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X Amish Atheist

~ fighting dogma from behind the lines…

X Amish Atheist

Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Bible is Ambiguous – No Informative Value

09 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Epistemology, My Philosophy, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ambiguity, ambiguous, Bible, poetry


The Bible is ambiguous and most Christians, I believe, can accept that. Given almost any passage, different people give different interpretations of the passage. Even a person who interprets a passage one way may interpret it another way years later. The Bible is an ambiguous text.

My argument is that the Bible, at least all the parts that are ambiguous, does not have informative value. If the authors wanted to convey information, to provide a text with informative value, they would have written clearly, and not in metaphors and parables. Like poetry, most of the Bible is of no informative value. Like poetry, I would argue that religious texts don’t serve to convey information as much as they serve to tease out our own feelings and beliefs. That is how different people interpret the Bible and poetry differently and how a person might interpret a passage one way and then interpret it differently a year later.

One argument that I’ve had to defend against is that the writers of the Bible didn’t intend for their text to be ambiguous. That’s just how they wrote things back then and if we find it ambiguous it’s a failure on our part. I disagree. We can point to any number of earlier writers, Aristotle for instance, who wrote unambiguous text that clearly conveys what the writer meant.

All religious texts that I have encountered are ambiguous, and they must be so to survive. An unambiguous text has informative value that can be compared with reality and tested. A religion based on an unambiguous text that made specific predictions (including dates and times) would either become a part of the body of scientific knowledge or it would be discredited.

There is definitely an allure to ambiguous texts. We don’t completely understand them and so we tend to assume that what they’re trying to say must be wise indeed. Ambiguity is not so much a technique for accurately conveying information as it is a technique for teasing out what you already believe. For that reason, there is some kind of value there–just not informative value.

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Natural Law: The Foundation of Morality?

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Ethics, My Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

amish, ethics, morality, natural law


The other day I asked an Amish friend of mine whether he thinks abortion is morally acceptable. His adamant answer was an unequivocal; No. When asked why, he says it’s unnatural; it doesn’t conform to natural law.

My friend is not the typical close-minded Amish person and his idea is that natural law is based on the physical laws; the laws of nature. He agrees with me that evolution is a natural outcome of biological agents living in a universe with our physical laws. He goes on to assert that the characteristics of evolution, such as the tendency to survive as an individual and to reproduce as a species; is natural law. Abortion, he says, is morally wrong because it does not conform to this natural law. It opposes the natural law of reproduction. He claims that morality is objective and it can be derived from the physical laws in the aforementioned way.

My first response to his argument was that abortion isn’t found in the animal world (and is unnatural in that regard) because it requires advanced technology which non-human animals don’t have. My second criticism was that we engage in a lot of activities which aren’t “natural” but he considers to be moral. Marriage and monogamy, for instance, do not conform to his idea of natural law.

My friend admitted that he would have to rethink his position but he refuses to accept my position; that there is no inherent or objective morality, there is only behavior that we don’t put up with.

What do you think? Is morality a set of objective, non-changing, ultimate-truth, ideals or does it evolve with society?

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The Hypocrisy of School Prayer

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Other

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

atheism, Christianity, hypocrisy, public prayer, school prayer


I don’t know if it’s as much of an issue today or not but I know that several years ago Christians were making a big deal about prayer in public schools. Many Christians wanted school-led prayer allowed in public schools while secular groups pointed out that it would violate the First Amendment.

Well, I want to point out something else. Public prayer is a hypocrisy. Christians are informed very unambiguously that public prayer is done by hypocrites.

Matthew 6: 5-6 (KJV)

5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

It is clear that those people that pray in churches, out on the street, or anywhere in public, are not succeeding as Christians. It is clear, according to Christian gospel, that anybody advocating prayer in school is doing so in blatant opposition to the teachings of Jesus. So just shut up you hypocrites, you have defeated yourselves!

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Catch me on Penn’s Sunday School Podcast

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Other

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

atheism, penn jillette, penn's sunday school


This Sunday you can listen to me on Penn’s Sunday School. If all goes according to plan I’ll be on this Sunday (September 9, 2012) soon after noon Pacific time. If all does not go as planned then I’m sure I’ll be on some other Sunday.

Penn’s Sunday School is a podcast by comedian Penn Jillette–an outspoken libertarian and atheist. Penn Jillette might be best known as half of the Penn & Teller team–a duo of Vegas illusionists and stars of the television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

I first became familiar with Penn Jillette’s work through Penn & Teller: Bullshit! This funny, irreverent, and very skeptical television show tears apart many practices and beliefs that people generally take for granted. Even my very Christian girlfriend enjoyed the show although she would frequently shake her head at their irreverence and rampant blasphemy.

Penn Jillette is one of my favorite living atheists and when I first started my Twitter account several weeks ago, he was like the third person I followed. Right after Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, of course. Lo and behold, as I was perusing his most recent tweets I came upon one mentioning an ex-Amish atheist being on their show. I wanted to meet this guy (there are so few of us) so I tweeted at Jillette. It turns out the ex-Amish guy had been lying about being ex-Amish, what a bummer. Anyway, so I offered to be on their show if they wanted an ex-Amish person, and long story short, if all goes well, I’ll be on the show this coming Sunday.

This will be my first ever “public appearance” and I’m not sure how it will go. In real life I am a very introverted person that does not enjoy socializing. Alone and in my head, or when writing, I generally appear fairly intelligent, but discourse in a social context reduces me to a useless lump of quivering flesh. Hopefully, the veil of anonymity promised to me by the producer of Penn’s Sunday School will short-circuit that response so I don’t embarrass myself. Pray for me… just kidding 🙂

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The Genius Kid in Amish School

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Early Life, The Amish

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

amish, astronomy, education, genius, intelligence, IQ, parochial schools


My first eight years of education, and so far, my only “formal” education has been in an Amish parochial school. How quaint to have been educated in a small one-room Amish schoolhouse with about a dozen other students, you might effuse excitedly. Well screw you! Amish parochial school stunted my intellectual growth and that pisses me off.

When I was a young Amish boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, I was fascinated with the night sky. I looked to the stars and I marveled when comet Hale-Bopp appeared in 1997. I dreamed of becoming an astronomer or an astronaut but of course I knew that I would never become either of those–I was Amish. Sometimes I wished my parents were normal so that my dreams would have a fighting chance of becoming reality.

My Dad, who was a great father despite all the religious crap, gave me one of those little rotating star charts one Christmas. With a cheap pair of binoculars and that star chart, I spent many enjoyable evenings outside, identifying constellations and writing notes about individual stars and planets. I read many astronomy books and taught myself ‘stargazing’ until I was able to find most specific visible stars, several of the brighter nebulas, and of course the Andromeda galaxy and the visible planets.

Academically, I did well in the Amish parochial school compared to the other students. I found the work easy and would work ahead on my material because I found it fun. My Amish teacher didn’t find that amusing and warned me several times not to work ahead of the other students. One day she had enough of it and spanked my offending hand with a ruler. That day I learned that it was important not to take initiative and not to do more than is asked of me.

I was always the nerd in school. As soon as I had an individual lesson finished I would go to the small library along one wall and grab several books to read. Often during my schoolwork I would think of some subject (e.g. radio astronomy) that fascinated me and upon completion of my schoolwork, I would go to the bookshelf and select the “R” encyclopedia. After reading the entry I would go back and select several more encyclopedias so I could read related subjects or more in-depth entries. This behavior was of course not normal and the other Amish students, many of whom had nothing but religious books at home and didn’t particularly like reading, would mock me for it. I became used to the word “bookworm” being used like most people would use “child rapist”.

Many of the Amish in our community liked to hunt. The men were quite competitive about it and always bragged about who shot the deer with the biggest antlers. I felt compassion for the helpless animals and told my fellow classmates that I would never harm an animal. I quickly became used to the word “environmentalist” being used like most people would use “child rapist”. Of course I didn’t like being mocked and after many hours of heart-wrenching rumination, I decided that I would show them and would become a better hunter than any of them. Years later, I actually did.

One day while reading through our encyclopedia set at home, I learned that Jupiter had quite a few moons. I was amazed by this knowledge as I had only been aware of one moon up to that point. Some weeks later I mentioned this fact in passing to my fellow classmates. They informed me none too politely that there is only one moon. It didn’t take long for me to get used to “stargazer” being used like most people would use “child rapist”.

That evening I told my Dad what had happened when I tried to enlighten my classmates. My Dad told me gently that he believed me that Jupiter had more moons and told me that the other students just didn’t know any better. It wasn’t very consoling, I wanted my friends to like me, not my Dad. To me, the concept of intellectual superiority was alien. I was told that I was “good at school” and “good with numbers”. Nobody told me that I was smart. Nobody helped me understand why I was so different or how my weirdness would help me later in life.

I stopped gazing up at the night sky and I put away my star charts and astronomy books, thinking wrongly that it was something that only weird people do. I stopped reading so much, tried harder to fit in, and withdrew into myself, intellectually. To this day I would rather sit silent than correct, even a friend, a factual error that he or she has made. It is a tactic I learned in Amish school to appear normal.

I can’t help but think that if my parents had been a normal family and had provided me with the education that I needed and desired, I would be doing great things by now. I like the idea of freedom when it comes to the educational system. I fear that if primary education is restricted to only state-run or heavily regulated schools, we could end up with a propaganda problem down the road. But Christ! Being intellectually stunted in a religious school just doesn’t feel fair to me.

Many years after leaving the Amish, I discovered a webpage with an experimental high-range I.Q. test designed by a psychologist and research scientist. I decided to try the test and after working through the number sequence problems, I submitted my answers. A day or so later, I received my score report. According to the associated statistical report for that test my score equates (at least theoretically) to an I.Q. a little higher than 160 (s.d. 16). To the ***holes who mocked me in Amish school–take that! Now if only I could get over it.

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Suicide: Exploring the Afterlife

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Metaphysics, My Philosophy, The Conversion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

adventure, agnosticism, life, pantheism, suicide


There was a short period of time in my life when I was somewhere between pantheism and agnosticism. This was when I no longer held the dogmatic belief that suicide is inherently morally wrong but I had yet to release all hope for an afterlife. It was during this period that I toyed with the idea that suicide would be the ultimate adventure (I never actually seriously considered doing it myself).

Suicide: The Game of Life

Suicide: The Game of Life

I no longer believe in an afterlife but I still hold a small secret admiration for those that take their own lives. Many people call them cowards. I call them courageous. I would never commit suicide while I was physically healthy, but that’s partially because I’m a coward but mostly because evolution selected strongly against such tendencies–in other words, I don’t want to. Also, I’m a bit of a nihilistic fellow so I think suicide would be just as pointless as living. Why bother killing yourself? Even that is ultimately pointless.

If you believe in an afterlife, wouldn’t suicide be the ultimate adventure?

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