Puck’s Blog

This is a response to Blogosaurus Vex’s post, which you may want to read first.  I’ll take it point by point, with a summary.

Here are some things that bother me about how some athiests think and behave:

Some athiests seem to think that the problem with religious people is they aren’t or can’t be logical.

Well, I’d certainly agree about the first part (aren’t logical) about their religious beliefs.  Those beliefs aren’t logical, despite attempts to make them so with things like Descarte’s Ontological Proof of God. 

And I do think that religious believers tend towards a less logical worldview overall.  Of course there are a great many exceptions to this.  The biggest that comes to mind is Ken Miller, who is a Roman Catholic, and yet an incredibly intelligent and educated biology professor who defended evolution and made a mockery of Intelligent Design proponents during the Kitzmiller v Dover trial.

But the subset of  believers we tend to call “creationists”, who take the bible as the inerrant and non-metaphorical word of God?

They can’t be logical.

Some athiests seem to think that religious people are less than athiests somehow

I do — about that specific facet.  There are a lot of believers who have done more than me in my life, have achieved more, have helped more people, are better looking, funnier, cleverer, are kinder, richer… 

But they believe in a fairy story as though it were true, and many base their lives around it.  They — if they’re Christian — make decisions based on a 2000 year old desert cult whose beliefs were originally an oral tradition and changed with each telling and was finally written down.

This doesn’t make me a better person than them.  I don’t feel superior to them overall, but that one broken gap in their reasoning is certainly inferior to mine.

Tell me, Blogo, did you feel superior to your woo-spouting instructor?  I’ll bet you did, and don’t really regret it.  Why should religion be protected from mockery and her “chakra” bullshit not be?

Some athiests seem unwilling to admit the value and importance of religion in many people’s lives.

And apparently, some atheists can’t admit the value of a world based on reason, logic and truth.

The problem with the comfort of religion is that it’s a false one, and isn’t based on the real world or whether you should be comforted at all.  The 9/11 hijackers were so comforted by their religion that they were able to fly the plan they were on into a building to their certain deaths.

They act as though becoming an athiest is no big deal, like nothing would be lost.

Nothing is lost, except for weekly social gatherings at the church where you can make business contacts.  I don’t see the world as a big scary place where I need a security blanket of falseness to make me feel good about living in it.  The “life is scary without religion” angle is brought up all the time by apologist atheists, and I have only to point you to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as a positive, uplifting and heartwarming display of the wonder and marvel of the real world around us, how we fit into it, and what we can do in it to make our lives worthwhile.

Saying that others do need it is arrogant in the extreme, as though there’s something special about you and your mind.

Some athiests think we can make progress towards a more secular society by mocking the religious.

Oh, I don’t do it just because I think we can make progress.  I do it because I can be a jerk sometimes.

That said, comedy is a powerful way to make uncomfortable points.  The jester was the only one who could make fun of the king, and today’s comedians — or anybody being funny — are still far safer making fun of things nobody else will.

See, that’s mockery, funny, and true.  And eye-opening to some.

Oh demotivators, your wisdom might just save us all.

People don’t become religious after careful consideration of the facts.

There are no facts to support religion, so of course not.  However, a great many people become non-religious after careful consideration of the facts.  I’ve had a few people I know through the Internet tell me that my posts on this blog opened their eyes and had them re-examine why they believed.  Eventually they become non-believers.  It blew my mind the first time because I honestly thought I was just shouting into the wind.

the elements that comprise religion are all drawn from cognitive “modules” that were naturally selected for to solve problems common in the ancestral environment.

In this way we can see religiosity as a natural phenomenon that, while it was not selected for itself, piggy-backs on systems that were.  This means that it is “natural” for us as this evolved species to be religious. 

Well of course we have a natural propensity towards belief.  I’ve read quite a few great articles about the subject, and I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”.  The fact that we all look for someone to get angry at when it rains on a day we wanted to go outside doesn’t mean that someone did make it rain.  It certainly doesn’t mean we should believe that nonsense and change our lives because of that belief, no matter how good it might make you feel.  It will still rain on some days.

The “it’s natural” argument fails completely in the modern world.  Human beings have a lot of natural tendencies that we are already actively suppressing.  Rape was a viable way to continue your genetic makeup, but it’s abhorrent to us in modern society.  Male dominance is another that our society has only recently begun to reverse.

We get rid of these things because they’re harmful to our society.  Religious belief can be both helpful (I admit it, sometimes) and incredibly harmful.  The usual way one deals with complex issues with both positives and negatives is to reason them out and try to keep the helpful while getting rid of the harmful.  But then we’re simply insisting religion be subject to logic and reason, which you cannot do because it is inherently illogical and unreasonable!  Where do you draw the line?  Do you say “You can *believe* in killing non-believers and being rewarded with 72 virgins in the afterlife, but don’t go *doing* anything about it!”?  or “You can *believe* God created all species in a puff of magic on one day, but don’t go influencing the schools with that belief!”?

The root problem of religion in our modern society is that it is not subject to rational discussion.  It is inherently irrational and cannot be controlled by reasonable discourse.

And finally…

No secular ideology has ever successfully replaced religion in a people.

“It’s never been done, so stop trying to do it.”

Even if we don’t fully achieve it, every step we take towards a secular society makes our society better.

Sooner or later the Earth will be hit by a huge asteroid that’s floating out there in space.  Prayer won’t stop it from wiping out every living thing on the plate — science, reason, and wide open eyes will.

Prayer won’t stop a world leader from pressing the big shiny button that wipes us all out.  In fact it might make him (or her) do it.  Reason is what we count on to keep that from happening.