Hello again, all. I apologize for not posting lately, but I'm hoping to start back up soon. I just wanted to let you all know that everyone here's doing fine, and today was a special day. No, not just Zombie Jesus Day -- today, my wife came out to her family (specifically, her mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa)!
There's only so much a person can take around holiday get-together with elderly people and their narrow-minded views, and she spur-of-the-moment told them that she's an atheist. They didn't shun her or ask too many questions either, and now that the announcement has been made, we can expect it to get around the rest of the family and open the doors of conversation -- and hopefully, understanding. At the very least they won't spout off things like, "it's the atheists who are trying take Jesus out of everything because they all hate him".
So congratulations my dear. I love you.
-STA
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Friday, December 16, 2011
A Horseman Falls
Life is keeping me busy and while I do plan to make future posts, I'm not entirely certain when.
Tonight I just wanted to put up a small, mournful post regarding the death of Christopher Hitchens. I'm not sure what I could add to the outpouring of remembrance posts that have flooded the internet since his death last night, except to say that I'm sorry I never got to met him. Hitch was an extraordinary influence on me during the time I began my road to recovery, as it were. He had such a captivating grasp of language and could craft a sentence that made my budding intellectual mind hum with intrigue. I've always wanted to be able to spontaneously generate such cogent strings of words like Hitchens could. Not only was he a great speaker, his arguments were -- are -- among the best presently available, and I doubt a similar figure will appear in my lifetime. I'm thankful to Hitch for being in the right place for me at the right time, and for delivering a wealth of counterpoints and kernels of thought that I'll can always go back to and study. We'll always have his work.
So tonight I'll raise a glass in remembrance of Hitch, an eloquent speaker and a wonderful human.
-STA
Tonight I just wanted to put up a small, mournful post regarding the death of Christopher Hitchens. I'm not sure what I could add to the outpouring of remembrance posts that have flooded the internet since his death last night, except to say that I'm sorry I never got to met him. Hitch was an extraordinary influence on me during the time I began my road to recovery, as it were. He had such a captivating grasp of language and could craft a sentence that made my budding intellectual mind hum with intrigue. I've always wanted to be able to spontaneously generate such cogent strings of words like Hitchens could. Not only was he a great speaker, his arguments were -- are -- among the best presently available, and I doubt a similar figure will appear in my lifetime. I'm thankful to Hitch for being in the right place for me at the right time, and for delivering a wealth of counterpoints and kernels of thought that I'll can always go back to and study. We'll always have his work.
So tonight I'll raise a glass in remembrance of Hitch, an eloquent speaker and a wonderful human.
-STA
Saturday, May 21, 2011
The Fat Lady is Sleeping
Well, it seems the "end of the world" has once again come and gone. While the faithful are busy trying to rationalize their cognitive dissonance, reality continues -- as it always does -- forward. I am both enraged and saddened at Harold Camping for the casualties left in his wake of fear-mongering, and simultaneously filled with schadenfreude for the dumbfounded scratching their heads in disbelief.
Let's face it, none of raptor-ready halfwits are in any kind of "shock" right now. When the mind is addled with such a lack of critical thinking, it can come face-to-face with contrary or antipodes information and still assume it was right all along. The double-think involved is seen any many other areas of theistic ideology...it's like a staple or a necessity for it. In fact, I'd be amazed if I could find one of these May 21st people who would say, "I truly believed the world was going to end, and when it didn't I realized there was something deeply wrong with my thinking."
One can wish. Next up to get bitch-slapped by the world when it sticks around: the Mayans.
-STA
(Typed while listening to Ænema)
Let's face it, none of raptor-ready halfwits are in any kind of "shock" right now. When the mind is addled with such a lack of critical thinking, it can come face-to-face with contrary or antipodes information and still assume it was right all along. The double-think involved is seen any many other areas of theistic ideology...it's like a staple or a necessity for it. In fact, I'd be amazed if I could find one of these May 21st people who would say, "I truly believed the world was going to end, and when it didn't I realized there was something deeply wrong with my thinking."
One can wish. Next up to get bitch-slapped by the world when it sticks around: the Mayans.
-STA
(Typed while listening to Ænema)
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
The Molestation of Pachyderms
I was recently offered an old Indian parable by a theist as an attempt to befuddle me into accepting that different religions are all part of the same god. You know the one about the three blind me (or men in the dark) who are asked to describe what an elephant looked like by feeling it. The first man feels the leg and says an elephant is like a tree. The second man feels the tail and proclaims it to be a length of rope. The third feels the tusk and decides this long and sharp object must be a spear. You've probably heard it differently; there's many forms of the story. But the point is that this argument was presented to me as an attempt to show how we all see the same thing in reality, just from different perspectives. This particular theist was using it to further illustrate how science is just another blind man feeling around in the dark. The analogy may sound flowery, philosophical and convincing, but it is fundamentally flawed.
Religion is Blind
The point that was lost on my theistic friend was that religion is like those blind men. It feels around for something and immediately sticks to it's interpretation of what it finds (demons cause disease, anyone?). But science keeps going. It doesn't just proclaim "it's a spear" or "it's a tree trunk". It says, "well, this part resembles a tree trunk, but we need more data". Religion gives up. It has no reason to continue searching or to keep asking questions because it thinks (nay, knows) it has all the answers.
Another point the analogy makes is that the blind men are all wrong. Not only do they get the description of the elephant wrong, but they get the animal itself wrong as well (if you follow the version that is asking the men to describe what they're feeling). Religion says, "yep, it's a spear alright". Science says, "it might be a spear, or spear-like, but we don't yet know".
My theist friend failed to realize that the parable was not meant to be about how religions are the same, but instead about how religion knows nothing. As John Godfrey Sax's poem about it ends:
Not The Same
Further points can be made against the New Age view that all religions are parts of the same whole. While this view is relatively harmless, I don't see it as intellectually honest, and would rather argue on the side of religion for the sake of religious integrity (however frail that may be). As my friend Todd Allen Gates points out in his book, Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer, the reasons for thinking "all religions are one" fall into five categories.
First, perhaps different religions fill different needs. God made all the world's religions, but he modified them to suite the needs of different regions. This might sound at first to be well and good, but flaws appear after a few moments pf thought. Does this mean that people who, say, travel to India, should observe the caste system? What about people whose divine directives say they should kill all who practice witchcraft? What happens when they travel to a country where the practice of witchcraft is believed to be a commandment from god? The bigger point here is: where do you go for guidelines? Who writes the standards for which doctrine gets observed when overlaps or contradictions occur?
Second is the "corrupted message" view that we see conflict in religions because God's original True Word(TM) has been corrupted by humans. This boils down to, as Gates says, something of a CEO who is too inept to keep unauthorized subordinates from editing the text and -- even worse -- a CEO who stands by idly when the corrupted messages are forged and spread even more widely than the original, true message. This give a contradictory view of God; he's powerful enough to create the universe, but can't seem to keep his mission statement from being tampered with.
Third is the "paradox hypothesis". God made different religions to confuse us on purpose, because those bewildered by conflicting doctrines will reap the benefits of expanded spiritual perceptions. This idea that God purposefully confused us might be supported by a small number of people who feel their spiritual lives have benefited, but when we look at the history of violence and bloodshed caused by this confusion, it makes a caring Creator who wishes such bloody disorder look inept and not so caring. As Gates so eloquently puts it, "it makes little since to believe that such a deity who could so successfully calculate the different respiratory needs of gills versus lungs, would have so badly calculated and miscalculated the effects of inspiring consecrated contradictions".
Fourth is the "emanation hypothesis", that the Creator of the universe didn't set out to inspire any religion, but holy truth simply emanates from it, and different humans in different time periods tap into these emanations. The idea is that there's one divine source, people just pick up on that source in different ways depending on their culture. This too falls into the same basic contradiction-quagmire as the previous two categories: that an all-powerful, all-loving being cares enough about us to want us to be delivered, but offers no way of preventing us from making up our own mind about which is the True(TM) way, however wrong it turns out to be. This deity continues to emanate truths without care as to how those truths are being interpreted and what violence it begets. This position may not exclude a deistic god, but it certainly discredits a personal one.
The fifth and final way in which New Agers claim "all religions are one" is that even though we humans perceive differences and contradictions in religions, that's only due to our limited, finite, or broken human understanding. But this cop-out answer is not the sole property of New Age spiritualists; fundamentalists will use this same rationalization to nonbelievers in their religion. Any difficulty can be explained away by it, but how is it that "we don't know" something can turn into "therefore we know"?
Can't We All Just Get Along?
It would be nice if religions were all parts of the same elephant. Even though they're not, those who wish peace between religions can only want a good thing. The bigger point is this: we don't need religion -- any religion -- to have a peaceful, loving, and productive coexistence. We're better off putting aside religion, or at least cutting out the "love your neighbor" bits and throwing away the rest. One thing is for sure: we're all in this boat together, and we're all a little blind.
-STA
Religion is Blind
The point that was lost on my theistic friend was that religion is like those blind men. It feels around for something and immediately sticks to it's interpretation of what it finds (demons cause disease, anyone?). But science keeps going. It doesn't just proclaim "it's a spear" or "it's a tree trunk". It says, "well, this part resembles a tree trunk, but we need more data". Religion gives up. It has no reason to continue searching or to keep asking questions because it thinks (nay, knows) it has all the answers.
Another point the analogy makes is that the blind men are all wrong. Not only do they get the description of the elephant wrong, but they get the animal itself wrong as well (if you follow the version that is asking the men to describe what they're feeling). Religion says, "yep, it's a spear alright". Science says, "it might be a spear, or spear-like, but we don't yet know".
My theist friend failed to realize that the parable was not meant to be about how religions are the same, but instead about how religion knows nothing. As John Godfrey Sax's poem about it ends:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
Not The Same
Further points can be made against the New Age view that all religions are parts of the same whole. While this view is relatively harmless, I don't see it as intellectually honest, and would rather argue on the side of religion for the sake of religious integrity (however frail that may be). As my friend Todd Allen Gates points out in his book, Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer, the reasons for thinking "all religions are one" fall into five categories.
First, perhaps different religions fill different needs. God made all the world's religions, but he modified them to suite the needs of different regions. This might sound at first to be well and good, but flaws appear after a few moments pf thought. Does this mean that people who, say, travel to India, should observe the caste system? What about people whose divine directives say they should kill all who practice witchcraft? What happens when they travel to a country where the practice of witchcraft is believed to be a commandment from god? The bigger point here is: where do you go for guidelines? Who writes the standards for which doctrine gets observed when overlaps or contradictions occur?
Second is the "corrupted message" view that we see conflict in religions because God's original True Word(TM) has been corrupted by humans. This boils down to, as Gates says, something of a CEO who is too inept to keep unauthorized subordinates from editing the text and -- even worse -- a CEO who stands by idly when the corrupted messages are forged and spread even more widely than the original, true message. This give a contradictory view of God; he's powerful enough to create the universe, but can't seem to keep his mission statement from being tampered with.
Third is the "paradox hypothesis". God made different religions to confuse us on purpose, because those bewildered by conflicting doctrines will reap the benefits of expanded spiritual perceptions. This idea that God purposefully confused us might be supported by a small number of people who feel their spiritual lives have benefited, but when we look at the history of violence and bloodshed caused by this confusion, it makes a caring Creator who wishes such bloody disorder look inept and not so caring. As Gates so eloquently puts it, "it makes little since to believe that such a deity who could so successfully calculate the different respiratory needs of gills versus lungs, would have so badly calculated and miscalculated the effects of inspiring consecrated contradictions".
Fourth is the "emanation hypothesis", that the Creator of the universe didn't set out to inspire any religion, but holy truth simply emanates from it, and different humans in different time periods tap into these emanations. The idea is that there's one divine source, people just pick up on that source in different ways depending on their culture. This too falls into the same basic contradiction-quagmire as the previous two categories: that an all-powerful, all-loving being cares enough about us to want us to be delivered, but offers no way of preventing us from making up our own mind about which is the True(TM) way, however wrong it turns out to be. This deity continues to emanate truths without care as to how those truths are being interpreted and what violence it begets. This position may not exclude a deistic god, but it certainly discredits a personal one.
The fifth and final way in which New Agers claim "all religions are one" is that even though we humans perceive differences and contradictions in religions, that's only due to our limited, finite, or broken human understanding. But this cop-out answer is not the sole property of New Age spiritualists; fundamentalists will use this same rationalization to nonbelievers in their religion. Any difficulty can be explained away by it, but how is it that "we don't know" something can turn into "therefore we know"?
Can't We All Just Get Along?
It would be nice if religions were all parts of the same elephant. Even though they're not, those who wish peace between religions can only want a good thing. The bigger point is this: we don't need religion -- any religion -- to have a peaceful, loving, and productive coexistence. We're better off putting aside religion, or at least cutting out the "love your neighbor" bits and throwing away the rest. One thing is for sure: we're all in this boat together, and we're all a little blind.
-STA
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Reasons for Everything
My mother is fond of saying, "Everything happens for a reason." I agree with her, but not in the way you'd think.
She, unlike myself, is a theist. The "reason" she attributes everything to ultimately boils down to nothing short of a divine plan authored by some all-knowing being. As a loud, snooty man on Fox News is fond of saying, "the sun goes up and comes down", and that's enough to ascribe an invisible father figure to it all.
I'm somewhat of a determinist. Now I don't think there's an ultimate plan for anything -- I'm no fatalist. But I do think things happen for reasons we can either explain, or can't (yet?). Say, casting a handful of dice. Natural forces determine how the dice will fall; everything from the strength and angle of your hand, to its height above the table, to the material makeup of the dice and the surface, to air pressure, to the tilt of the earth, and any number of other factors. But that does not mean that it's written somewhere ahead of time "On March 21, 2011, STA will throw a 2, 4, and 5 on 3d6." We can't really process all the factors in a seemingly random event, like a dice throw -- that's why we use them to determine random outcomes. If we really could process it all, it wouldn't seem random.
Therefore, I don't really believe in randomness. We might not know or understand all the circumstances for an event, but I don't think we can accurately say a thing just randomly happens. Even quantum mechanics might have some extenuating circumstances that lie beyond a certain complexity boundary for its seemingly random goings-on. I see randomness as a label that we put on too-hard-to-calculate events.
Sure, things happen for a reason. But those reasons have reasons themselves, and they've nothing to do with gods or magic. There may be a reason for everything, but it's just a whole lot bigger than you or I can comprehend...without the need for God.
-STA
She, unlike myself, is a theist. The "reason" she attributes everything to ultimately boils down to nothing short of a divine plan authored by some all-knowing being. As a loud, snooty man on Fox News is fond of saying, "the sun goes up and comes down", and that's enough to ascribe an invisible father figure to it all.
I'm somewhat of a determinist. Now I don't think there's an ultimate plan for anything -- I'm no fatalist. But I do think things happen for reasons we can either explain, or can't (yet?). Say, casting a handful of dice. Natural forces determine how the dice will fall; everything from the strength and angle of your hand, to its height above the table, to the material makeup of the dice and the surface, to air pressure, to the tilt of the earth, and any number of other factors. But that does not mean that it's written somewhere ahead of time "On March 21, 2011, STA will throw a 2, 4, and 5 on 3d6." We can't really process all the factors in a seemingly random event, like a dice throw -- that's why we use them to determine random outcomes. If we really could process it all, it wouldn't seem random.
Therefore, I don't really believe in randomness. We might not know or understand all the circumstances for an event, but I don't think we can accurately say a thing just randomly happens. Even quantum mechanics might have some extenuating circumstances that lie beyond a certain complexity boundary for its seemingly random goings-on. I see randomness as a label that we put on too-hard-to-calculate events.
Sure, things happen for a reason. But those reasons have reasons themselves, and they've nothing to do with gods or magic. There may be a reason for everything, but it's just a whole lot bigger than you or I can comprehend...without the need for God.
-STA
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