So the other day, I had my first encounter with a Mormon. Mormons are pretty rare here in BC, and for most British Columbians, our main exposure to them is reading about that Mormon splinter group that lives up in the mountains and still practices polygamy, and so I’ve sort of wanted to have a chance to play with one of them for some time now. Predictably enough, it didn't go so well for him.

Many years ago, my friend Paul and I attended a debate at the University of Guelph entitled "Does God Exist?" There were two fellows there, both of whom purportedly arguing in favour of a scientific worldview. One of them, however, was - perhaps unsurprisingly - being a trifle more thorough about it than the other. I can't remember their names, but for the purposes of this anecdote, their names aren't terribly important. What's important is that they were spokespeople for two fairly well-represented approaches to this question.

There was the one fellow arguing essentially for an evidence-based approach to learning, and for what any reasonable person might call "actual science". The other fellow, who was taking the "pro-god exists" position at that debate, built his argument around what is called the "first cause" or "prime mover" argument. In the briefest of terms, this argument goes something like this: Everything we can perceive in the universe has a cause, and usually one we can in some way understand or theorize about. We can go back further and further back in the history of the universe and find one thing before another before another, each causing the thing after it in a giant chain of causality. At the beginning of this chain, he argued, there must be an "un-caused cause"; something that caused the next series of things, but which required no cause for itself. This cause, he furthermore argued (and here we get to the insultingly ridiculous anthropic principle), did such a jim-dandy job of setting up this string of causes in such a way as to eventually cause human beings to exist that it must have been an amazing super-intellect which had human beings in mind as an end result of his act of creation. So we might as well call this entity "god", and therefore conclude that he exists. He went on in much greater detail, of course, but I don't feel the need to expand upon it too much; you should easily enough be able to find any number of other Christians out there parroting the same material.

And I use the word christian advisedly here: The man was a christian, and intended for the audience to be convinced that his christian god was real and thus subscribe to his bronze age mythology. If we had all walked out of that lecture hall and become Muslims or Hindus, or started a hundred different and distinct religions, each of which were confusingly named "The Church of the First Cause" (which, come to think of it, actually isn't a bad-sounding name), I doubt very much that he would have been very happy with the outcome of having convinced us simply of the existence of this "first cause"; he had a specific identity and personality in mind for this entity which his hypothesis didn't seem to contain support for.

This is an obviously vacuous hypothesis for a number of reasons. I was ten years old when I first asked "Oh yeah? Well then who created god?", and to this day, I've never heard a christian (or any other theist) provide an explanation for their pet deity's existence which wasn't laughable and which was supported by their own mythology. This fellow - the debater above - took the stance that his god required no cause, no reason to exist, and that was that. It seems to me that this falls apart for a couple of different reasons.

The first, which occurred to me several years ago, is that even if he were entirely correct and that there WERE a divine "first cause", there's no reason to expect it to be the christian god he plainly meant to convince us to worship. And I don't even necessarily mean "What if it were Odin or Zeus or whatever" (and yes, I acknowledge that neither was a creator god in their own mythologies, but bear with me here). I mean, even if we entertain his idea that there IS a christian god, that he is essentially as-described in the bible, and that he created our universe, this does nothing at all to support the idea that such an entity might be his "prime mover". What if this god exists, but was caused by some super-god in some higher plane, and whom the christian god is nothing but a helpless insect before the presence of? What if that super-god was himself created by some super-duper god on some higher plane than that? What if this goes back another sixteen or sixty levels further back than the first link in that chain of causes he posited, and the true first cause is actually just some primordial chaos with no intellect or will or what-have-you, and which caused a situation in which his god came into existence by means of what we might teasingly call a naturalistic process?

I'm not saying this is true, or that we have any reason to believe it. I'm saying that the hypothetical structure he's provided gives us at least as much reason to believe this crazy bullshit hypothesis as the crazy bullshit hypothesis he actually wants us to embrace, and thus his argument does nothing whatsoever to accomplish underlying his goals, if you give it the scrutiny it deserves.

But there's an even bigger problem than that, and one which occurred to me quite a bit more recently: If we accept his idea that we live in a universe where things - even very complicated and unlikely things like the spontaneous generation of a hyper-intelligent and immortal substance-less intellect such as his "first cause" - then what does that tell us about the sort of universe in which we live? It tells us, among other things, that we live in a crazy, arbitrary universe where things CAN happen without cause or reason, and that as such, there's no reason to believe that any GIVEN phenomenon needs to be traced back to some primordial prime mover. Why do human beings exist? No reason. Just because. Why does gravity exist? No reason. Just because. Why does god exist? No reason. Just because. Again, if we accept his premise, that we live in a universe which plays home to these sort of random and arbitrary events, why do we suppose that there is a SINGLE first cause? There could be dozens, hundreds, an INFINITY of "first causes", each of which came into existence for no reason whatsoever, and the first first cause to have come into existence for no reason whatsoever could have little or no impact upon the universe at all as it presently exists, having long ago been marginalized by all of the subsequent "first causes".

Indeed, even if we grant his hypothesis the boon of the little bit more rope which it needs to hang itself and say that this first first cause is - as he believes - this christian god of his, then who's to say that in a universe where things can happen without any cause or reason, this god might not have at some point ceased to exist or had its nature changed or somesuch... again, for no reason, and without any cause? What if this god DID exist and was at one point immortal, omnipotent and omniscient and all that, but at some point, for no reason and with no cause, he suddenly became a drooling, mindless, and somewhat spiteful invalid?

Again, I'm not saying this is true, or that we have any reason to believe it. What I am saying is that - again - the hypothetical framework he set up seems to allow for this sort of event, and that if so, there's no way we can take anything he - or anyone else - says very seriously.

"And so you see, this is how you get yourself into heaven."
"Oh, yeah? When did we first hear about that?"
"Two thousand years ago!"
"Well, how do we know it hasn't changed since then?"
"Why would it have changed?"
"No reason. Just because."

It's self-defeating reasoning; a hypothesis which by its very nature cannot prove anything, since its core premise prevents anything from being explained by its very nature. The very definition of a self-defeating argument.

Oh, how I wish I could travel back in time to that day so I could have asked this question to him during the question period at the end of the debate. I expect I would have destroyed him on the spot, causing him to bodily disappear in a puff of logic.

Apparently there's this "Are you a hardcore atheist" meme going around, which I found by means of the excellent Evolved and Rat/i/onal blog. While I only occasionally post memes and surveys of this sort, I felt this one was smart and on-the-nose enough to be worth my time and attention.

Quoting from the original post....
 

***

A few years ago, I got roped into voulenteering at a homeless shelter up in Vancouver; a program called "Out of the Cold." It was run out of the Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, and this was, for certain (and I think obvious) reasons a little uncomfortable in that sense. Still, I had friends I was voulenteering with, and this made the experience survivable at first. Not only did I have people I was comfortable with, but I feel like there was a certain "Safety in numbers" deal going on, which kept the christians from proselytizing to me.

As time went on, and weeks turned into months, the christians there, I think, came to accept me and warmed up to me. I was a hard worker, I was polite, and I was doing good work. And you know, it was a good experience for me. Really good. I felt like I was living up to my moral standards in a very tangible way.

I always say, "We all have this one life, this one chance, this one world, and afterwards, nothing. It's up to us, and only us, to make sure it's as good experience for all of us as we can. We're all in this thing together." Having the chance to really put that philosophy to action was an enormously satisfying experience.

The next winter, though, when the program started up again, I was working thursday nights. And the next. And the next. And so on. I kept wanting to get back to it, but I never quite found the time.

These last few days, as I'm sure it's escaped nobody's notice, have been terribly, bitterly cold. It put me in mind of that program, and I realized "Hey, I have thursday nights free". I did some checking, and it seems the program is still going. Even better, the guy who was running it at the time I was there - a fellow named Karl - is still around. Karl, more than anyone there, I remember fondly. As the winter program was coming to an end that year, I remember him giving me a card (and I wish I could find it now! I'm sure I didn't throw it away!), telling me about how I had changed his mind about atheists, and showed him it's possible to be moral for entirely altruistic reasons, without any desire or need to get into heaven. It touched me rather deeply.

So, I'm going back there. This thursday, most likely, and I expect on subsequent thursdays as well. This having been said... I find that I would prefer to go there along with a kindred spirit or two, for the same reasons as I enumerated above. I don't know if any of you folks have thursday late afternoon/early evening free, but if you do, I would be glad of the company. Besides which, it's a worthy cause and the feeling of genuine satisfaction which springs from that is one which you would do well not to deny yourselves.

One way or the other, I'll be there. Perhaps I'll have a story or two to share when I get back.

So I've decided to try something new. An audio blog, or "audioblog", if you like. my timing, as always, is extremely opportune; I have acrippling cold, which I think gives my voice a ruggedly crackly quality. Like a mountain man, down out of the wilderness to share his musings with the village folks down below. 

Basically, I wanted to record something with no script, minimal planning, and just kind of rant. As much as I love the medium of written text, there is something to be said for sitting down and talking with one's audience.

This first entry is on the topic of cargo cults: 

And moreover, on the topic of faith in general. 

Enjoy.

A couple of days ago, I posted an entry in which I mused a little bit about the christian concept of hell. That post actually spun out of another conversation I was having elsewhere, and which I think is just interesting enough to warrant a post unto itself. 

Now, some years ago, I started to consider the possibility that christianity (and to exactly the same extent, Islam) is somewhat akin to Stockholm Syndrome. At that time, I was sort of one-quarter joking about it, and didn't give it much serious thought afterwards, but recent events have caused me to revisit that train of thought. 

I was discussing some of my moral and thological qualms with christianity with this christian girl I know down south of the border (and who may very well be reading this post). The point I had made was that her god, as described, is a tyrant, a thug, and a bully, and unworthy of worship. I clarified thus: 

You say that "we're all hellbound". Now, why - according to your worldview - is this the case? Is it your god's will that everyone is hellbound? Would anyone ever be hellbound if he didn't set the criteria for damnation as what they are? Would hell even exist if your god didn't decide it should be there and that people belong there?

What I'm saying is that if your religion is correct, then your god has set up a system wherein people go to hell if they don't worship him. That system would not be in place if your god didn't will it to be so. In other words, nobody would be in hell if your god didn't decide they should.

Your god, if he's real, and omnipotent and omniscient and omnibenevolent, could very easily decide upon an "everybody wins" afterlife, where everyone gets a happy ending and nobody needed to suffer. But he didn't; he decided that the system he preferred was one in which the following is true : "Anyone who does not worship me will go to hell". It is THAT system, THAT preference that I take issue with.

Any being who would make such a decision is a being unworthy of worship, since this is a terrible thing to decide upon. It is the decision of a bully and a thug and a tyrant. 

When she tried to explain that her religion states that it's mankind's own fault that we're "all hellbound", to which I responded that her god, as described, could set the criteria for who is hellbound as broadly or narrowly as he wanted, and chose to set the criteria to include literally everyone who does not worship him. This is the "tyrant" part of my earlier assessment. 

This line of discussion led me to a second line of thought (returning to the original topic at last), in which I attempted to walk a mile in a christian's shoes. Or something around a mile. I went out for a walk which lasted for about half an hour while thinking about this, and I suspect I covered around a mile or so in that time:

Now, I was thinking about something last night. I was thinking about what it would be like if I genuinely believed that your god were real and that your religious beliefs were correct. If I believed that, after the end of my life I needed to go to heaven or hell. Either seems like torture to me: heaven holds no appeal to me whatsoever... Most christians are people I don't enjoy talking to. There are exceptions, of course. I enjoy talking to you, and last year I dated a christian girl for a while (though in the end she betrayed me, like most of the christians I've dealt with...), but MOST christians just leave me pulling my hair out. Likewise, all of my friends are atheists. It's not that I seek out atheists to hang out with, but everyone I enjoy talking to ends up being an atheist. Heaven would be a place full of people I couldn't stand and containing none of the people I like, and ruled over by a tyrant I couldn't stand. And I would be stuck there forever. No escape, no end, no hope. I couldn't even kill myself to get away. This would be torture. I would not want to go there. But nor would I want to go to hell! If I found myself believing that I was trapped between two twin torturous afterlives, and wanting to experience neither, what could I do?

Facing the prospect of heaven or hell and no means of escape, I believe I would basically go insane. But what form would that insanity take? Well, in situations where people are held against their will and feel trapped and helpless, they frequently fall victim to a mental disorder called 'Stockholm Syndrome'. Basically, as a survival mechanism, they begin to identify and sympathise with their captors. Even when their captor is entirely malign and without redeeming virtue, sufferers of this syndrome will begin to love and adore their captors, even going so far as to take up their cause. You can look up the story of Patty Hearst for a famous example.

I suspect that if I believed in your god, and felt there was no way to escape, no way to protect myself from him, and no hope of rescue, I would begin to fall victim to Stockholm Syndrome. I would begin to irrationally excuse him for his worst excesses, ignore or make excuses for his faults, and even begin to like him just as a psychological defense mechanism against the overwhelming dread I would otherwise feel.

Going insane would be the only rational response to a belief in your god.

And that got me to wondering: how many christians out there are actually just like I would be in that situation? How many of them are suffering from this mental illness?

Could the answer be ''all of them''? How would you know? Someone with Stockholm Syndrome doesn't know they're suffering from it. They think they legitimately love their captor. Just like christians do about their god.

It's been said that religion is a mental illness. I wonder: could we now have a name for that illness? I need to speak to a qualified psychiatrist about this. It's a very exciting idea. 

I've given some further thought to this topic since then, and the idea isn't a perfect one. The research of Dr. Michael Persinger seems to indicate that there's a biological basis for extreme religiosity; basically a defect in one of the lobes of the brain which gives rise to religious visions, and which, when directly electrically stimulated, tends to cause religious visions in people who posess this defect. Pleasingly, when Professor Richard Dawkins underwent this process, he had almost no reaction at all, presumably because he has next-to-no biological predisposition to religion. If this is the case, then Stockholm syndrome doesn't completely explain this sort of religiosity, since there remain other biological causes, but I do feel that on a behavioral level, there's something to this. 

If one believes that there is such a god, constantly hovering over your shoulder, unavoidable, inescapable, and capable of snuffing out your life at whim, then he is basically the ultimate captor, wielding the ultimate threat. When you think about the most famous case of Stockholm Syndrome - Patty Hearst - going out with a machine gun to fight in the name of her captors in order to win their approval, it's easy to look at the many religious wars fought over the course of the last 2000 years as being made up of armies of Patty Hearsts, all driven insane by their beliefs and desperately, violently trying to please their own Donald DeFreeze in the sky...

As an interesting aside, a few years ago, I asked some Jews in one of their own Livejournal communities about this topic. The jist of what I was told was that, according to their religion, they don't hold that one needs to worship their god or be a member of their religion in order to enjoy a happy afterlife; you just have to basically be a good person. Indeed, being a Jew might actually DECREASE your chances of said happy afterlife, since you accept a greater degree of moral responsibility by being a Jew (according to their ethos) and are thus held to higher standards. To this I said, and maintain,

I must say that the vision of the afterlife you present here is probably the most charming afterlife belief I have ever heard. I find nothing here to be at all repugnant or offensive, which is wholly unique in my experience. 

I haven't been posting here much lately, so I felt like I should toss something up here, just to show I'm still alive and such. 

A recent conversation on the topic of atheism on 4chan's /b/ message board: 

Some christian (who was probably just copying and pasting this text from somewhere else) says 

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference.

Look at it from another perspective: Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the “Big Bang” about 15 billion years ago. Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred. Suppose the universe had never existed. What ultimate difference would it make? The universe is doomed to die anyway. In the end it makes no difference whether the universe ever existed or not. Therefore, it is without ultimate significance.

About the only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.

The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within such a world view. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.

Without God, man is nothing.

To which I say: 

If that's how you choose to define the term "abusrd". Personally, I think that your use of the word "absurd" is itself absurd, because it is predicated upon a comparison between the universe as it observably exists and the false standard of how you wish it existed.

Besides which, This argument makes me laugh.

There is not one word here which suggests that your bronze age middle-eastern fairy-tale god is real. All it suggests is that you would like it if he were. This is a statement - indeed it is a wailing cry - that you hope you're right. It does nothing to validate your claims. All it does is show how insecure and emotionaly unstable you are.

You convince me of nothing more than your own deficiency.

In the process of researching for my book, I've come into conversation with a fairly passionate Jewish girl. During our discussions, she suggested that I hate christians. This comes up over and over again, and though I've answered it a couple of times in a couple of places, I felt the need to really get into the meat of it with her. It occurred to me that it might not be the worst idea in the world to post this bit in my journal, for the sake of public record. 

***

You give voice here to one of the most common misconceptions here that I run up against in this arena, and it’s one which I find kin of baffling. I honestly neither intend nor think that the tone which I employ should give the impression that I hate christians, and yet this comes up so often. Let me tell you what I always tell people who throw this in my face: I no more hate christians than surgeons hate cancer patients. A surgeon will want to remove cancerous growths from cancer patients because they feel that these patients suffer from having this horrible thing inside of them. My approach, attitude and motives are similar; I want to remove this religion from these religious people because I feel the world suffers from having people contain this horrible thing inside of them.

I suppose I should qualify my answer somewhat, actually. I DO hate christians of the stripe of Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush; christians who use their religion to rally their christian countrymen to horrible acts of murderous, xenophobic rage. These are a vanishingly small minority, who only come up once a generation or so, but if christianity were absent from the world, such people would have nothing to work with; no means to motivate the christian soldiers to go marching unto war.

I could go a step further and say that I loathe christians of the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps variety, who find and promote the most hateful elements of their religions so as to create the fierce us-versus-them mentality in their flocks which they benefit from so much, in terms of finances, politics and ego gratification. These are the people who mobilize large numbers of influential christians to cripple and limit society, institutionalizing the sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia which genuinely is there to be found in their bible. Yet even these I do not hate: I believe that they are sincerely motivated by a pursuit of what they genuinely believe to be good… it’s just that the definition of "good" that they’re working from is one which is primitive, archaic, outmoded and simplistic. In the modern world, it does more harm than could be done with a more enlightened, sophisticated and – most importantly - EGALITARIAN philosophy. So: I loathe them. I find them to be profoundly, profoundly misguided and badly deluded victims of their pathetic mythology, who – as a byproduct of this mythology – share their victimization with the world around them. But I don’t hate them. To hate is to actively wish ill upon a person, and I don’t wish ill upon them. I just wish they would stop it.

I could go further still and say that I pity those christians who are simply christians because that happens to be the prevailing authoritarian social institution in the areas where they were raised, and are indeed so naturally predisposed towards group-think and sheep-like subservience that they’d be a passionately devoted member of any religion they were raised with. These people are beyond the reach of logic and reason, and would probably just attach themselves to some other authoritarian movement if they were ever liberated from christianity anyways, and would thus be no better off. In my darker moments, I fear that these might be the majority of christians, though I hope that I'm wrong.

I could indeed go one step further and say that I have concern for those christians who simply haven’t had access to the information necessary to make the informed decisions on the topic of their religion, and who, in a world where access to information were more wide-spread and energetically pursued, would be able to come to their own logical conclusions. They’re like plants deprived too long from the light of the sun, and seeing them makes me sad. I hope that these are the majority of christians, and that they can be reached.

I actually wrote this a year and a half ago, but it seems I never got around to posting it! I have no idea why; I quite like it. A discussion in the

atheism

Many people I know or have known will be happy to praise christians who find inventive new ways to interpret the christian bible, to willingly and knowingly ignore parts of it in order to circumvent some of the more grisly bits, or equivocate about why it’s okay to ignore certain parts of it which contradict their personal philosophy. I have been criticized – repeatedly – for holding all christians to a standard for consistency which in many people’s minds ought only to apply to dyed in the wool fundamentalists. I’ve always felt it to be intellectually dishonest, though, to call yourself a christian and yet disagree with some of the things which the christian bible purports that their god has commanded them to do, such as punishing a rapist by forcing him to marry his rape victim and then pay her father with a few silver coins.

It’s not that I object to the idea of rape victims not being forced to marry their rapists. Far from it; I find such objections to be commendable. It’s the act of calling yourself a christian while at the same time deliberately flouting your purported god’s stated will because you don’t agree with what it requires of you. It seems hypocritical, and hypocrisy has always rubbed me the wrong way. If you’ve decided it’s okay to deliberately defy your god, then why even continue on in a religion which has the stated goal of pleasing said god in order to avoid his eternal and undying wrath? It’s like deciding to be a fire fighter, but refusing to do anything involving water; you’re missing one of the key components which is critical to achieving the goals of BEING a fire fighter. It seems to defeat the purpose of the endeavour.

Arguments can be made that such an individual remains a part of the christian community, and a part of the christian culture, even if certain specific elements of the dogma are overlooked. I would counter this argument by contending that it is the dogma, taken as a whole, which is the single thread which runs the entire length of that culture, binding it together in any meaningful way. The evidence of this is manifest in the way that entire groups of churches can schism from one another – often violently – over comparatively minor differences in dogma. If this is the case, then how can one omit an element of dogma entirely and yet remain a part of the culture defined by that dogma?
Perhaps more to the point, once you grant yourself license to re-interpret elements of the bible in manners which are clearly antithietical to the original authors’ intents, you are immediately on a very slippery slope, indeed. What you are doing at that point is essentially re-writing the bible to suit your own whims and your own tastes.

Once you have granted yourself the privilege to re-write whatever elements of the bible you dislike into more pleasing forms, at what point are you required to draw the line? Could you, for example, re-interpret the entire bible to such a degree that it becomes a guide to the practical elements of the reproductive cycle of garden slugs? If not, then why not? If you have decided you can ignore and even invert the will of the authors, yet still insist that you are observing the religion which their wishes define is in itself a decision not to be bound by their will. So why stop there?

My argument is that once you’ve re-written the bible in your head to a certain extent, it then ceases to be the bible, and thereupon becomes some second document, which simply happens to share the same name as the first. And if the dogma which defined the bible is the unifying element of christianity, then it seems to me that by discarding this dogma in favour of this second document of your own creation, you in effect discard the single element which makes you a part of christian culture, and thus you cease to be a christian.

This is the hypocrisy which rankles me: To call yourself a christian while having dispensed with your christianity. It is logically inconsistent, intellectually dishonest, and a sign of poor character.

Now, make no mistake: I have no objections to people defining their own moral code, or, come to that, their own spirituality. Far from it, I encourage it. However, to do so while still claiming adherence to a different moral code for the sake of the benefits one receives, either personally or socially, is delusional and asinine at best, or opportunistic and manipulative at worst.