. It could happen again. What if some theist comes up with some brilliant argument that refutes what I just said, so brilliant that I cannot answer those refutations? Does ‘god is love’ work then? Not hardly. Consider an exercise in consistency.
Do you believe that the sea exits? You do? Great! That means you must believe in Poseidon, for Poseidon IS the sea. The tides reflect his breathing, the waves his mood. Thus, we can learn a lot about Poseidon just by looking at the sea. As any seafarer will tell you, conditions out on the briny sea can are uncertain at best, displaying how temperamental Poseidon is. Therefore it is always good to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon before any travel by sea, in order to secure safe passage.
Are you convinced? Will you now pray to Poseidon? Not a chance. Why? Because you just can’t attach a real life thing to an imagined being and have it pop into existence, that’s why. If this method worked, you would have to believe in Apollo because you believe in the sun, Thor because you believe in lightning, Gazunga because you believe in cheese, and Eros because you believe in love. Wait! What was that? Love was for that christian god, wasn’t it? Yup, this line of reasoning can bring into existence multiple deities for the same real life phenomenon.
In fact, it can pop into being an infinite amount of gods, an infinite amount of whom require that they be the only god. That either means that this line of reasoning is necessarily incoherent, or it shows that each god concept has an equal chance of being true, which, in this case, is literally infinitesimally small.
‘God is love’, like all such fanciful tripe (eg. ‘God is beauty’, ‘God is truth’, ‘God is justice’, etc) either renders god meaningless and the idea ought to be discarded, or it is dishonest and the idea ought to be discarded. Even on the minuscule chance that I’m wrong on this, the same method could then be used to validate an infinite number of mutually-exclusive gods and the idea ought to be discarded. No matter what, theists using this line are not being deep, spiritual, other-worldly, or mystical. They are just being wrong.
I do love what the commitment to mythology does to people. Religion distorts empathy and reason and allows bigots like the pastor featured in this clip to get away with spewing more than a few spitefully atrocious statements. It is funny though for a religion that often claims to represent absolute morality we observe that claims are presented such as: love thy neighbour. Note closely there is no “but only if they are heterosexual…” is not included anywhere in that phrase.
The heinous nature of christianity continues to stain our history with its bigotry and hate. We should do ourselves a favour and opt out as soon as possible.
Like to watch Christians tie themselves in knots trying to explain/justify sending infants to burn forever? Yah..me too.
There is a conversation that happens all the time between theists and non-believers. I have engaged in it many times myself as well as observed others engaging in it more times than I can count. While there are a number of seemingly valid ways atheists could deal with this conversation, I have come to believe that many of these methods merely lead to baited traps.
This conversation starts with the theist coming up with Claim X, asserting that no one could explain Claim X without invoking god, and smugly concluding that god must exist.
There are four categories Claim X might fall into:
1) Claim X is simply false
2) Claim X is easily explained without invoking god
3) Claim X is explained without invoking god, but it’s complex
4) Claim X actually has no current non-god explanations
While there have been millions of examples of ‘Claim X’ used in these conversations, scant few still fall into the fourth category. Because it’s so rare, most atheist responses to such a conversation ignore this category. This, I think, is the major reason such conversations can (and have) gone on for seeming eternities. To illustrate, let’s look at each of the categories.
Claim X is simply false
The bait here is nigh on irresistible. One of the theist’s premises are wrong, thus the argument is invalid and the conclusion does not follow! It’s irrefutable!
What do you mean it isn’t? Oh silly secularist, you fell into a trap of perpetual distortions.
Showing Claim X to be false simply invites the theist to propose ‘Claim X-prime’ that is slightly different or a bit more vague than Claim X. And when you do the same for Claim X-prime, the theists alters it again, and so on ad infinitum. Should you ever get to the point where all versions of Claim X are shown to be false, the theist then just says something to the effect of ‘Look at all that contorting and effort you had to do, just to grasp at straws. Your desperation indicates your flaw. Your story keeps changing, while my answer, “God”, stayed constant.’
Is that rational?
No.
But discourse is not based on rationality. It’s based on persuasion. As such, the theist is right, you have failed to be persuasive. To the theist, that is. Those exercising reason may indeed enjoy your absolute thrashing of whatever B.S. the theist churns up. But then, if we were only trying to persuade people with reason, we wouldn’t be talking to theists, would we?
Claim X is easily explained without invoking god
A wonderful example of this is Bill Head-Up-My-Arse O’Reilly’s infamous ‘Tide goes in, tide goes out’ line. Again, the pull here to shove reality based ideas in the theist’s face is often overwhelming. But, like in our previous case, just because the secularist is right, doesn’t mean they win. Once more, the theist backs up a bit and makes Claim X slightly harder to explain, and then slightly harder still and so on until it eventually turns into…
Claim X is explained without invoking god, but it’s complex
Now things can get tricky. We saw this as O’Reilly responded to the initial wave of attacks with his ‘How’d the moon get there?’ bit. Answering the theist’s challenge might now actually require formal education to supply the answer. In some cases, it might require a fair deal of study just to understand the answer. I personally enjoy listening to responses from people who have done the requisite schoolwork, as it can be a fun way to learn about things (I highly recommend TheLivingDinosaur ‘s “Holy Hallucinations” series) but alas, these are also doomed to fail. As the answers are now further away from the layman, the theist is safe to ignore all presented evidence. It’s not as if anyone in their camp is going to actually research this stuff. Thus, the theist vision of what fits into the next and final category is quite bloated.
Claim X actually has no current non-god explanations
This is where the theist wants to go and, as I’ve described above, there is little to be done to stop them from getting here, other than infinite loops of explanations that are ever more easily discarded. And you can’t get anywhere inside of an infinite loop.
A key point to realize is that in these conversations, the theist doesn’t really care to which category their particular ‘Claim X’ belongs. Rather, what matters is that somewhere out there, some ‘Claim X’ does reside in the fourth category.
And, ultimately, the theist is right. There are things that currently cannot be explained. There are things that may never be explained. Further, there may be things that inherently defy human understanding and are impossible to explain. So the theist wins. God exists. Accept it and go home.
Wait a minute…That can’t be right. Let’s back things up and look at the original argument structure.
1) Claim X is true
2) Claim X cannot currently be explained by humans without invoking god
3) Therefore god exists
There are two huge problems with this structure, regardless on the truth of the first two premises. The first problem is a false dichotomy implied by 2): as Claim X cannot be explained without god, it is explained *with* god. “God did it” does not explain anything. If I ask you ‘how does a clock work?’ and you reply ‘a clock-maker makes it work’, have I gained any understanding at all? Not one lick. All the god “answer” does is avoid explaining anything at all.
But a theist could potentially offer an actual explanation that is based on the god hypothesis. This tactic is used less and less, as these explanations are invariably discovered to be wrong (see Thunderf00t’s wonderful ‘Why people laugh at creationists‘ series). But lets say a brilliant theist comes up with an explanation that cannot be disproven by even the most intense scrutiny carried out by our most brilliant minds. If this were to ever happen (don’t hold your breath) we then run into the second problem: 3 does NOT follow from 1 and 2. Just because a hypothesis CAN explain a phenomenon, does not mean it DOES explain it.
Going back to our clock, consider if, instead of “a clock-maker makes it work / god did it”, you replied “inside there is a team of invisible gremlins with perfect timing. They were captured and placed in this clock and forced to move the hands of the clock in order to relay time to outside viewers,” and there was an elaborate tale explaining all the ins and outs, and further, we had no way of observing the gremlins inside this clock to verify this (or any other) story. According to the theist’s argument model, we’ve just proven the existence of clock gremlins. The god hypothesis is a worthless ad-hoc conjecture as it is dependent on nothing, predicts nothing, and is non-falsifiable. As such, any of an infinite of imagined things could take god’s place in the theist’s argument and it would be equally valid.
The theist wants their argument to come off like this:
1) Claim X
2) Claim X would be impossible unless god exists.
3) Therefore god exists.
But the theist will never say anything close to this, because then the onus is obviously on them to demonstrate 2) and they just can’t do it. It is an impossible premise to validate. So they twist and distort until their argument takes the fallacious form we see so often, to try and shirk the onus of proof onto non-believers.
So how should one react to Claim X?
I would recommend immediately acknowledging that there are things that current science cannot explain, regardless of under which category Claim X falls. Resist the bait. Then, address how a gap in knowledge cannot prove any supernatural entity, as otherwise it could prove any of an infinite possible deities.
Remember, it doesn’t matter to the theist’s argument if Claim X is wrong or currently understood – even though it should – so it shouldn’t matter to yours.
This is the conclusion to a great article found on Practical Doubt.
“Hidden beneath the inclusive guise of Christianity exists the absurd notion that people are capable of understanding the depth of humanity through the eyes of faith. They engage this masturbatory exercise without the slightest comprehension of words like love, mercy, justice, and morality. I cannot think of anything more detrimental to the progress of human beings.
That our understanding of reality comes from a deluded perception, one that is completely irrespective of reality and the behavior of others. Inside of this vacuum allegedly exists the answers to all of life, and yet a war veteran that had seen more atrocities than any human being should experience in such a short life span, refused to accept a supposedly ordained child of God.
If that isn’t proof for the lack of a creator, then I’m not sure what is.”
– Jarod Smith
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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