Review of True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism

In advance of the "Reason Rally" in Washington, DC, Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnaur published "True Reason:  Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism".  I wrote a brief review of the book here.  Please vote "Yes" if you found this review helpful.

Do Religious Arguments Persuade?

It's been a while since I have posted anything, but frankly, I've been busy. I was made aware of this video coutesy of David Mack on the BIBLE GEEK FACEBOOK PAGE.

Frontline Video: From Jesus to Christ

Watch From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (Pt. 1) on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

This is a fantastic video if you want to understand the origins of early Christianity, how if formed, why it evolved as it has, what influenced it, what the different types of competing Christianities were, and why the version we have now won out out over all others. This video includes scholars such as Elaine Pagels, Helmut Koester, Paula Fredriksen, and others. This is really a must watch! Fascinating!

Jesus Coaches Up Tim Tebow

I know I'm a little late in seeing this video, but this is got to be one of the funniest I have seen in a while. Any good bit of humor has an element of truth!

7 Reasons For Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays

Source: Greta Christina' Blog

It's often assumed that the atheist position on what is politely termed "the holiday season" is one of disregard at best, contempt and annoyance at worst. After all, the reasons for most of the standard winter holidays are supposedly religious -- the birth of the Savior, eight days of miraculous light, yada yada yada. Why would atheists want anything to do with that?

But atheists' reactions to the holidays are wildly varied. Yes, some atheists despise them: the enforced jollity, the shameless twisting of genuine human emotion to sell useless consumer crap, the tyrannical forcing of mawkish piety down everyone's throats. (Some believers loathe the holidays for the exact same reasons.) But some of us love the holidays. We love the parties, the decorations, the smell of pine trees in people's houses, the excuse to eat ourselves sick, the reminder that we do in fact love our family and friends. We're cognizant of the shameless twisting and mawkish piety and whatnot -- but we can deal with it. It's worth it for an excuse to drink eggnog with our loved ones and bellow out "Angels We Have Heard On High" in half-assed four-part harmony. (In fact, when it comes to the holidays, atheists are in something of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position. If we scorn them, we get called Scroogy killjoys... but if we embrace them, we get called hypocrites. Oh, well. Whaddya gonna do.)

So today, I want to talk about some of the reasons that some atheists love the holidays: in hopes that believers might better understand who we are and where we're coming from... and in hopes that a few Scroogy killjoys, atheist and otherwise, might be tempted to join the party. (If not -- no big. I recognize and validate your entirely reasonable annoyance at the holidays. And besides, Scroogy killjoys are an important holiday tradition.)
Speaking of which:

Reason #7: Holiday traditions are comforting. The human need for tradition and ritual seems to be deeply ingrained. It's comforting to do things at the same time every day or every year: things we did as a child, things our parents and grandparents did. It gives us a sense of continuity, of being part of a pattern that's larger than ourselves, of passing along ideas and customs that we hope will live on after we die. For those of us who don't believe in an afterlife, that last bit can be extra important. And when those customs and rituals are about joy and celebration and people we love and so on... that makes it extra nifty.

#6: The holidays connect us with our ancestors... and with the earth and the seasons. In modern civilized culture, we tend to treat the changing seasons largely as a fashion challenge and an excuse to complain. (Even in San Francisco, where the temperature rarely gets above 80 or below 40, we still gripe about the weather.)
But for our ancestors, the changing seasons were a critically important part of their lives: a matter of life and death, which they watched and marked with great and careful attention. The winter solstice holidays rose up as a way to mark those changes... and to celebrate the all-important imminent return of the sun and the warmth and the longer days. Celebrating the holidays reminds us of what life was like for the people who came before us -- the people who are responsible for us being here.

#5: Presents. 'Nuff said.

#4: The War on the War on Christmas. Watching Bill O'Reilly and the Christian Right work themselves into an annual lather over the fact that (a) not everyone in America celebrates Christmas and (b) some well-mannered businesses choose to recognize this fact by using ecumenical or secular holiday greetings... this is some of the best free entertainment we could ask for.
Sure, it's theocratic. Sure, it's bigoted. Sure, it has its roots in anti-Semitism and white supremacy. But it's also freaking hilarious. Watching these hypocrites twist themselves into knots explaining why America is a Christian nation and it's the grossest insult to acknowledge the existence of other religions by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas"... and why this stance somehow isn't shameless religious bigotry? It's the best contortionist act in town. And like the circus, it comes around every year.

#3: The holidays connect us with the universe. Axial tilt is the reason for the season! For many atheists, one of the greatest joys of atheism is that it opens up an awe-inspiring world of science. It's not that believers don't care about science: many of them do. But the passionate love of science is a defining feature of the atheist movement, and many of us will take any opportunity to gush about the topic ad nauseam. Usually in embarrassing, Carl-Sagan-esque, "billions and billions of stars" purple prose.
And the holidays are another excuse to go gaga over the wonders of science. They're another way to celebrate the fact that we're living on a tilty rock whizzing through frigid space around a white-hot ball of incandescent plasma. Neat!

#2: The music. You heard me right. I actually like holiday music.
Not the gloppy shopping-mall Muzak that gets forced into our bleeding eardrums every year, despite our cries of pain and pathetic pleas for mercy. I hate that stuff as much as anyone. But some holiday music is seriously pretty. The soaring eerieness of "The Angel Gabriel"; the strangely haunting cheeriness -- or cheery hauntingness? -- of "Chanukah, Oh Chanukah"; the lilting saunter of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland"; the majestic transcendence of "Angels We Have Heard On High" (especially when sung in half-assed, eggnog-addled four-part harmony). Some of this stuff is freaking gorgeous. The really old stuff especially. If you like the tunes but can't stomach the lyrics... well, there's a wide world of holiday song parodies at your disposal. (My personal faves: the H.P. Lovecraft ones, and the Christmas-themed parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody.")
And as I discovered when I was digging up lyrics for a Christmas party songbook, a lot of holiday music is entertainingly grotesque and surreal. You don't have to dip into the Lovecraft Solstice Songbook to find holiday songs about blood, suffering, torment, and death. I mean, "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume/ Breathes a life of gathering gloom/ Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying/ Sealed in a stone cold tomb"? What's not to like?
And the Number One Reason for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays:

#1: For the same damn reason everyone else does. Because it's dark and cold, and it's going to be dark and cold for a while... so it's a perfect time to decorate and light lights and celebrate the fact that we're alive. Because we're all going to be cooped up inside together for a while... so it's a perfect time to have parties and give presents and eat big festive dinners and otherwise remind ourselves of why we love each other. Because this time of year can truly suck... so it's a perfect time to remember that the cold and dark won't be here forever, and that the warmth and light are coming back.
Any day now.

Louise Antony-Goodness Minus God

One of the things I will discuss quite a bit in upcoming posts is the subject of morality. For me it was my single biggest concern that I had as I felt my faith slip away. "Would I have any basis to continue to be a good person?"

As I discuss morality with more and more with theists and apologists I have been astonished to some of claims I have heard. For example, without God we would have no basis to say that rape was wrong or that the Holocaust was objectively wrong. Really? God or no god, if you were about to incinerate one of my family members, I would not need a divine command to pull them out of the oven and throw you in it instead.

Theists make such claims as appeals to outrage. Who in their right mind wants to be in a position where they can't condemn a Hitler or a Charles Manson? They think that the existence of objective moral facts are so inexplicable that only an appeal to a transcendant lawgiver can offer any plausible explanation and thus is a slam-dunk proof that a god exists.

Louise Antony, a philosopher at the University of Massachusettes in Amherst, explains in a clear and concise way the problems, absurdities, and down-right immorality of grounding morality in  a diety. Her article appeared in the New York Times and can be read here.

If you don't have time to read the entire article, here are a couple of quotes worth mentioning that highlight her key arguments:

“First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God. Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:

• It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.

• It is wrong to enslave people.

• It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.

• Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists. That seems to me to be a remarkable claim. If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.? There’d be nothing wrong with torture? The pain of another human being would mean nothing?”

Even if I were a moral nihilist (which I am not) the claim that I would not be able to recognize the pain and suffering, the thwarting of human desires that these actions cause to other human beings is really an extreme claim.

"If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him. We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so. God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants. (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.)"

Theists do have a response to this which I will take up in later posts, but it's not very persuasive and pretty much evacuates any meaning from the word "morality".

And lasty, "(T)here are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant. Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption…I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Can I hear an "AMEN" to that?

Penn State’s Mike McQueary and Applied Christian Apologetics

Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary has been the target of outrage from people all across the country who believe that he didn’t do enough to stop his colleague Jerry Sandusky from molesting a boy when he walked in on Sandusky and the boy in the shower of the  locker room back in 2002. Furthermore, McQueary did not report the incident to the police and, as a result, it is believed that Sandusky was allowed to continue on with his nefarious ways until finally resigning from coaching just a few years ago.  The moral outrage directed towards McQueary is because he could have stopped the molestation of several children, but he didn’t. 

Most of us instantly recoil at the thought of someone not acting to prevent the suffering of a child when they could have.  Yet Christian philosophers and apologists provide a  variety of arguments that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, all-good God is off the hook for idly sitting by and watching the suffering of countless numbers of his creation, including children. 

Bradley C. Bower / AP

If these arguments are good enough for God, are they good enough to get Mike McQueary off the moral hook?  Let’s try a little applied Christian apologetics and imagine actually trying to defend McQueary using the same reasons given for God’s inaction.   

The JOB Defense:  McQueary could argue that, after all, who do we think we are questioning the behavior of football coaches in the locker room? How can we, mere sports couch potatoes, know what kind of behavior is appropriate? How many of us have ever been in a football locker room?  And if we have, has it been the locker room of one of the most prestigious football programs in the history of the game?  Do we even know the number of football players on a team?  How to read a playbook?  How to sweep left? Line up in nickel formation?  Blitz?   McQueary should argue that we simply have no standing to comment on anything that goes on in a football locker room, period.

The “Can’t Have One Without the Other” Defense:  McQueary could say that in order to really appreciate coaches that act appropriately around children we must experience coaches that don’t every once in a while. You can’t have good coaches without bad coaches.  To step in and stop Jerry Sandusky would be depriving the rest of us the knowledge of truly evil coach and the appreciation of what it’s like to have good coaches.

The “Character Builder” Defense:  McQueary could argue that Sandusky’s molestation of the child in the locker room was ultimately for the child’s benefit, and had he stepped in and thwarted Sandusky, that victim and all the others would have missed out on the character-building effects the experience produced.   After experiencing such a horrific act, Sandusky’s victims will now be better able to cope with later suffering in life; will be more empathetic to others in the same situation, or a number of other benefits. 

The Free-Will Defense McQueary could argue that the most important thing in the world for any coach to be able to do is to exercise his own free will.  After all, what good would it be if coaches only acted appropriately towards young children because they had to?  Sometimes when you have free will you make the wrong decisions, but you can’t expect a guy to step in and stop someone every time they use their free will to make a wrong decision, can you?

The” Mystery or Skeptic” Defense: McQueary could argue that unless someone can prove that he didn’t have a really good reason not to go to the authorities and report Sandusky, then they can’t really say he was wrong for not acting.  If someone then asks him, “What exactly was your reason?” he should just say, “You’ll have to see for yourself in five (ten, fifteen, twenty, etc…) years, but it’s a really good one I can assure you!”

I suspect that McQueary would not fare too well with arguments like these.  I’m more inclined to believe McQueary when he says that he was “shocked, horrified, not thinking straight” after witnessing the events in question, and that contributed to his inaction. The question is, “Are apologists and their followers ‘thinking straight’ when they defend the existence of God in spite of inaction in the face of suffering with arguments that don’t measure up to anyone’s own moral sensibilities anywhere except in their own mind?”