Now, More than Ever

As time marches on and the tides of time test my new foundation in life, I find that the stance of Atheism only strengthens itself under criticism. What a pleasant stance to have.

Reality makes more sense in the light of reason. In the midst of Religion, it is only muddled, cloudy and tough to keep straight. It relies heavily on rationalizations, whereas free thought finds solace in rational thinking.

God is inconsistent. His followers spend a hell of a lot of time defending him against all the things that don't make sense. They say he is infinitely loving, except when he doesn't want to be, and then it's not his fault anyway thanks to freewill. All criticism is deflected by some vague interpretation of a book that was never written to refute such claims. Blindly gripping what cannot be firmly held.

Commandment Eleven.

Science, reasons, logic. What solace I have find in these words. No longer are they to be feared as the arrogant, rebellious challenges of man. They represent the vastness of the human mind, intellect and reasoning power. Much like the painter's brush, these tools are limited by their holder, but knowledge can be combined and together we all benefit from real knowledge.

There is nothing known that is not known as a result of science. Everything else is wishful thinking and guesses.

I'm reminded every day of my former life. It feels like much further behind me than it actually is, but I couldn't be happier. All things make sense now, all questions either have answers or test the limits of our knowledge. No more trusting beyond my own mind, my own sense of correctness, my own sensibilities. In the past, I would have seen such thinking as arrogant, smug, rebellious. Now, I see myself as imperfect, but growing. I'm actually capable of doing things on my own and needn't feel guilty for acknowledging that.

I basically walk around like this.

I detest faith based reasoning. I hate the foolish and harmful decisions it pulls intelligent people toward due to ignorance. I wish everyone could understand the beauty of reality, but unfortunately as with many other things, fantasy is much more appealing in the right now and requires much less effort to become an expert.

Atheism is the one thing that ought to be proselytized were the sharing of religious opinions not so repugnant. Live and let live as the people say. Easier said than done, sometimes.

My life has meaning, my efforts have purpose. I make my own destiny and it has never felt better. Life in the light of truth is incomparable to any other fantasy. In some ways it is harder, you have to think for yourself, you know? In other ways, it is so easy it's impossible to imagine a time when I didn't embrace it.

It's a shame people are so dependent on religion, it's a shame they cannot see how their religion breeds dependence in them. Religion is a vicious circle of weakness, insecurity and fear masked in truth and righteousness.

To my fellow atheists, it's an honor to be counted among your numbers. To the rest of you, just try testing your beliefs, would you? After all, if talking snakes are real, then why can't we come from monkeys?

The Young Earth Myth

This is one of those topics that is important to me. Primarily, I imagine, because I used to accept it quiet readily.

This is the issue of Young Earth Creationism.

The other night I was watching an episode of NOVA, they were addressing the issue of the Sphinx and its origins. One of the most interesting elements to me was that the great sphinx was not made of bricks carted in like they imagine was the case for the nearby pyramids. It had a much cooler sculpting process...

The ground is in the area is made up of many, many layers of limestone. This limestone was formed when the land of Egypt was completely underwater and the decaying animal carcasses formed the separate limestone layers over a tremendous amount of time. The water over Egypt eventually went away, these layers dried out, the Egyptians built some stuff and eventually the sphinx, which they carved directly out of the limestone. That's right. In an age with no advanced tools, just rocks and sticks basically, they were able to pound, chisel and scrape out an amazing work of art. It likely took thousands of man hours just pounding away at this big piece of rock while some arrogant Egyptian, most likely with a French accent, looked out over his outstretched thumb and muttered something about how lime made for an unruly canvas.

That gate doesn't keep anyone out.

Even now if you look at pictures of the Sphinx you can see these layers of limestone. Even more interesting is that if you follow the layers imaginary line into the adjacent walls, then you can see that the layers line up exactly. A feat that would be incredible difficult to manufacture and something that the even the notoriously, extravagant Egyptian architects couldn't be bothered to do.

Now, this is a Young Earth/Old Earth issue because Egypt hasn't been underwater in the last 10,000 years, (a figure often designated as the age of the Earth by the YEC crowd) At least not that they were aware of and that's the kind of thing that's hard to miss even if you see the world in strange picture form.

Proof.

In fact, that particular part of Giza hasn't been under the ocean for millions of years. The lime sediments date back to the Eocene period which was anywhere from 56 to 34 million years ago. It takes many more than ten thousand years to create solid layers like this, they have to be wet, house life, let the life die and compress on the ocean floor, then have all the ocean water go away and then wait all those millions of years for the fossil record to catch up and then have some people build the sphinx some 4,000 years ago.

Not Egypt. (Present Day)

The evidence is clear, the idea of an Earth created with age has no basis in fact, but it just a wild guess to explain why the facts don't match the faith. Perhaps the most annoying thing about such a theory is that there is no reason a belief in God must contradict the theory of evolution. The only thing that gets in the way is the assumption that this really old book must be literally true in every respect, and thus nature must be wrong. Sorry Sphinxy, you're younger than you thought.

Unapologetics

I received a much greater response to announcing my agnosticism than I ever intended, and while it caught me off guard, I like to think that I welcome the resistance. After all, what are beliefs or opinions if they cannot be challenged. I'm no a priori skeptic and I gladly welcome any and all evidence to the contrary. In fact, I would gladly change my mind if such evidence presented itself.
I feel the need to expound a wee bit on my current position for the sake of those who would understand, rather than condemn out of hand.

My feeling on Christianity at this point is as follows: It's a perfectly nice story, with positive and negative elements, much like anything in this world. It makes a lot of claims about things unseen, things intangible and things that are completely unfalsifiable. It is entirely possible that such claims are true. Since they are not testable, then they cannot be shown untrue. Not definitively at any rate. The old "you can't prove a negative" dilemma.

There are many such negatives in the world today. Homeopathy, psychic powers, demon possession, exorcisms, UFOs, 9/11 conspiracy theories, bigfoot, loch ness, ghosts. While I am a firm believe that anything is possible, I think it's important to stress the weight of the qualifier not everything is probable.

So, it means a trust science. This is trite, I know. This is the most common rebuttal to religion and it holds very little weight with Christians. That's fine, I wouldn't expect to phase a true believer with such a soft ball. The main problem with Christianity, in my book, is that it demands blind allegiance to ideals that are clearly refutable by science, and then assumes knowledge about all that is outside the realm of science.

One might argue, well, Faith takes over where science ends. This is true, by definition. My position however is this: Why have faith at all? If science, in its limitation, can not explain something, then why make guesses and act as though they are fact? Sure, you could be right, but you probably aren't. It's not even a million to one, it's infinity to one. And what makes you so sure that your faith based claims carry any validity over another's faith based claims. Christians vs Islam, or Buddha, or Judaism, or Aliens, or anything. How can you really be sure?


This is where most people, in my estimation, fall back on emotion. If you can't know yourself, you have to trust someone who does know (i.e. God, holy spirit, bible). How do you know what they know, well technically speaking, you don't. But say you get a feeling, you read a verse, you feel that God has communicated something to you in someway. You are still basing your conclusion on what you feel god is saying, or how you feel you should proceed. Sometimes, christians make very logical decisions based on carefully reasoned arguments about bible verses.
This still operates under the assumption that the Bible is indeed true. This is a very scary and unwelcome question to many a christian. How dare you challenge the word of god? What arrogance! How can you think you know more than God! Sound familiar?

But the beliefs we hold most dear should be the ones we question the most.

Think about a belief that is very important to you. Think of the most important belief after your religion. Whether it be political, social or what have you, focus on it. Think about how it makes you feel, think about what the opposition might say against your idea. Think how their words might make you feel. What would you say back to them? How would you defend your cherished belief? What would you say to show them they were wrong? What is wrong with their logic, with their line of thinking? What are they missing that you can so clearly see?
Now, turn that magnifying glass on yourself. No, but really do it. Don't make any assumptions, don't let anything you think be true by default. Its just you, in your mind. No one will know if you say something stupid or make a mistake. Let your guard down a little and challenge yourself like you were your opponent. Be vigorous!

If you are resistant to really let the gloves off, then how honest are you really being with yourself? How do you know that you're right if you haven't explored the other side, if you haven't tried to prove yourself wrong? If you are right, as you believe, then it shouldn't matter. You're beliefs will hold water, they will stand up to questioning, they will remain solid when shaken.

Are there any questions you don't want to ask yourself? Is there anything that you've said "well, that's obviously true" about? Why would you say that? What can be so obvious that it requires no scrutiny? Is there anything in your life that you can take for granted 100%. (hint: there isn't)

Your car might not start, your chair might break, your job may be lost, your family member may die, you might have misunderstood something, your perception/memory may have made a mistake. You are human after all, mistakes are normal.
You know that the authors of the bible were human as well? They didn't fall from the sky and neither did the Bible. There is no evidence, no written word that says these writers went into a trance and somehow managed to write error free documents sometimes 30 years after the fact. So where does this belief in the inerrant nature of scripture come from? You know that it doesn't count to quote the bible when trying to prove the bible is correct. So what external source taught you it was true? I can say with absolute certainty that it was someone you know. So who told them? and them and so on. It's such an old idea that it must be true, right? Lies can't last throughout history, the truth always prevails. At least that's what someone told me once.
It was under such scrutiny that, for me, Christianity was found wanting. If you apply the skeptical method to any portion of the Bible, it cannot answer with any degree of certainty. The bible is its own source and it's only source.

There is much more to be said on this issue, but this post is already far too long.

Which of your beliefs have you questioned lately? Any? Have you ever questioned your beliefs? Are you being a priori, looking to disprove any opposition without considering the evidence by itself? Are you looking to prove what you just know to be true already, or are you following the evidence itself to a conclusion? How much of what you believe did you really decide on your own and how much is something you've simply memorized from repetition?

Car Analogy

This was posted on ex-Christian.net by Hammurabi and I thought it was just perfect:


The ultimate tragedy of being a deconvert is the fact that even though we stop believing, we won't let it go. Imagine your old faith like a car. For a while you loved it, you took care of it and drove it all the time but one day it breaks down. You get out and try to fix it, but you can't. You ask a mechanic but he just asks for 10% of your income and tells you to fix it yourself. You consult the user manual but it was written for a horse-and-buggy. In desperation, you start kicking the car, swearing at it, throwing rocks at it. You hate it, and somehow punishing it for leaving you stranded makes you feel some amount of relief. You push it home, kicking it and swearing at it the whole way. You get up in the middle of the night just to take a leak in the gas tank. Then you start acting weird.

You start pushing the car wherever you go, breaking out the windows and scratching the paint. You get a new car and tow the old one behind it just so it's available for abuse whenever you need. You may even attack other peoples cars of the same make and model; "Your car's garbage! Throw it away, you can't depend on it!" Admit it, you actually enjoy being mad at your car.

For a time that anger is very therapeutic, it helps you cope with the loss of a major component of your life. Now however, your life is just as consumed with this car as it was when it worked, and you don't even get to drive it anymore! To truly be past it, you need to go ahead and drop it off at the dump. You don't need to rush yourself, have fun tearing the hunk-o-junk up, but wouldn't it be nice to live a life that didn't revolve around the old christ-moble anymore?