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Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?
Theocracy? No Thanks
Atheism and Marriage
I do not believe in God. I have no need of God, therefore I have no need to pray. I do not intend to start a lifetime of systematically lying to myself. I believe lying is wrong, so I don't do it.
Your analysis of my upbringing is totally wide of the mark. I was brought up within a religious family and became a choirboy, which meant I attended church at least twice per week throughout most of my childhood. I was not forced into believing anything against my will, I was encouraged to become a Christian. I was confirmed a member of the Church of England while was I was unsure of the matter, I hoped perhaps that faith would follow later. It didn't. Quite the opposite. It became clear that I did not believe in God and I felt so much better for becoming clear about the matter in my mind. I stopped trying to believe and just allowed myself to believe whatever seemed reasonable to conclude based on the evidence I came across. I knew many clever people did not believe in God and had alternative explanations for “the great mysteries” of life. I rejected the idea that mystery was a good thing. Ignorance was nothing to be proud off, especially wilful ignorance, and that is exactly what faith was.
People who believe that it is only their belief in “a higher power” that is stopping them from behaving in an immoral way are slandering themselves and our species. Morality is human, all societies develop systems of morality, which are always immediately colonized by their religious beliefs. In China not stealing is being true to communist ideology, in Iran not stealing is being true to Allah. This is of course nonsense. Stealing is wrong in all societies because it is impossible to have a good society and a stable economy with rampant theft. It is not Buddha, Karl Marx, Mohammed or any Sikh Guru that makes it wrong. Other ideas are considered immoral in some belief systems but not others. Some frown on drugs but allow dancing, some consider that a man can have multiple wives and as long as the right God is consulted on the matter that is perfectly OK. And of course some religions put a greater price on honouring the silly symbols of their religion than on the lives of its adherents. Dying for a turban makes a man a martyr? It makes him a dolt, a dead dolt.
If any activity is allowed by some societies but not others that is a pretty good indication that such laws are human in nature and not divine. If it was divine will that sodomy, meat eating, dancing, polygamy, enjoying sex and drinking alcohol were sins then you should expect all religions to pick up on that will. They don't. It is illogical to imagine that God could be responsible for telling mankind what the universal sins were and at the same time regard such deity as the source of religion-specific teachings. God cannot be perfect and infallible and at the same time idiosyncratic and capricious.
A much simpler explanation is that humanity is naturally moral but has no universal explanation of why that is so. Culture has a great potential to get wrapped up with morality and organized religion moves in on morality as if it owns the patent. The bigger and more inter-connected cultures become the more they tend to fix on the same ideas of what are moral issues and what are not. At the highest levels of organization, above all religions, come international structures such as the UN which despite avoiding all mentions of beliefs in deities of any kind (at least as the source of morality) manage to come up with quite similar ideas of what is good and what is bad. This is no surprise. Morality is normal human behaviour, we are social animals, both explicit rules and internalized rules are essential for a satisfactory life. Chaos and anarchy (in the unambiguously bad guise) are anathema to mankind. Only those who have less than nothing to lose have anything to gain by chaos.
However people also have a tendency to distrust strangers, for understandable reasons, foreigners and strangers are often invaders who are out to do down those they encounter. The fact that strangers are likely to have different beliefs makes it easier to reinforce the idea that morality is caused by beliefs and gods. Different languages, different cultures and different religions grow up reinforcing themselves and their separate identity. Those stuck within such cultures find it very easy to believe that it is their God that is making people moral. However this is absurd. There is morality in all human societies. Murder, rape, adultery (the stealing of men's sexual property) and theft (from members of the in-group) are universal morals. In some cultures there are other aspects to morality, such as extending the right not to have property stolen to other people, even women and foreigners. This morality does not need a god, it springs up everywhere, including in societies with simple animistic religions, atheistic religions such as Buddhism and in societies that have grown out of, put down or thrown off religions.
Religious people are, fundamentally, people. They have human desires. One very human trait is to enjoy being one up on everybody else. By believing the right thing and by acting in the prescribed ways people can gain more status through religion than they can through any other form of human endeavour. You may object that the deeply religious are humble and pious but that is not the point, they are still happy for you to get the impression that they are holier than anybody else. He might be squatting at the top of a pole or living in coarse robes but that is all a status claim. The bloke may be ugly, stupid, poor, unemployable and offensive in personal habits and odours but by being a holy man he has trumped all the kings and maharajas, sportsmen and film-stars. Thousands of people get their status not by their actions but by their beliefs, as if believing something is of itself a worthy thing. Worthless parasites!
It is not necessary to have a belief in some god to be charitable and to seek to solve the problems of poverty and inequality. The USA is full of people who loudly declare how important their God is to them but their nation contributes less per head and by the size of the economy than most countries in Europe where secularism is more common. The biggest charities in Britain are secular, not religious and the biggest names behind charitable activities are often atheists, humanists or people who keep their religious views private. Many religious people who are involved with charitable works are deeply concerned with spreading their message more than alleviating poverty or have weird and vaguely perverted ideas of doing charitable works for the good it does for the souls rather than the human suffering it avoids.
Another interesting thing to ponder is that highly religious countries like India, Afghanistan and the USA have inadequate provision for the poor while some of the best state support comes in countries which have low-key religious traditions, thoroughly secular communities or formally atheistic states. Criminality is rife in many highly religious societies, American prisons are full of religious believers. The idea that belief in gods keeps people inline is not borne out by statistics. Millions of people are atheists and lead very moral lives, this fact is something the religious find very hard to come to terms with. I often get accused of being ungodly for drinking, taking drugs, eating meat or not hating homosexuals. But such matters are not part of any universal code given by God to all believers. Billions of religious people eat meat and drink alcohol. Millions of religious people take drugs as part of their religious rituals. There is no part of my behaviour as an atheist which would meet with universal disapproval by all religious people, except perhaps my refusal to accord religion some special status above and beyond questioning and ridicule.
Believing in something with faith does not make you a better person, it makes you a victim of ideas you let have a greater value than your own self. I do not believe you when you say you do not believe you are better than me. All religions foster the impression that believing makes people better, even if the formal words used may say the exact opposite, the implicit message is always saying that being holy and faithful is the best thing that a person can be, more important than health, wealth or social status. A total fuck-up can redeem himself by faith. Bible bashing Christians rejoice when cannibalistic mass killers accept Jesus as their saviour. Boys who have done nothing good with their entire lives can become the heroes of their community by demonstrating their faith by blowing themselves up on a bus. The message from all this is loud and clear, faith is all that counts, faith is everything.
Atheists don't live by divine and pure morals because there are no such thing. Some atheists use their lack of belief to justify whatever they want to do, these tend to be the reactive atheists, those responding to a religion that has been forced on them. Such people are rightly despised. Living without morality should not be acceptable behaviour. However many religious people like to paint all atheists like this, as if all atheists are thoroughly amoral and capable of any actions. This is an absurd charge.
You say you cannot love without God. That is either a meaningless statement or a terrible and wicked lie. Love is a human emotion. It is an irrational commitment between one individual and another. Its irrationality is the basis of its success and its underlying rationality. The capacity to fall in love has a real survival advantage because it strengthens our relationships and commitments. It is a real emotion, a real drive. It helps us to irrationally commit to a single individual because it is only by having an absurd level of commitment to an individual that stable couples can be formed which have the strength to cope with whatever life throws at them. All human literature is full of tales of such commitment and the sacrifices that men are prepared to make for their women, and women for their children (and less often women for their men). The direct beneficiaries of such altruistic love is not a non-existent God or a divine plan but the genes that such people carry. A man who loves his wife and children will not stop to calculate exactly how much danger it is sensible for him to brave to save his family, the emotion of love will make those decisions for him. And it is no surprise to find out just how often that emotion gets it just right, just how a geneticist, games theorist and evolutionary biologist would agree is the right degree of risk and sacrifice. Emotions are not something godly added onto our animal nature, they are our animal nature. Emotions do not seem to come from our minds, they come from elsewhere, and language often betrays that sentiment with talk of gut feelings and heart's desires. This is not true, the emotions are the work of our brains, but deeper down below the threshold which our conscious mind can directly control.
Religious people postulate that the answer to every difficult question is the will of God. Science finds again and again that mysteries that hae previously been put down to the will or whim of God have thoroughly rational and understandable natural explanations. In view of the track record on this matter it is thoroughly reasonable to work on the basis that any issues to which science does not yet have an explanation are likely to be demystified in future. This is not a faith position, it is a reasonable opinion that cannot be shown to be irrational.
The truth is not written in any books. The truth is there to be discovered.
If I promised not to influence my children would you promise not to influence yours? I guess not. Believe it or not I have not influenced my children's beliefs, I have not told them “this is what we believe” or “good people believe this story” or anything of the kind. I have not even had a conversation with them about belief in God or religion. My daughter believes in Jesus, and, apparently, angels and fairies too, she is 13. My son is not yet 10 and has declared he does not believe in God. If they want to discuss such matters with me I will discuss them, I do not see it as reasonable behaviour to force beliefs and fears into the minds of children. Indeed I would go as far as to say that it is wrong, a form of child abuse that is no less evil for being widespread or done for sincere motives.
Your fairy story of God's will and birth and rebirth seems a very elaborate way to describe the way things are and square that with our beliefs about what is fair and reasonable. Life is unfair, it is offensive to our sensibilities of fairness and justice. The God who works in mysterious ways is a story designed to show that what seems unfair and arbitrary is in fact in some hidden way fair and beautiful. If it was true such a story would be uplifting. As it is a lie it is evil, it encourages people not to challenge the way things are by suggesting that this life is only a small part of the ultimate reality. But this life is the only thing we have. To spend it preparing for something that is never going to happen is a terrible waste. It is difficult to imagine anything more scandalous than wasting an entire lifetime to die in the vain hope of something greater to come, unless of course it is wasting an entire lifetime for something that isn't going to come on the basis of trusting the word of the people whose love you should be able to rely on and yourself spreading those lies to those you love.
There is a widespread fallacy that if you have a sexually transmitted disease you can rid yourself of it by having sex with a virgin. It is totally untrue, but it has a twisted kind of logic to it that appeals to something in our psyche that ensures that it crops up again and again in different centuries and different cultures. I wonder whether religion isn't something of the same kind, as if by infecting a new virginal mind you can bury your own doubts and more easily accept the lies you have been told.
The teaching of morality in a framework of divine retribution is profoundly stupid. If people think the only reason to treat people with respect is because God wills it they become rudderless hollow shells if they lose their belief in God. It does take a little more effort to explain to a child why an action is wrong rather than just reaching for the God stick and beating them with that but it is a much better way to teach. If children understand the hurt that their actions can cause other people they can begin to develop their own morality that is not based on a lie. You may say that this does not guarantee good behaviour. When the day comes that the prisons contain nothing but atheists you can win that point. Religion does not prevent crime. All societies have religion, all societies have crime. Some societies have atheists. Some societies are civilized. The correlation between atheism and civilization is stronger than that between atheism and crime. In American prisons the proportion of atheists is lower than that in the outside community. The proportion of born-again Christians is higher than that in the outside community. One of the most civilized and law-abiding communities on Earth is China, which encourages atheism and has not been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of crime and immorality.
Teaching a trusting young mind in its formative stages about gods, devils and eternal torment is a form of child abuse that we should rightly condemn as being outrageous and unforgivable. I hope I live to see the day when indoctrination of children is cast aside as being as barbaric as making them into slaves.
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
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After reading the whole of what you wrote, the same point comes to mind that you are blinded. The reason i say this is you use your big words and believe you have an explanation for most things so that everything is explanable, so you clearly undersatnd, but what you are missing is the hidden things in life. Why do you think there are more born-again Christians in USA prisons than there are in the country and there are more atheists in the country than there are in prison, is because you think everything stops here that this snapshot in time justifies this great point of there not being a God. I cannot speak of God as if i am the great knower of him but, think of it open minded and logically, if there were a great being who controlled everything, why would he need to bestow his greatness, and messages onto someone that does not believe and rejects the belief, than to someone who believes in God but is living an ungodly like lifestyle. It would be most obvious that the person who would take everything as the will of God to be more responsive to an message from God that an non- believer. I believe that is why God makes the non-believers more comfortable in their life, and makes it harder for us who do believe so that we can prove our selves to him. I do sincerely apologize for making the assumptions of your upbringing, but there has to be a justification of why you stop believing, and the one that comes to min=d is that you didn't believe in the first place. From reading what you say i feel a lot of hate, you have hate for this world and what is and has occurred in it, that is why you couldn't love and or believe in anybody/thing that could of created it. What you mention about the turbans, i think you got a bit confused. Being a Marty is somebody who will lose there physical life form for his/her God. So when a Sikh refuses to take off their turban even to the point where death may be imposed, this is merely somebody who is standing up for what they believe in, and staying true to their Guru and the thousands of people who have been murder because of it. I could write on and on and so could you, but what would be the point so that you could say a big word put them all together and than confuses the reader. Every body has there day, so will you. You can say what you like, you can post this message on your site, and curse it all day long, what good will it do, none, because all your doing is spreading your hate for God international, worldwide. You can write about the evils of this world and the good of this world. Today a lady i work with told me her friend lost her 3 months baby she then said 'what the point of giving a child to somebody, to just take it away. that isn't a God' i stayed quite for a while and thought about what she said but no, everything comes down to faith and how strong your faith, everything in this world, including people is not promised, it not definite. I think it was a bad idea for me to e-mail you in the first place because all i've allowed you to do is use your reasons and justification on everything i have said. God Bless p.s. please do not respond, because we both have our own views and neither of us are gonna change that, so why waste our time. |
I've been wasting my time on theists for five years.
The reason I believe there are more born again Christians than there are atheists in prison is based on a little thing called evidence, statistics, part of the empirical scientific method. The population of prisons in America is like the population of America, but disproportionately male, black, poor and stupid. Not disproportionately less religious or less Christian. Atheists are under-represented in prisons compared to the external population, “born again” Christians are over-represented. This fact does not prove there is no God, but it does prove the simplistic idea that religion causes morality is highly suspect.
There is no way to prove there is no God. It is quite impossible to do because the religious define their gods in such a way that not being provable is one of their good points. Attempting to directly prove there is no god is an entirely pointless exercise because it cannot be done, there are no tools available to do it. The most powerful scientific tool is logic, but gods are immune from logic (if and when they choose to be), or created logic in their own image or can play with logic to hide away from those who lack faith. I see no reason to waste my finite life trying to disprove the existence of gods, except as an exercise in satire.
Of course if there was a god he wouldn't make himself known to those who don't believe. Likewise if there were not a god only those who believed in such a god would think he contacted them. The universe would look exactly the same whether there was a shy god or no god. The simple fact that supernatural beliefs seem to be pretty much universal is evidence that the human mind is capable of imagining gods. It is just an act of perverse faith to assume that somehow all cultures can make some kind of a real connection with god and yet get all the details wrong. It is a much simpler matter to believe that beliefs in gods, fate and supernatural forces is in some way part of the way our brains work, perhaps not universally but existing across all cultures just as homosexuality and left-handedness exists in all cultures. By postulating that there will exist sensitive people in all cultures it becomes more or less inevitable that a religion will form in any given culture because it is just a matter of time before sensitivity meets up with a persuasive personality and a prophet, shaman or guru emerges. Once such a person is around ideas will be put together and spread, memes will be born. How those memes spread depends entirely on how well they appeal to the minds of the people who hear them. I suggest that the simple fact that never in the history of humanity has a religion travelled uphill is very significant.
By travelling uphill I mean a package of ideas coming from a backward culture coming to dominate a powerful culture. Never in history has a group of farmers looked into the next valley and seen a bunch of hunter gatherers and adopted their culture and religion. Never. When the British Empire was at its height Christianity swept through non-Islamic Africa like cholera. In India it was an entirely different story. India was not a backward culture compared to the culture of Britain, as a result Indians did not simply adopt British culture wholesale and indiscriminately. Indians were quick to pick up on things they found novel and useful but simply did not see the need to throw out their religions. Indian religions had a long history of interacting with other powerful religions, only the strong had survived. Indian religions were used to competing against other powerful mature religions, they had developed survival strategies. In contrast Christianity had a similar effect on the indigenous religious cultures of southern Africa, Americas and Australia as cats and rats have had on dozens of small islands across the world: the native species were all wiped out in a matter of a few years. The British and Indians saw each other's religions as being on a similar level, there were no mass conversions in either direction, no synthesis, in the main just small scale and individual conversions.
That pattern I see as excellent evidence that religions are a cultural phenomenon, not the result of direct divine intervention in human lives. If gods really could make people believe in them then the pattern we should expect to see would be very different. We would not see missionaries going out to find primitive people, we would find primitive people going looking for enlightenment or sharing their knowledge of gods' will with other peoples. When people of high material culture meet people of primitive material culture the primitive people ask about the material culture, the missionaries just teach about hell. God doesn't seem to be telling any of the missionaries the things he told the primitive people. Why? My explanation is simple. What about yours?
I have no hate for the world. That is a preposterous idea. I am concerned about the world, I want the world to be better and I intend to do something about it, not just pray for it. If I hated the world why would I care so much about it? You still seem to be wedded to this idea that being good and being godly are the same thing, that believing in god is loving and not is hating. There are some atheists who are nihilistic jerks. They usually grow out of both the nihilism and the atheism. One of my main reasons for writing my website and using the tone I do is to engage with these people and inoculate them against theism, so they merely grow out of being jerks and don't feel the need to become religious in the process.
There is no point in me preaching to the converted and being polite to the religious almost as if I didn't care that they are wrong and encouraging further error. My mission is to appeal to people who are atheists or agnostics and to give them the encouragement they need to strengthen their own beliefs. I do not expect to convert anybody from any religious belief to atheism, I aim to enable the confused to become more comfortable with atheism so they do not feel the temptation to slide back into the stifling clutches of a faith in later life. All this means I am serving the cause best by adopting a style of debating with theists that is firm and goes to edge of being impolite without being gratuitously abusive. I do not intend to be hateful. It is difficult to avoid hurting people when they have a parasite or cancer inside their brain. I love the people who I debate with, but I hate the ideas that hold them in thrall. If those people interpret that as hating them it is only to be expected, as they have adopted the memes that control them as being the best part of themselves.
Have you ever known a father tell his daughter that the man she has chosen is wrong for her? Young women in that situation are very quick to say that their fathers hate them but anybody on the outside of the issue can see that is nonsense, if the father hated the daughter he would not care who she chose. The daughter has associated one idea, her love, as being the core of her being and responds to attacks on that love as attacks on her. Please see my attitude to those with religious beliefs as being like the thoughts of such a father, if I didn't love or care for the person than I wouldn't be interested in their beliefs, it is only because I care for the person that I care that they are holding beliefs that are wrong, damaging and dangerous. I do passionately hate the idea of faith in gods because I think it is harmful to society and the individual. Just like a loving father I can see how happy religion makes people but I can also see beyond that.
Religion gives people an illusory sense of security. Billions of people have died horrible deaths while knowing as if a fact that this could never happen, that their god would save them from suffering. People do die of starvation, get buried alive, eaten by tigers or sharks or trapped and burned to death in houses and cars. People also languish in prison for crimes they did not commit and suffer unbelievable hardship or misfortune. This is reality. Believing it will not happen to you because of some god's will and so being happy is an illusion, just as much of a dangerous illusion as taking heroin, which gives people that wonderful feeling of accomplishment without having to go to the trouble of actually accomplishing anything.
I do not deny that religious believers are often happy, healthy and well adjusted people, but that does not mean they are right. Studies have shown that rich and happy people are over-optimistic and unrealistic. Positive thinking is a good thing, I have no argument with it if that is the way that such people are. I do have a big quarrel with absurd Pollyanna sentimentality being foisted upon everybody and truth being distorted in the process.
Your defence of those who will die rather than take off a turban seems to be rather hollow. I do not see any distinction between dying for your beliefs and choosing not to avoid being killed for your beliefs. It seems an absurd waste of a life. I cannot understand how anybody who believes in a good god would consider such an action to be laudable. Refusing to commit a serious crime is laudable, I have enormous respect for pilots who refuse to bail out an aircraft before they have ensured it will not hit a populated area or soldiers who refuse to obey illegal orders and so get shot rather than become murderers. But refusing to take off a turban stops being noble as soon as it causes a death, anybody's death. It is a thoroughly selfish act, an act of machismo and bravado.
When you said God bless what did you mean? The kind of blessing such as “giving a child” and then “taking it away again”? What is wrong with simply wishing somebody well? You know I do not share your belief in a god. People often use such expressions to me “in real life” and I do not say anything, I have no doubt that they would be horrified if said that I didn't believe in their god and didn't want such a wish. I have no doubt they would say it was just an expression, no harm was meant and why didn't I just get a life. Now you know better. You know I do not want such a sentiment. Ask yourself why you need to do it, ask yourself if there is any benefit to you from transmitting your beliefs to people you know do not share them, especially in such a way as cannot ever hope to influence anybody in any significant way. Your throwaway “God Bless” is, as you well know, like a spit against a forest fire, you cannot expect to make soup by dropping a single pea into a lake, it was a totally futile gesture, and unwanted, likely to be received as hostile.
I hope the lifestyle comes together,
Martin