What's the Meaning?

"Your life has no meaning without God."

Apologists often appeal to meaning when arguing for their deity. Let’s quickly look at what they mean by this claim.

Possible meaning #1

To have meaning you must have been created. Okay, then God has no meaning according to their own doctrine--which begs the question, how much meaning can we really have as the product of a meaningless being?

Possible meaning #2

To have meaning you must either have been created or create. This option gives meaning to God as well as us--but it also allows for our meaning without God. We create under our own power everything from art to life.

Possible meaning #3

To have meaning you must have a purpose ascribed by an authority higher than yourself. Again, this makes God meaningless which makes him a pretty weak authority and therefore us essentially meaningless by proxy. It also gives anyone meaning once they enter the workforce or are born into a family with defined expectations.

Possible meaning #4

To have meaning you must have a purpose ascribed by God. Ah, now we’re getting to the fallacious crux of the argument. By defining the word “meaning” as that which is prescribed by God, apologists guarantee a circular win via a linguistic trick only they accept. Atheists are confused because they get their definitions from dictionaries and /or common vernacular. Knowing what they mean by “meaning” in this case, we see what they are really appealing to is their own indoctrination.

Gotta Keep Them Separated

Not to mention that "hell" is the absence of the omnipresent God.

God's Nature: Moral or Imaginary?

I recently joined a Google+ community meant to educate people on counter apologetics. This was my first post.

Here is a way to dismantle the moral argument for God without getting into the subjective vs. objective morality debate.

A more traditional take on the Euthyphro dilemma, a classic problem of the moral argument for God:

If God chooses what is good, does God have a reason for the actions to which he assigns a good value? If so, why can humans not come to the same reason? If not, then someone (God, in this case) arbitrarily assigned good and bad values, which is exactly what theists think is the problem with subjective morality. 

Modern apologists rarely say God decided anything, rather they claim what is morally good is simply part of God's nature. They expect this negates the dilemma. It doesn't. For this reason I recommend presenting a formation more like below to stay with the times.

If God's nature is good and it could be no other way...who made God's nature as such? If someone made God's nature good, then we should probably worship that God...if only we could know why that God made good what it is. There's a potential infinite regress of moral responsibility here which explains nothing. However, if no one made God's nature good, then it's possible for beings to have good natures without a higher being making them as such. Therefore, the same can apply to us.

It's a small distinction that most people should be able to come to on their own, but apologists are highly motivated to not think about how their arguments might fail. We need to show them, repeatedly.

Throwing Apologetics Under the Bus

Here's a line of questioning that undermines the entire field of apologetics.

1. Do you believe an all-powerful being is possible?
2. If so, can an all-powerful being deceive limited beings?
3. Are you a limited being?
4. Then how can you trust personal revelation, outside authority, historical records, physical evidence or anything that you feel supports your beliefs in a world with an all-powerful being?

Any theist, by definition, would answer "yes" to question one. The answer to question two is necessarily "yes." I think we can all agree that three is a "yes,"especially in relation to an all-powerful being. Which leads us to question four.

I recently asked this question to the Google+ community for the Christian Apologetics Alliance.

In a world where a supernatural entity exists with the power to reveal knowledge to me or others directly or indirectly, how can I be sure that the same or different supernatural entity won't reveal false knowledge?

Here is the link to the original post. The responses, for the most part, refused to acknowledge the entirety of the question. None of the comments were able to adequately answer the question in my opinion, but I encourage you to judge for yourself.

Apologetics: The Second Best Defense

The Cause of the Big Bang

At it’s heart, the cosmological argument for God says that anything that begins to exist must have a cause. Used in conjunction with the Big Bang Theory, apologists can rightly argue that our universe at least seems to have a point of origin and therefore a cause. As an atheist, I reject a supernatural creator that did not begin to exist...so, what caused the Big Bang? Well, I don’t know (which is a valid response.) I only know of scientifically informed options.

Quantum foam. I can’t explain this better than Lawrence Krauss so I prefer that you come back after reading the book A Universe from Nothing or after watching a relevant lecture. The best layman explanation I can provide is that “nothing” (the absence of conventional matter, energy, space & time) is an unstable state and quantum fluctuations will give rise to something--even the singularity that became our universe.

Self-Causation. Violated causality is a logic no-no, however, it is a valid interpretation of quantum mechanics. If A can cause B which can cause A--then the first instants of the universe, while it was still at the quantum scale, could be it’s own catalyst. It’s counter-intuitive, but that’s the name of the quantum game and why we shouldn’t assume we know how things work at the literal dawn of time.

Result of a Collapsing Star on a Higher Dimension. I'll be honest, astrophysics is even less my area than quantum mechanics. Read this.

Result of a Multiversal Event. It has been theorized that bubble universes interacting could cause a new universe. Or a simulated universe could become complex enough to program a nested simulated universe. Or something. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene has suggested that there is a chance every mathematically possible universe exists.

Big Bang/Big Crunch Cycle. It’s the idea that the universe expands then contracts back into a singularity which expands into a new universe. The cycle is an older hypothesis that is now less likely than once thought.

The universe is essentially eternal and therefore causeless. Yes, there is a point of origin, but I’m not so sure we can regard the movement of time at it’s birth to our standards. For instance, if time moved exponentially slower the closer to it’s point of origin, the 13.8 billion years we think the universe has been around is only correct judging time from our perspective. In fact, it’s essentially eternal.

Magic. Theists draw upon the supernatural in support of their preferred god all the time, so I can just as easily suppose the supernatural as an option that abolishes the need for a god. I firmly believe there is a natural process that resulted in our universe, but even if there isn't, that doesn’t rule out that the supernatural process involved is unguided and spontaneous. Any argument against this can be dismissed with one word: magic.

*Events that precede space and time are nonsensical to our experience. Some of the above options require both a time-like dimension and a space-like dimension independent of our universe, but then so would an eternal deity.

**If you understand the latest in quantum mechanics or cosmology or theoretical physics, please comment with citations. I’ll gladly update this post with more accurate information.

Brain Death and Other Happy News

The belief of a soul or spirit that can exist independent of a brain is a romantic idea that I don’t often go out of my way to debate. After all, believing that the essence of one’s identity continues after death is an understandable comfort to those dealing with mortality. That said, I’ve been asked recently why exactly I don’t believe in disembodied consciousness and figure that here is the perfect place to record my thoughts.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t an atheist issue. The existence of a God doesn’t imply an afterlife nor does the absence of a deity imply that there can’t be a hereafter. The fact that the two beliefs are so often tied speaks to how religions have positioned themselves to appeal to desires in order to gain a following. By this I mean that a master who must be worshiped and a church that must be paid doesn’t fulfill many emotional wants, however, a master who can eternally reward worship and a church that serves as the proxy for heaven--that’s desirable to many. Still, the afterlife, like God, is an issue for skeptics. Neither can be proven or specifically understood and they both rely on supernatural assumptions. It’s impossible to say for certain that we don’t wake up somewhere else post-mortem, but below are my reasons for doubting.

There are many ways to show that my consciousness (or my mind/spirit/soul/self--depending on definitions) is directly tied to my physical brain. Drink too many beers and I become less inhibited, more friendly, and slower to process new information. Drink enough, and my consciousness goes on hiatus entirely--and booze is just the tip of the iceberg. When considering the full range of effects pharmacology has our brain, how can anyone deny that chemicals are a catalyst for how we think and behave? We observe higher levels of serotonin or dopamine when happy. Age wears down the brain as much as any other bodily organ--resulting in sluggish thinking, memory loss, and confusion--which in some cases are diagnosable as Alzheimer's or Dementia. There is a laundry list of contributing evidence that shows as goes the brain, so goes the mind. The reasonable conclusion is that when the brain goes completely, (dies) so does the self. I get it, it's a bummer, but desire does not dictate reality.

When Christians Tell Me How Nuts Scientology Is

The Failed Prophecy of Jesus' Return

Hat tip to Hausdorff for actually reading the damn thing.

Links Shminks #15

The many possible outcomes of a Pascalian Wager render it useless.

The 10 weirdest right-wing Xian conspiracy theories

Vjack talks about Atheism+ and where it went wrong.

Richard Dawkins had a short interview on The Daily Show, and a longer interview with Jon Stewart on-line.

A great post for those wondering if a religion is harmful.

Rosa Rubicondior's take on the censorship tendencies of religion.

An atheist wonders if his rationalization to eat meat is religious in nature.

An atheist thinking about the kind of theist he could be.

And finally, a cartoon creationist needs representation.

Prayer Pamphlet

Now It All Makes Perfect Sense

Self-Defeated

One of the stupidest ideas in the Christian apologetic handbook is that the ability to construct self-defeating statements says something about the nature of reality. For example, I’ve seen posted twice this last week (here and here) the claim that truth can be known because the statement “truth cannot be known,” is self-defeating. Yes, that particular statement is self-defeating, but to say the opposite must then be true is willfully ignorant. I shouldn’t have to explain why, but I will.

If “truth cannot be known” is a known statement of truth, then it shows truth can be known making the statement wrong. The statement renders itself nonsensical by its own claim, hence self-defeating. However, if a internally consistent statement is all that is needed to ascertain the nature of valid knowledge, how about “we may or may not be able to know truth.” There is nothing self-defeating here. The two reasonable answers to the question of whether or not we can know all truths is not “yes, we can” and “no, we can’t;” it is “yes, we can” and “it’s unknown.”

That’s it. That’s the post. I’ve previously said that evidence and experience inform essential truth while philosophical ideas make absolute truth hard if not impossible to see. It's worth pointing out that our ability to know one truth doesn't mean we can know any or all truths. I've also talked about the one truth that comes to mind that can be objectively determined evidentially by the relational language of math. If you want to know about that, go read those posts. Here I’m only making clear that apologists expose their ignorance by presenting the linguistic straw man of a self-defeating statement. If you are an atheist, please let every apologist know it’s BS. If you are an apologist, stop it. Just stop. You make it hard for us to take future arguments seriously with this crap. I know apologists you respect came up with this line of reasoning, but they shouldn’t make you respect a shitty argument more than it is worth. If anything, their shitty argument should make you respect them less.

What Would Jesus Drink?

Sins as Crimes

Imagine you have a son mid-puberty. He appears to grow another inch every day, but his vocal cords are struggling to keep up with the man he is becoming. You’ve had the “birds and bees” talk, but whatever knowledge or values you managed to impart were filtered through the teenage mind. One day the police come to your door with a warrant for your son’s arrest. They take him into custody and make his bedroom a crime scene. You don’t get a full explanation until you follow the police cruiser to the station. Internet traffic monitoring provided just cause to make the boy a suspect for multiple counts of pornography viewing. Their CSI team then did a blacklight sweep and discovered suspiciously placed sperm discharges. Your son goes to court and is found guilty of both consuming pornography and masturbation, both serious felonies. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In this alternate reality, not only are watching porn and beating off crimes, they carry the same penalty as the crimes of rape and murder. Replace the word “crime” with “sin” and “police” with “God” and this alternate reality mirrors the divine judgement as described by many religious denominations. Catholicism, for example, considers porn, masturbation, rape and murder interchangeable as mortal sins--meaning that if any of these go unrepented God will send you to hell.

My question to theists is this: would you be comfortable with your government judging crimes the same as you believe God judges sin? I doubt anyone could truthfully answer “yes,” which implies that they’d be fine with their son being hauled away in the above scenario. If I were to guess, I’d say I won’t get many theists answering this question at all. To make this easier, allow me to address what I suspect will be their two main issues with the hypothetical.

“God judges, man should not.” Okay, then I assume you are comfortable with revoking all laws of man. From now on no earthly repercussions for murderers and rapists, let God sort them out. Not ideal? Okay, moving on.

“God sacrificed his only Son to save us from the punishment we deserve, providing we repent and/or accept Jesus as our Savior.” Applying this to our analogy, anyone convicted of a crime, be it masturbation or murder one, will be let free as soon as they admit to the crime and ask forgiveness. This will free up the prisons and put everyone at risk by, again, effectively taking away earthly consequences. I understand that for most religions the asking for forgiveness is ideally sincere and paired with an honest attempt to never sin again, but theists must also admit that the attempt nearly always fails and cite our sinful (or in this case criminal) nature as the cause. Same applies here. A stricter reading of this issue would make the criminal in question need to beg forgiveness from the State, worship either the arresting officer or the President of the State, and act in service of the State until they die in order to escape the sentence of life in prison. God, if he exists in any capacity similar to the beliefs of Abrahamic religions, is no more just or merciful or loving than a totalitarian government with 24/7 surveillance and absolute enforcement. Knowing that I once thought otherwise is a testament to the power of indoctrination.

Tweet Round-up

When someone says "It's against my religion," I hear "It's against my superstition."

The Catholic Church is completely infallible to those who own bibles and not history books.

Most women would never spend money at a business with the hiring policies of the Church, yet they often give when the basket comes around. I don't get it.

When met with an apologetic claim, I ask "why do you think that?" More often than not, it is because they were told to.

The more debates I have with Christians, the more sure I am that they are wrong. I always think that I couldn't be more sure.

"Moral perfection" doesn't equal mass killings in my book, just in the holy book.

Apologists have a lot of certain knowledge about God's nature, power & motivation until a hard question is asked. Then its all mysterious.

I like to think the Arthur Fonzarelli was an aaaaaatheist.

Jesus preaching the Golden Rule is his validation of subjective morality. What I want done to me may not be the same as what you want done to you.

Apologist when posed a yes or no question in which the answer would expose flaws in their argument: "Read this 200 page book for the answer." (Related: What kind of diabolical BS artist can give you the run-around for 200 pages?)

Calling Islam the religion of peace is like calling FOX News fair and balanced.

For more follow @deityshmeity

Would I Play By God's Rules If I Knew He Was Real?

If I could know that the Christian God exists, would I worship him? Let’s explore the angles.

Why I should not worship Jehovah:

Regardless of apologetic talking points, the God of the Bible is imperfect. He makes mistakes and he contradicts himself. Between creating a talking serpent that thwarts his own plan and feeling the need to sacrifice himself (or his son, depending on who you ask) to change his own rules of eternity, God has done little to inspire worship. I would also have to excuse divine choices that I fundamentally disagree with--like allowing anyone to suffer infinitely for finite sins. I imagine some of those suffering I even knew in life. Complying with God’s wishes and humbling myself to him would be like a German with freshly dead Jewish friends admitting allegiance to Hitler.

Why I should worship Jehovah:

While their commitment to extreme punishment for those they consider distasteful is on par, God and Hitler have some major differences. God forgives and shows mercy as long as you follow his strict criteria. I doubt Hitler would consistently allow Jews to live even if they all agreed to become Nazis. Also, unlike Hitler, we wouldn’t be here if not for God. The man upstairs also managed to impart some positive life lessons, so perhaps the Almighty deserves at least as much respect as my parents. More than this, the nummero uno reason why I am compelled to worship Jehovah is because I will go to hell if I don’t. Yes, heaven also factors in, but the stick is more compelling then the carrot in this case.

Weighing the options. I completely understand the anti-theists who call God evil, but I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, he kills humans, but I kill bugs. I eat cows and chicken and delicious, delicious pigs. I don’t consider myself evil so I would be hypocritical to call God evil. We are inferior to him in all respects (unless you include human-centric morality.) I can call God irresponsible, unfair, even cruel--but not evil. When it comes down to it, I would be completely unprincipled and play according to God’s rules, yet I think I would. I’m not proud of it. I am fully aware how that makes me a Nazi, but I’m also aware how it doesn’t. I like to think I would have sacrificed everything to fight Hitler even as a German under the pressure of death and threat to my family. I think I would because I could have rationalized that Hitler could be overthrown and any contribution to that cause is worth anything. I can’t rationalize that the Almighty can be overthrown. It’s right there in the name, all mighty. I would worship an erratic tyrant and try desperately to convince others to follow suit because no cost or benefit in our x number of years on earth compare to the forever after. To keep some scrap of dignity I would tell myself that one day in heaven I’ll be able to talk some sense into God...that won't happen. Mostly because Jehovah doesn’t fucking exist.

Music Shmusic: Jay-Z's Heaven

Usually rap has a lot of "praise the Lord" talk mixed in with lyrics promoting questionable morals. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a song with a more skeptical take from Jay-Z.

Listen to Jay=Z talk a little about the sony in this promo for his new album, which I happen to like a lot.
 

Grundy Disagrees #4

My latest disagreement spawned from a Two Catholic Men and a Blog post on the so-called "availability" of God and/or the Holy Spirit. I pointed out that the knowledge of the God's word is not universally available, rather it is asymmetrically available. Some people are born into areas where Catholicism hasn't spread or at least isn't mainstream, some people die before hearing about Jesus, and others are so indoctrinated into competing religions that a near insurmountable boundary is present. Basically, if the Catholic God exists, it is unfair for his word to come so easily to some and not at all to others. Further more, this God is unjust to judge symmetrically given the circumstance he put in place.

Joe, one of the two guys, disagreed.

Here are excerpts of the exchange:

Joe: We must do our part and God will provide the rest. We who are indwelt are called to bring God's love to the whole world. It is OUR fault if some do not hear of God when they are accessible to believers.

You put the fault on God who "makes it so much harder." Again, it is not God who does this. We who imagine and teach the competing worldview are to blame.

God is not a genie in the sky who is expected to wave a hand and fix our troubles. Part of our salvation comes from working to solve just these issues.

Lastly, God judges how God will. He has revealed to believers how he will judge, but God can always save who he will without consulting anyone. Maybe many will be saved in spite of their ignorance. We don't know.

You may say, "perhaps it is better for them to remain ignorant." Maybe. Maybe not. We do know God is just and fair. The question is then, "why bet on ignorance when sure knowledge is available?"

Me: You seem to be trying the justify the lack of availability from the perspective of the believer, but from the perspective of those who don't know about Jesus or have been conditioned to believe otherwise, it's surely not their fault they are in the situation they are in. That's what I'm saying, and it makes God, if he exists, neither just nor fair.

Joe: God does not reveal to us the ultimate fate of non-believer. He only reveals to us our responsibility towards them. Whatever their fate, we as believers are held responsible for our own actions (or non-action) towards them. 

As God is both just AND fair, the fact that someone is the situation they are in when it is not their fault would certainly work in their favor. You are certainly correct in pointing out that circumstances reduce an individual's culpability. 

The Catholic Church has NEVER said that anyone is in Hell. Not even Judas. We hope that Hell is empty. 

Do you see the difference?

Me: I see the difference in regards to hell, but denying some heaven while giving others that reward when asymmetrical circumstances make it so much harder for some to be aware and to believe is the definition of unfair. So, I'll ask you the same question I asked Ben: Do non-Christians go to heaven? Can they?

If the answer is no, God is unfair. If you don't know, then the fairness of God is also unknown and I don't think availability is the best topic to blog about.

Joe: Would you be considered unfair to give a gift to someone but not to another? I would think you would say no.

In the same way, human life is given as gift. If you were in the position of God to create matter from nothing and then bring a non-living being to life, say a clay figure, (see my Clay Man post) you would be perfectly in your rights to do whatever you wish with that Clay figure. You can take away its life without moral impact. It's YOUR stuff. You gave it life and can take it away again.

This is a very hard teaching to accept (as clay men). If you do not accept it, then we have different ideas as to what's "fair" and I'd beware of people who ask you for money since you'd be unfair or unjust not to give money to each and every person who asks.

If God gives life (and eternal life) as gift, it's not mysterious, but it IS up to him. If he wants to explain some of his rationale to us so we can have a chance of obtaining it, even THAT is gift. We are fortunate to listen to it!

Me: I don't accept that teaching and neither do you. Take a child who wouldn't be alive without you. According to this teaching, it is perfectly acceptable for you and your mate to abort the fetus, after all, it's YOUR stuff. I know you don't feel this way because I see you are pro-life. Further, once the kid is born anything from incestual pedophilia to murder one is fine when committed by the parent, right?

Wrong. You and I are both right in not accepting this teaching.

It goes on. Check the comments or weigh in yourself here.

No Interpersonal Revelations