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X Amish Atheist

~ fighting dogma from behind the lines…

X Amish Atheist

Category Archives: Religion

Why Christians should be Killing Babies

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by xamishatheist in My Philosophy, Religion

≈ 68 Comments

Tags

Christianity, God, heaven, hell


Every once in a while I exercise my right to post something that most people find utterly repulsive. This is one of those posts.

Most Christians believe in a God that judges people for their sins and sends them to eternal heaven or hell based on his judgment. Let me show you how it logically follows from those beliefs, that we should kill all newborns.

To the Christian I ask, do you believe that a newborn goes to heaven if he or she dies? If not, then you cannot claim your God to be a benevolent God. What did a newborn ever do to deserve eternal hellfire?

I’m going to assume that you believe newborns go to heaven if they die. Here is the problem with that belief: Since living life beyond the newborn stage increases the chance that a person sins, thereby reducing the chance that he or she will get into heaven, shouldn’t you take it upon yourself to kill all newborns to ensure their eternal happiness? Sure you would go to hell for your troubles but wouldn’t it be the right thing to do? Wouldn’t it be better for one person to go to hell for killing thousands of babies than for half of those babies to grow up as sinners and go to hell when they die?

The beliefs that; 1) God is benevolent, 2) God is more likely to send grown people to hell than babies, and 3) One shouldn’t kill babies, is not a coherent set of beliefs. At least one of these beliefs must be wrong. If you disagree, please tell me where my reasoning is faulty.

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The Semantics of my Atheism

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in My Philosophy, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

agnosticism, atheism, God, pantheism, religion


What really is my position on the existence of God? Am I really an atheist or am I more of an agnostic? The question isn’t as simple as it seems.

I personally dislike the atheist/agnostic labels because I feel that my position isn’t clearly defined by either. I don’t consider myself agnostic because in most cases, I think those who believe in God are making a mistake. I don’t consider myself a pure atheist because in most cases my position would not include the unequivocal statement that ‘God does not exist’. My references to “most cases” I hope will become clear soon–once I discuss the definitions of “God”. If we drill deeper, my beliefs are probably closer to agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism than to either atheism or agnosticism. It just didn’t sound right to call my blog, “X Amish Agnostic Atheist”.

My position is quite simply that; the available evidence for the existence of God, as most people would define God, does not warrant the belief in such a being. Note that the above position applies to anybody that doesn’t ascribe to the common definition of God; be they atheists, agnostics, pantheists, Buddhists, or what have you. For a period of time, I actually considered myself a pantheist and there may still be pantheistic ideas out there that I would consider.

My position is also; if you believe in God, as most people would define God, then A) you must have evidence that I do not, or B) your belief in such a God is unjustified. I am of course assuming that my determination of what makes a belief justified or not, is valid, and that I have not made a mistake in the reasoning with which I concluded that the available evidence does not justify the belief in such a God.

Now, on to definitions… With all the different religions and belief systems, God and gods are ascribed many different characteristics. Some of these Gods, I am more inclined to discard as foolish given the ready natural explanations for the things that are ascribed to them. Many cultures have believed in thunder gods and almost all of us consider the notion foolish now that we have a natural explanation for thunder. I am as atheistic about such Gods as most people are willing to unequivocally state that, “Santa Claus does not exist.”

On the other hand, if we consider a pantheistic God, such as; the universe itself is God, then I tend to be more agnostic than atheistic. However, I would consider such a God to be so ill-defined as to be almost meaningless. Is God; mathematics and the all-pervasive mathematics only? If that’s how you want to define God, then sure, I have no problem believing in mathematics.

Now, on to the semantics of the supernatural… According to many definitions of God, he is supernatural, existing outside of time and space, outside of our universe as we know it. We will never be able to detect such a God with our natural instruments and while they will never be able to prove that such a God exists, we will never be able to prove that such a God does not exist (I’m not even going to go into the whole burden of proof issue). I consider such a God; meaningless. If something is in principle undetectable, then it is by definition; nonexistent. Otherwise, the concept of existence is meaningless. Check out my older post about the Nonexistence of Undetectable Things for a more in-depth explanation of what I’m referring to.

Let’s take a break from God and talk about aliens for a moment. Do they exist? Are they out there? I don’t know. On the subject of aliens I am agnostic, but not at all atheistic (I know the word technically doesn’t apply to aliens) because they are detectable in principle. I hope they exist.

What if you were to define God only as our creator? Would I believe in the possibility of that? Sure, if you’re willing to think of abiogenesis + evolution as your God. Oh, it has to be an intelligent creator? Hmm, what about those aliens? Could aliens have created us? Well, not really… it doesn’t make sense that animals are so genetically similar to us if we humans were created by aliens (unless they created the animals from the same stockpile of DNA). Well, maybe the aliens just brought the first cellular lifeforms and allowed evolution to take its course–creating us in that sense. Could I believe in such alien Gods? While I would consider such a God not out of the realm of possibility, I do think abiogenesis is a more likely explanation. While, I believe such alien Gods are far more likely than the Christian God, I’ll remain fairly atheistic about both.

Then there’s the idea that we live in a simulation. Could an advanced species have created computers powerful enough to simulate a universe and could we be living therein? Probably! While such a God is interesting to consider, it is once again, one of those undetectable Gods that just isn’t very meaningful in our natural universe.

So what really is my position on the existence of God? It all depends on what your definition of “God” is.

Why do I call myself an “atheist” then? I don’t believe the evidence for the existence of God, as he is commonly defined, justifies a belief in God. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I think the likelihood of such a God existing, based on our current evidence, is so low that my beliefs are much more like the pure atheist than the pure agnostic. That is why I call myself an “atheist” even though in some cases I am not an atheist.

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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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The Obduracy of Religious Belief

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in My Philosophy, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

atheism, belief systems, Bible, children, education, indoctrination, metaphysics, religion, religious belief, Santa Claus, skepticism


The Christian belief in the Bible is quite unlike, for example, my current belief in “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins. Back when I believed in the Bible, I thought of it as “truth”. I also believed other books but I would think of them as good stories or as helpful information.

Why the big difference? Why did I consider one ancient text as pure truth and all other ancient texts as just stories? Why did I consider the Bible to be pure truth but other books, that I also believed to be nonfiction, were just informationally helpful?

In the Bible, fantastical stories such as a person living briefly inside of a whale, a virgin giving birth, a snake talking to people, were perfectly acceptable. Why were those fanciful stories acceptable but similar stories in other books were dismissed as myths? If I had read a story in The Blind Watchmaker that claimed a person had lived and survived inside of a dinosaur for three days, I would have been extremely skeptical. I would have asked for some serious evidence to back up this extraordinary claim. Why then, was it perfectly alright for a similar story to be in the Bible?

Some atheists will arrogantly state that they became atheist as a child when they first read the Bible. These people relate the story of how upon reading fantastical stories about talking snakes and virgin births that of course they had to discard the whole thing as mythical… as if the rest of us are just too stupid to get it.

I have a brain capable of critical analysis and I made full use of this skill when reading all but one book. Why did it take so long for me to become skeptical of the Bible? The answer to this can soon be reached once we understand that the Bible is a very significant part of a huge set of beliefs called “Christianity”.

The answers to all of these questions, I believe, can be answered by understanding what religion is and understanding how and when it is taught to a person. But first, check out this post I wrote about belief systems because I’ll be talking a lot about beliefs and belief systems for the rest of this post.

Religion is a set of beliefs that is pretty comprehensive – it pretends to explain everything from ‘why are there mountains’ to ‘how should I live my life’. Therefore, for a religious person, the set of beliefs that is his religion is almost inextricably meshed with the rest of the person’s belief system. Even changing one little belief is difficult to do because it would have ramifications for many of the other beliefs that it is intertwined with. A religion generally forms a large fraction of a person’s belief system.

Secondly, religion includes metaphysical beliefs. Metaphysical beliefs are beliefs that have to do with being and existence, and concepts such as cause and effect. Religion provides answers to such metaphysical questions as ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, ‘what was the first cause’, ‘where did we come from’, and ‘why are we here’. As such, religious beliefs become foundational to the person’s overall belief system. Individual religious beliefs become the axioms upon which the rest of the person’s belief system happily rests. To change these beliefs is almost as hard as tearing the foundation of a house out from underneath the house without disturbing the rest of the house.

The religious person suffers less from existential angst than the non-religious person because his metaphysical questions are answered. If a religious person starts questioning his own beliefs these metaphysical questions pop up and he wonders ‘well, why are we here then’. The existential angst that would be caused by unanswering these metaphysical questions is often on its own, enough of an incentive to stay with religion.

Religion is also a self-supporting set of beliefs. When questioned on one belief, the religious person can always bring out another belief that supports the first one. In this way, everything backs itself up. In logic, this is known as “circular reasoning” and it is a fallacy. In a small syllogism, circular reasoning is easy to identify and to recognize as fallacious but in a very large set of beliefs like religion, it is so easy to miss it.

Children will happily believe in Santa Claus but after learning that Santa doesn’t really exist, it is much easier for them to accept it and move on than it is for anybody to accept that their religion may not be true. Why is there such a difference? I believe it is because of the reasons I listed above. Believing in Santa is only a small set of beliefs, and it answers only one metaphysical question – ‘why should I be good’, whereas a religion is a huge set of beliefs and it answers pretty much all of the metaphysical questions.

It could also be that a child finds it easier to revise beliefs and possibly even to completely rebuild their belief system. After all, their brains are still developing and they are in the perfect stage to absorb massive amounts of information and to incorporate a massive number of beliefs.

In the previous paragraphs I explored several of the qualities of religious belief which have a direct effect on its obduracy. Now it is time to examine the methods that are used to deliver these beliefs to a person’s mind and how these methods also have an effect on its obduracy.

A baby starts off with basically an empty mind when it comes to beliefs about the nature of things. If you start with an essentially empty mind, the mind will accept the first thing that comes to it because there are no pre-existing beliefs to contradict the incoming information. For that reason, it is easy instill any kind of belief system in a child.

It is generally easier to dismiss new information than it is to revise existing beliefs so once a belief system has been established, it is very difficult to remove it even if it blatantly contradicts reality.

Most religious parents teach their children the religion starting at the youngest possible age. Long before the child learns that different people have different ideas about how things really are, long before the child learns that there are many different religions, and long before the child learns anything about critical thinking, the child is taught that its parents’ religion is the only possible truth.

Can you blame a child for rejecting other viewpoints? As the child matures, and if the parents continue to reinforce the same belief system, the belief system becomes more and more difficult to change.

The installation of a religious belief system is quite different from the installation of a secular belief system. With religion, the child is taught that not only is the religion pure truth – it is unquestionable truth. Any question that the child has that could undermine their belief system is quickly rebutted by the parents with reproachful assertions that it is evil to ask those questions. The child is admonished and sometimes physically abused simply for asking the unwanted questions.

Can you blame the person when years later he is still unable to honestly question his belief system when the mere occurrence of such a question feels treasonous and blasphemous?

To educate someone is to provide information, to provide explanations, to provide instruction. To indoctrinate someone is to provide information, to provide explanations, to provide instruction. The difference is, when someone is indoctrinated they are not expected to question what they are learning and in many cases they are not allowed to question or to critically examine what they are being taught. Someone who is being indoctrinated is not given the choice to believe or disbelieve.

Religious parents do not educate their children about religion – they indoctrinate them.

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