That said, religion wasn’t drilled into my head week after week. I believed in God because seemingly everyone else did. But—aside from the aforementioned events spread across years, a few references my family made to the evil of atheism, and a sense that religion was “good” and lack of it was “bad”—my Christian belief was scarcely reinforced. My family rarely talked about religion, went to church, or said grace. We had a Bible, but it was usually tucked away somewhere like an old and forgotten book. I don’t recall seeing anyone reading it. Little did I know of its details.

Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's popular, and violent, depiction of him

That remained the case for years of my childhood. Through that time, my belief waxed and waned as I wrestled with doubts about God’s existence. After all, I had seen neither hide nor hair of God or Jesus. Prayer seemed neither meaningful nor effective. The most significant relationship I had with the divine was looking at the crucifix on my wall as I lied in my bed. (Contemplate how some Christians complain often about violence in the media, but society thinks little of exposing children to the imagery of a suffering man nailed to a cross and on his way to a painful death. The cognitive dissonance at work is astounding.)

I held onto my belief, though, especially after I perused a religious text I found laying around the house saying anyone who didn’t believe in God was bound for hell. I was terrified! I remember literally telling myself, I do believe in God, I do believe in God, I do believe in God. I was scared that I wasn’t thinking the truth, but I impressed on myself the need to believe in God. I didn’t want to go to hell, and I wanted to be a good person.

I didn’t really start reading the Bible until after I’d gone to school for a while and learned a bit about history and science. What I encountered astonished me: Evaluating the Bible for myself, I found it to be a self-contradictory mess of anti-scientific rambling and bloodthirsty evil. I couldn’t square the Genesis Creation with science. I couldn’t accept God’s psychotic jealousy in such stories as that of the Golden Calf. I thought narratives such as that of the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, and the Burning Bush resembled fairy tales.

The massacre of Golden Calf worshippers is one of the most sickening episodes in the Bible.

Delving into the Bible placed on life support whatever pretense I had that I believed in God. The pretense died as I learned more about religions across the world now and historically, many of them claiming to be the one true religion and all of them featuring elements just as fantastical as the Bible. On what basis could I believe Christianity right and other religions wrong? None. What support did the world’s religions have other than the say-so of their followers? None.

In my early years of high school, as I discovered more about sociopolitical groupings, I called myself an agnostic. I believed myself to be a reasonable person, and whereas I did not believe in God, I thought humanity wasn’t in a position to rule out God, either. I continued thinking of myself as an agnostic until I was in college.

The summer after my freshman year, I read Atheism: The Case Against God by George Smith, a former editor of Reason magazine. I found these to be the most important points it made:

• “Atheism” denotes lack of belief in God. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary will disagree, but dissect the word: “a-,” meaning “without,” and “theism.” Also, check out the etymology on the dictionary page: “Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god.” The earliest historical root of the word means “without god.” Representing theism and atheism with the logical symbols I learned in my Logic class the second half of my freshman year, theism would be T and atheism would be ~T.
• Agnostics who lack belief in God, ergo, would more properly be labeled atheists.
• Since atheism doesn’t claim anything, it has no need to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the theist, the religious person, who is making the positive assertion. Logically, as with all positive assertions, the theist must show the locus of his devotion exists.
• Since the concept of God as presented is inconsistent and illogical, we can safely conclude God does not exist. We don’t need to know anything beyond the scope of our universe to make this conclusion; pure reason rules out God, as much as it does a square circle. Whatever might exist beyond the scope of human comprehension, it cannot comport with the human God concept. (That should be tautological.)
• Faith is no foundation on which to believe anything. Because faith eschews evidence, it can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Therefore, one can’t claim it’s a path to knowledge. Believing something on faith is simply believing something because one wants to do so. Some people might be okay with that, but that doesn’t change faith’s opposition to reason. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive. (A person can indulge faith and exercise reason, but not at the same time.)

I had no problem calling myself an atheist after I’d read Smith’s book.

Cementing my atheism were a talk given by Michael Shermer and two books from Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion and The Blind Watchmaker. They demolished arguments for intelligent design such as irreducible complexity. I liked Dawkins’s quip that God would assuredly be much more complex than anything intelligent design advocates falsely point to as examples of “irreducible complexity,” so the creator concept introduces more explanatory problems than it solves and demonstrates the inconsistency of “intelligent design” to boot. If the idea that the eye could have arisen without a designer strains credulity, would not God as well, to an even greater degree?

In addition, Dawkins’s criticisms of the arguments of those who call themselves agnostics struck me. Agnosticism is a reasonable position when contentions in play are roughly equiprobable. The answers to the question of whether a creator exists, however, are not equiprobable. The existence of a creator is quite improbable, since we have no evidence of supernatural forces, the universe appears evolved rather than designed, and our notions of a creator are illogical and self-contradictory, anyway.

That takes us to the past couple years, wherein my views have remained largely unchanged.

So, when left to decide matters of faith for myself without indoctrination or pushing, I eventually became a solid atheist. Contrary to what many religious believers would seem to think, though, I don’t think I have a grasp on absolute truth.

The same observation and reason that backstops my atheism says human beings are very limited creatures with very finite knowledge; none of them could know absolute truth. Claiming to do so would bespeak too literal an interpretation of Nietzsche’s advice to be one’s own god, since only a god could claim understanding of absolute truth. Such a claim would exude an irrational faith in one’s own rightness. I say faith because science tells us we lack the intellectual capacity that would make such righteousness rational.

I believe the stipulations of reason and the rules of logic point to atheism. And I believe superstition, not rationality, buttresses religion. But, as my choice of verb indicates, I’m under no delusion these are anything but beliefs. And I respect people, even friends, who don’t share my beliefs.

After all, I once supported the Iraq war. The outcome of that fiasco was the ultimate lesson in humility. I shall not wag my finger at what I perceive to be irrationality in others when I’m capable of irrationality myself. And I always try to keep an open mind; that doesn’t entail lacking firm beliefs, but keeping in mind they might, under circumstances I cannot presently foresee and consider unlikely, change someday.

Watch these

(Hypersyllogistic Forums thread discussing the above video.)

Losing my religion is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

(This blog entry is a reply to the horrid piece “The blood-stained century of evolution.”)

This article has numerous problems.

First, it engages in the logical fallacy appeal to consequences. Any consequences of a proposition, be they good or ill, have no impact on whether the proposition is true or false.

Second, throughout most of human history, religion has sought totalitarian control over everyone’s beliefs, thoughts, and actions. Within a religion’s dominion, whoever did not submit to the religious authorities faced torture and death. Whomever lived outside religious authorities’ control, these authorities often tried to convert through conquest. Few places on Earth have been free of the misery, oppression, and warfare that has resulted. The histories of Europe and Asia are particularly riven with suffering and bloodshed stemming from heretical dissent, sectarian rivalry, and interfaith hatred. If religion hasn’t quite achieved the body count of Nazism and Communism, the only reason is that religious police and faithful combatants didn’t have remote surveillance, gas chambers, machine guns, warplanes, battleships, tanks, missiles, and nukes.

Third, as a corollary to the above point, no ideological construct in human history has done more than religion to divide people into opposing groups, most of which believed they were the favored of God and hated the other groups. For example, Christians and Muslims hated Jews for centuries, the Christians because they nonsensically held Jews responsible for Christ’s death, the Muslims because a group of Jews supposedly thought Mohammed was a charlatan when he told them God was communicating with him. The Nazis didn’t invent the anti-Semitic hatred that drove the Holocaust; it was an ancient though still vibrant relic of religion.

Fourth, whereas some individual clergymen bravely resisted the Nazis, the Catholic Church as a political institution supported fascism around the world and collaborated with the Nazis, even to the extent of revealing files to them to help them determine who was sufficiently “pure” to avoid the gas chambers (and who was not). Many Protestant churches also cooperated with the Nazis. And, in Russia, the Orthodox Church served as a puppet of the state instead of resisting. And, of course, in both Germany and Russia, most people were Christians of one kind or another. Even Adolf Hitler was a member of the Catholic Church in good standing, although he made embellishments to the Christian mythos. And Joseph Stalin, even though he became an atheist, had trained as a monk; I guess extensive religious teaching didn’t dampen his homicidal tendencies.

Fifth, to the extent that the Nazis and the Communists did aim to supplant religion, the replacement was another kind of unreasoning faith: worship of an all-encompassing state. The totalitarianism that flowed from that had nothing to do with unshackling man’s reason or Darwinian evolution by natural selection, but with squashing them.

Sixth, the article mischaracterizes Darwin’s work. Darwin was a scientist who merely studied life and recorded what he found. “Might makes right” and other such drivel has nothing to do with Darwin or with evolution, which just concerns inheritance of traits through successive generations and fitness for particular environments. I must note, though, “might makes right” adeptly describes much of religious ideology and history. Think of the admonitions in many religious texts that if the will of a particular deity isn’t followed, divine and earthly punishment will ensue.

Seventh, I disagree with the article about the implications of abandoning God and embracing evolution. As I’ve written before, God is not an alternative to man’s will but rather a vessel into which man pours his will and hopes to escape responsibility for it. The erosion of the God concept doesn’t mean an ill-equipped humanity starts making moral decisions; humanity has done that all along. But society might become more self-reflective and willing to deal with its flaws without a divine scapegoat for them.

Also, I think realizing that man is only another animal that evolved over billions of years from microscopic life, and that genetics shreds arbitrary notions of “race” while confirming everyone’s unqualified and equal membership in the human species, would encourage treatment of the planet and each other with more humility and respect than religion has engendered. In that regard, Darwinian evolution isn’t divisive but unifying.

(C/P: Boston Atheists)

Addendum: Far from admiring Darwin, the Nazis banned Darwinist work. Why would the Nazis have forbidden books in a discipline they supposedly admired?

Rebutting “The blood-stained century of evolution” is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

Primates demonstrate empathy similar to that of humans.

David Hume said humans, in observing pain, experience that pain, too. Therefore, we want to alleviate the pain of other people, to ameliorate the suffering it causes within us. This empathy for our fellow humans constitutes the basis for treating them decently.

Hume’s best friend Adam Smith, in his 1759 work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, agreed that instinctual empathy helped birth human morality. He wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.

Observations of modern primates, which are likely quite similar to the ancestors of human beings, lend credence to the moral notions of Hume and Smith. As The New York Times reports in “Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior” (courtesy of Bondo on his blog):

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. [The reporter is likely oversimplifying here, as journalists tend to do...]

…

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Research on the brains of humans and primates further supports the idea of innate empathy. In his most recent book, The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer describes the latest scientific endeavors in this area.

According to findings Shermer cites, motor neurons known as “mirror neurons” comprise the foundation of human empathy. Giacomo Rizolatti discovered mirror neurons while experimenting with monkeys in the late 1980′s. Since then, scientists have found mirror neurons in humans as well.

Brain regions with mirror neurons light up when undertaking or experiencing an action but also while observing the action. And different neurons fire depending on the intent of the action, e.g., seeing one bring an apple to a cup or his mouth. If an intention is not evident—if an action has no context—then the mirror neuron network doesn’t fire as intensely. (Autistic children possess a malfunctioning mirror neuron network, which prevents them from assigning meaning to the actions of others, which then hampers their own behavioral responses.)

Furthermore, Christian Keysers and Bruno Wicker scanned the brains of test subjects as they experienced a disgusting odor and a video of someone making a face of disgust. These two scenarios—feeling disgust and watching disgust—both inspired the same brain activity. Also, these scientists found being touched in the leg and watching someone being touched in the same spot triggered congruent brain action.

Additionally, Jorge Moll discovered that charitable acts trigger the “reward” area of the brain that getting paid does. Essentially, charity gives people the same kind of emotional satisfaction as payment.

Of course, whatever natural impulses humans might have to do good, they still kill and hurt each other on occasion. But, considering the billions of humans on this planet, such antisocial behavior actually is rare. For every bad act we see on the news, millions of good acts have transpired that the media doesn’t deign to cover. (And why would it do so? “News” encompasses the unusual! The media has no reason to highlight what most people experience every day.)

As James Madison, a contemporary of Hume and Smith, suggested, men aren’t angels. But we aren’t devils, either.

Neuropsychology illuminates roots of human ethics is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos