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Pulling down the turgid crown of religious obeisance is high on most atheists “to do” lists.
Easier said than done.
Getting into the atheist loop and then bringing your wisdom to the faithful can be a tricky undertaking. One of the foremost requirements of being an atheist is possessing a great deal of patience as listening to people drone on about how wonderful their sky-daddy is and how he coerces them to do “good” becomes fairly boring, not to mention vexing, quickly.
Telling someone that they are full of shit isn’t always the most diplomatic strategy, although it is certainly fun here in internetland, sometimes more tact is required and that is where this nice piece I saw on Alter.net comes into play.
Jeffrey Taylor writing for Salon has some tips that may help in your daily interactions with the credulous religious.
Herewith, some common religious pronouncements and how atheists can respond to them.
1. “Let’s say grace!”
No, let’s not. When you’re seated at the family dinner table and a relative suggests clasping hands, lowering heads and thanking the Lord, say “No thanks. I’m an atheist. So I’ll opt out.” Nonbelievers have every right to object when being asked to take part in superstitious rituals; in fact, if children are present, they are morally obliged to do so. Courteously refusing to pray will set an example of rational behavior for the young, and contribute to furthering the atheist zeitgeist.
I’m thinking of my father-in-law when I see this and rather than just uncomfortably looking around while praise to the almighty ooga-booga is being said I should bust this out. Is the creation of more family tension worth it?
2. “Religion is a personal matter. It’s not polite to bring it up.”
No, religion is fundamentally collective, and since time immemorial has served societies in fostering union, but also in inciting xenophobia and violence (especially against “unchaste” women and “impure” minorities), often on a mass scale. Nonbelievers need to further advance the cause of rationality by discussing it openly; doing so, as uncomfortable as it may be at times, will help puncture the aura of sanctity surrounding faith and expose it for what it is.
No qualms here. Although prepare for the feckless equivocating between Hitler,Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot – and organized religion. For the record, *not* the same.
3. “You’re an atheist? I feel sorry for you.”
No, please rejoice for me. I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth.
There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.
I love the Nabokov quote. Partially the reason why I’m going over Jeffrey’s list here. :)
4. “If you’re an atheist, life has no purpose.”
A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals — solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than though religion and tradition – provide ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.
Hard medicine to swallow for the strictly religious – hierarchical thinking is tough to shake especially when the Magic Pants McSkyDaddy can have you burn for eternity if get out of line.
5. “If you abolish religion, nothing will stop people from killing, raping and looting.”
No, killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.
Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The “master-slave” ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.
But, but,… How can we be good without Mr.Rage-Slabius Panopticonist looking over our shoulders and convicting us of thought crime? What? Morality a function of social behaviour? Unpossible!
6. “Nothing can equal the majesty of God and His creation.”
No need to inject God into this. “Creation” is majestic enough on its own, as anyone who has gazed into the Grand Canyon or the night sky already knows. While paddling a pirogue down the Congo, at night I often marveled to the point of ecstasy at the brilliance of the stars, the salience of the planets against the Milky Way – just one of the many quasi-transcendental experiences I have had as an atheist globetrotter. The world is a thing of wonder that requires no faith, but only alert senses, to appreciate.
Statements like this are just thrown into the argumentative mix to further the Gish Gallop making it harder to unwind the verbal spoor your favorite religionist spins around a rational analysis of his faulty argumentation.
7. “It is irrational to believe that the world came about without a creator.”
No, it is irrational to infer an invisible omnipotent being from what we see around us. The burden of proof lies on the one making supernatural claims, as the New Atheists have tirelessly pointed out. But here again the New Atheists are really doing nothing novel. Almost 200 years ago, the British poet Shelley, in his essay “The Necessity of Atheism,” noted that “God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.” This was clear to him even before we had mapped the human genome, discovered the Higgs boson, or even invented the telegraph.
Yeah, sticking up for the invisible guy seems like a hard position to take, rationally speaking, but then again, so many try – search the abortion tag here at wordpress and wow it is like Invisible Dude for the Win!!
8. “I will pray for you to see the light.”
Not necessary, but do as you like. Abraham Lincoln noted that, “What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.”
Usually a closing missive after your favorite zealot realizes that his bullshite will not baffle your brains and that in your eyes his belief in god is the same as believing in unicorns and dragons.
9. “If you’re wrong about God, you go to hell. It’s safer to believe.”
Pascal’s wager survives even among people who have never heard the name of the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. Leaving aside whether blatant self-interest would please a god demanding to be loved unconditionally, which god will save us from hell? The god of Catholicism? Judaism? Islam? Doctrines of all three Abrahamic faiths prohibit entry into paradise for adherents of rival confessions.
Ohhh, mentioning other religions…burn heretic! Seriously though, Pascal’s wager needs to be put to rest already.
10. “Religion is of great comfort to me, especially in times of loss. Too bad it isn’t for you.”
George Bernard Shaw noted that, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” A few shots of vodka will do for me, and are more to the point.
After the passing away of his son, Lincoln, in dire need of solace, nevertheless remarked that, “My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”
“America founded a christian nation… ” Those five words almost always precede a historically inaccurate screed depiction on American history.
10. “As you age and face death, you will come to need religion.”
Perhaps in dotage anything is possible, but this turn of events is unlikely. Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.
Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea’s parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God’s intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.
You will turn to the Dark Side…muaahahahahaha!!!
11. “You have no right to criticize my religious beliefs.”
Wrong. Such a declaration aims to suppress free speech and dialogue about a matter influential in almost every aspect of our societies. No one has a right to make unsubstantiated assertions, or vouch for the truthfulness of unsubstantiated assertions on the basis of “sacred” texts, without expecting objections from thinking folk.
Respect my magic! (jumping up and down). LoL forever.
12. “Jesus was merciful.”
If he existed – and there is still, after centuries of searching, no proof that he did – he was at times a heartless prophet of doom for the sinners he supposedly loved, commanding those who failed to give comfort to the poor to “depart . . . ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
See previous comment.
13. ”You can’t prove there’s no God.”
Correct, at least epistemologically speaking. Reasonable atheists, “New” and old, would not argue with this. Richard Dawkins, for example, has told audiences that he is nominally an agnostic, since proving that something does not exist is impossible. He claims to be an atheist “only” in the sense that he is an “a-leprechaunist, an a-fairiest, and an a-pink-unicornist.” The evidence for God, fairies and leprechauns, he remarked, “is equally poor.”
Dawkins, when speaking on atheism has his moments. :)
14. “My religion is true for me.”
A soppy, solipsistic and juvenile declaration and cop-out bordering on the delusional and contradicting Christianity and Islam, neither of which recognize the other, and both of which espouse universalist pretensions. You will not find a scientist who will say, “quantum physics is true for me.” No one would have trusted Jonas Salk if he had promoted the efficacy of his polio vaccine as “true for him.”
Religious foundations not based in fact? Shocked I am.
15. “Don’t take everything in the Bible literally.”
Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on “revealed truths”) literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.
Applicable almost to every religious argument *ever*.
Hold the phone gentle readers, the persecuted christian majority in the United States is once again in crisis mode. Why? Satanists want to put up a religious monument of their own, just like the pious Christians have done on the capitol grounds. The threat of Satan beckoning to them, on the grounds of the Oklahoma state legislature no less, is causing the usual conniptions among the faithful (you know, the usual conniptions, where they get called on their abject duplicity and refuse to back down while accusing others of persecuting them). Amanda Marcotte from alter.net writes about the christian stupidity and the highlights are quoted here.
“Christian fundamentalists in Oklahoma managed to get a Ten Commandments monument placed on capitol grounds in 2012. Though the supporters of the monument deny it, it’s an obvious attempt by fundamentalists to get the state government to endorse Christianity above all other religious beliefs, in a direct violation of the Constitution’s ban on state establishment of religion.”
This should be no-shit-sherlock material. Narnian American christians tend to shit all over their venerated Constitution when it suits their needs. However, when other groups attempt to get their idols onto the capitol grounds then – dear reader – the problems begin.
“After receiving requests for monuments not just from Satanists, but from Hindus and animal rights activists, the legislature decided to place a moratorium on the building of monuments. The message is crystal-clear: The Oklahoma state legislature is not interested in reflecting the diversity of Americans, but only wants to elevate Christians above everyone else.”
Here is where we can delve into the murky depths of the persecuted majority complex that makes up so much of the mendacious superstructure of the reactionary christian right.
“Which is why prank-minded groups like the Satanists are doing such an important public service: They are able to challenge religious fundamentalists in their attempts to stomp out freedom of religion and religious plurality without having to worry overmuch about enduring the oppression real religious minorities face. When a Muslim or Jewish group objects to the religious right’s attempts to enshrine Christianity as an official or endorsed state religion, they run the risk of provoking the exact fear of religious pluralism that leads conservative Christians to do things like build Ten Commandments monuments in the first place. Ugly prejudice against minority religions is why Christian conservatives want the government to affirm their belief that theirs is the one true religion. When religious minorities push back, many Christians use that pushback as evidence that “they” are out to destroy Christian America.”
Interesting how that works, no?
Chalk this up as reason #239482 illustrating why the separation of church and state is a necessary feature of civilized societies.
Late to the party as usual, this mash-up of Sam Harris laying the smack down on christianity is too good not to post.
Talk about knocking it out of the park. Robert Green Ingersoll informs us on the true nature of the Bible. Go read the full text and donate to site for hosting such a good text. :)
Ministers wonder how I can be wicked enough to attack the Bible.
I will tell them: This book, the Bible, has persecuted, even unto death, the wisest and the best. This book stayed and stopped the onward movement of the human race. This book poisoned the fountains of learning and misdirected the energies of man.
This book is the enemy of freedom, the support of slavery. This book sowed the seeds of hatred in families and nations, fed the flames of war, and impoverished the world. This book is the breastwork of kings and tyrants — the enslaver of women and children. This book has corrupted parliaments and courts. This book has made colleges and universities the teachers of error and the haters of science. This book has filled Christendom with hateful, cruel, ignorant and warring sects. This book taught men to kill their fellows for religion’s sake.
This book funded the Inquisition, invented the instruments of torture, built the dungeons in which the good and loving languished, forged the chains that rusted in their flesh, erected the scaffolds whereon they died. This book piled fagots about the feet of the just. This book drove reason from the minds of millions and filled the asylums with the insane.
This book has caused fathers and mothers to shed the blood of their babes. This book was the auction block on which the slave- mother stood when she was sold from her child. This book filled the sails of the slave-trader and made merchandise of human flesh. This book lighted the fires that burned “witches” and “wizards.” This book filled the darkness with ghouls and ghosts, and the bodies of men and women with devils. This book polluted the souls of men with the infamous dogma of eternal pain. This book made credulity the greatest of virtues, and investigation the greatest of crimes. This book filled nations with hermits, monks and nuns — with the pious and the useless. This book placed the ignorant and unclean saint above the philosopher and philanthropist. This book taught man to despise the joys of this life, that he might be happy in another — to waste this world for the sake of the next.
I attack this book because it is the enemy of human liberty — the greatest obstruction across the highway of human progress.
Let me ask the ministers one question: How can you be wicked enough to defend this book?
A frequent dodge to avoid actually thinking about the issue criticism I have to deal with is that, as an anti-theist, I unfairly target Christianity and/or Islam. Why don’t I go around completely dismantling the vile B.S of other religions? Are their supernatural beliefs not just as irrational? Yes. Are their woo filled tenets not just as useless for understanding the reality which we inhabit? Yes. Is their presence not just as harmful to our society? No, no it isn’t.
And let me explain why.
We don’t have Zeus worshippers powerfully lobbying for science classes to ‘teach the controversy’ about the origin of lightning bolts. We don’t have Anubis acolytes “honour” killing wives and children. Christianity and Islam deserve every ounce of disrespect, ridicule, loathing we can throw at them because of the horrendous effects they have on individuals and society as a whole. I’ve always maintained that should any other ludicrous belief system result in such disastrous transgressions, I would criticize them with the same level of harshness. It wasn’t a challenge to be accepted, but here we are.
Catholicism, it turns out, does not have a monopoly on systematic child rape. Much less in the public eye, hiding under-the-radar, Judaism has its own truly awful institutionalized sexual abuse problem. Much like the worst stories from the Catholics, the inhuman perpetrators are shielded and go uncharged, people who speak out are severely punished, and kids are left to the predators. As reported in this article, Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg walked in on one such rape in a mikvah, a Jewish bath. When he tried to stop it, the rapist beat the protesting rabbi with a back scrubber for interrupting him.
Since then, Rosenberg has gone on to start up support systems for abused children and has spoken out against the rampant sexual abuse. For his efforts in trying to protect children, he receives death threats, is slandered in Hebrew newspapers, and is turned away from synagogues. He’s also had a cup of bleach thrown in his face.
Other inhuman lowlights mentioned in the article include:
- Stat: 50% or more of young males in Brooklyn’s massive Hasidic community have suffered from sexual abuse at the hands of their religious elders.
- Those speaking out against the problem face complete ruination
- Mothers who try to protect their children have them taken away
- Parents are afraid to complain to authorities on behalf of their children
- One of the worst offending Rabbis forced children to eat fecal matter in order to “purify” them
I can’t even process how a community can protect the vile scum that is raping their children while attacking the one of their number who’s trying to stand up for those kids. Once again, religion’s capacity to propagate incomprehensible evil in the world blows my mind. So fuck religious tolerance; fuck christianity, islam, AND judaism; fuck apologists defending rapists, but in the name of all that is good,
STOP FUCKING CHILDREN!
Pakistan announced that Malala Yousafzai’s book “I Am Malala” was banned from private schools. From the CBC:
Officials say they have banned teenage education activist Malala Yousafzai’s book from private schools across Pakistan, calling her a tool of the West.
It isn’t about religion, holiness, or allah, god (etc.). It’s not about defending the country from Western influences or even polishing allah’s knob at exactly the correct speed as mandated by the Qur’an.
This book banning is about charlatans and courtiers defending their privileged status against the radical notion that women are people.
Adeeb Javedani, president of the All Pakistan Private Schools Management Association, said Sunday his group banned Malala’s book from the libraries of its 40,000 affiliated schools. He said Malala was representing the West, not Pakistan.
The Deluded will go to any length to defend their fetid bullshit. See the christian analog (among many examples)in the the United States of christian loons shaming women as they attempt to shame women for legally ending a pregnancy.
Malala has become an international hero for opposing the Taliban and standing up for girls’ education. But conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan that her shooting was staged to create a hero for the West.
Because getting shot in the face is the most reliable way to become a hero? It is outrageous how far the religious will go to defend their mythology. Isn’t it enough that Malala was gunned down for the crime of being female and seeking an education, but now the same authorities (the ones ‘responsible’ for her security) are banning her book.
The Pakistani religious authorities are confabulating a grand story about the West’s plot to overthrow their country and religion – hero for the West, indeed! The only theory that is being consistently applied here is Patriarchy. It is patriarchal misogyny reinforced by religious tradition and implicit cultural norms that makes the banning of Malala’s book possible.
*ed. Wow, misspelling the name of the blog and forgetting what syntax is, all in the same post – sadly, this was after “proofing”. The dangers of early morning posting.
I’d like to quote-mine the christian apologist Francis Spufford for his thoughts on religion when he says that:
That we’re [the religious] too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy.
It’s so nice when they get something right. I mean statistically…monkeys typewriters and shakespearally-speaking – the deluded nailing it correctly is bound to happen sooner or later.
However, today[quotemined religious apologists aside] is not that day.
Today we revel in a cosmic truth filled to the brim with truthiness, that will make our deluded friend eat their hats. It is wondrous feature on a cosmic scale and it is epic victory for the forces of Atheism everywhere.
Behold!
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