A Few Thoughts

I know that I've been very quiet and I'm sure that my "three" readers are probably wondering what the heck has happened to me. I'm sorry to say that I've just been very busy and haven't had the mental energy to blog. I assure you that this isn't a permanent state, however. I have some ideas for essays that I want to write but I also want to be sure to get them the focus of my attention when I do write them.

In the meanwhile, here's an essay by one of the professors at Virgina Tech who's rebutting Dinesh D'Souza, who took the aftermath of the Virgina Tech tragedy as an opportunity to bash atheists. If there's one thing that makes me mad, it's when people spin tragedy in the name of agenda. I don't care if that agenda is gun control (pro andcon), anti-video game legislation, immigration, or secularism... all of which were wrapped around the shooting before the bodies were even in the ground. While I don't think that this is the time or place for a debate, this persons reply is eloquent and heartfelt and I think that it puts a nasty piece of public ugliness in its place.

People like Dinesh D'Souza have an axe to grind and they love nothing more than an excuse to grind that axe in public. They are attention whores of the worst order and I think that there must be something inside them that becomes thrilled when things like this shooting happen because it gives them one more chance to try to wedge themselves into the spotlight. While there is a part of me that feels that the best reply is silence there is the risk that silence equates to assent. This anonymous professor, who doesn't even care to put his name forward, challenges the D'Souzan vultures of the world with something better: the simple rebuke of shame.

Off-site Essay: The Ethics of Belief

What we should think of a shipowner who has an old ship in need of repairs. The captain, through a variety of rationalizations, manages to sincerely convince himself that the ship is seaworthy and leases her to a group of immigrants who, alas, go down in the ocean. Should we condemn him? Should we have condemned him even if the ship had safely reached it destination?

If you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you'll have noticed that I have a shameless tendency to inflict philosophy upon the masses.

Let's face it, philosophy has a bad reputation. The impression that people have is that it is dry, dull and, too often, a pointless exercise is sophistry. I don't know if my own amature efforts have done much to dispell this impression. This week, for the offsite essay, I thought that I'd provide a link to a philosophical essay that I believe should.

The essay in question was written by William K. Clifford back in 1877; however, the subject of the essay, which is titled The Ethics of Belief, is, I think, perfectly relevant to modern audiences. The essay is also thoroughly readable and filled with interesting examples.

I hope that you will find it thought-provoking and enjoyable.

Off-site Essay: Life In Our Anti-Christian America

I, honestly, don't have a problem with the majority of Christians in my country. In my experience, most people, of whatever faith, Christian or otherwise, have a live and let live attitude that serves the plurality of our culture well. Generally, people only take up religious arms when a hand-full of hot-button issues come up leaving religion to private considerations at most other times.

Unfortunately, there are vocal minorities who make it their mission to rake muck, nor am I singling out Christian groups. Trust me, there are atheist organizations out there that make me feel just as queasy as any of the strident Christian groups. Never the less, there is one tactic that Christian groups often employ that does especially set my teeth on edge: the tactic of claiming that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States.

The claim is absurd on the face of it. According to the CIA Factbook, Christians comprise a good 79% of the population (77% if you want to exclude Mormons, though I don't see the logic of doing so). Atheists and other non-religious groups make up a mere 10% of the population. In spite of these figures, there are groups that insist that Christians are being persecuted by atheists. One imagines a lion claiming to be persecuted by a mouse.

To highlight the absurdity of this, Rob Berry created a wonderful bit of satire called "Life In Our Anti-Christian America". It is a very ironic list of the ways that Chrstians are being subject to discrimination and marginalization. It includes such items as:

• Nearly all of our elected public officials are atheists; they even have to swear on a copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" in order to take office.
• All of our money has the atheistic slogan "We do not trust in God" printed on it.
• While atheists hold huge rallies in 25,000-seat amphitheatres, Christians are so few in number that they can only dream of holding such rallies.
• Most gravestones in America are engraved with pentagrams; those few graves which are engraved with crosses usually end up being vandalized.

The list has 218 entries and would have had more if Rob hadn't stopped taking submissions. It's been a while since it's been updated so some of the items may seem a bit dated and there are no entries for such current controveries as the Shiavo case. Never the less, the list is a rather stinging rebuke to the supposition that Christians are, in any sense, at the mercy of the atheist minority.

Theotest Challenge Redux

A while back, when I was still in the habit of debating atheism, I came up with something that I called the theotest challenge. Essentially it was a promise to convert to the religion of someone's choice if they could tell me the contents of an encrypted file (presumably by praying to their god for the answer).

It's been quite a while since I've engaged in doing those kinds of rhetorical stunts. I am greatly amused, however, to see that the Atheological Thinking site, run by one Silent Dave, has not only taken up the torch but has done me the honor of naming a modified version of the challenge after me. He's also tightened it up a bit. Many people were skeptical of my claim that I would convert (which I could well understand). In this version of the challenge, he promises to "either read four books of your choosing or attend a church of your choosing for four months, and [he] will give $100 to the American Red Cross!"

The challange can be found here. Scroll down almost all the way to the bottom to find it, or just do a search for "Lias".

A Rare Honor

For many years I've used and admired the Logic and Fallacies list on The Atheism Web. It is my considered opinion that it's one of the best lists of such fallacies on the entire web and that it should be required reading for anyone interested in engaging in rational debate and discussion.

I have recently had the rare honor of having an entry of my own added to the list. Readers of Unstructured Musings may recall that I wrote an essay arguing for the existence of a fallacy that I called The Fallacy of Mediocrity. I am thrilled to report that the owner of the Atheism Web has agreed that this is a fallacy that merits inclusion on the Logic and Fallacies list. It's listed as a sub-type under Fallacies of Composition and includes the description and one of the examples that I provided in my original essay (as well as a link to my essay).

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a historical accomplishment. Never the less, for me, this is a prideful moment. You'll pardon me, I hope, if I pat myself on the back for just a little bit.

Encounters with God

Before I present this week's essay, I'd like to take a moment to say that the purpose of this site is not to be a forum for my autobiography. While I do intend to occasionally include autobiographical elements in my essays, it is my goal that, when I do so, it will be to illustrate a larger point or idea. As it happens, this essay is almost entirely autobiographical being mainly a story of my personal journey into and out of religious belief. It's also fairly long. If this doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would appeal to you, I would suggest that you might want to wait until next week.

Atheists in this country (by which I mean the United States of America) have a common tendency to exaggerate their plight. This is not to say that there arn't any atheists, here, who have suffered discrimination in the workplace or before the law, nor is it to claim we are never the recipients of threats and even violence. It is, however, to say that these are not the norm. Certainly, in comparison to such groups as homosexuals, our lot is not so terrible.

In my own experiences, the very worst thing that has happened to me as a consequence of my atheism was a single death threat. This sounds dramatic but it was the sort of anonymous threat that tends to bubble out of the cesspool that is Usenet and, while I did forward it to the proper authorities, I did not feel any great distress. I have certainly never suffered any actual violence due to my atheism and the only times I have felt compelled to conceal it was not for concern for my safety but rather for fear that I'd have to engage in some awkward discussions with people whom I had no interest in debating.

Rather than saying that American atheists are a persecuted minority, I would say that we are, in fact, an irritated minority. It is important to understand, however, that the amount of irritation that we receive is not negligible. There is a de facto presumption, in our culture, that it is perfectly okay to criticize atheism and to belittle atheists for holding incorrect beliefs. At the same time there is a double standard where atheists are considered to be arrogant for assuming that we are correct in our beliefs and that we are bitter and hateful for having the audacity to question the beliefs of others. In particular, it is inevitable that if one admits to atheism it is only a short amount of time before someone comes along to challenge that admission with a set of arguments that we have heard innumerable times before. It is for this reason that atheists tend to have a very ironic familiarity with religious argument.

For myself, the most vexing response to my atheism, however, is not the amateur theological arguments that I get exposed to (there was even a point where I sought such arguments out, though not so much anymore) but, rather, the suggestions that people give me to help me cure myself of this epistemological affliction. In particular, the people who suggest that I should just open my heart up and try to believe in God. The reason that this is such an irritant is that I have yet to meet an atheist who hasn't, at some point in her life, attempted to do just that or, at least, has given the question some very serious consideration.

My first experience with the notion of God was while I still in Kindergarten. We had a teacher who wasn't overly concerned about adhering to the Supreme Court's stance on the separation of Church and State. She read us the tales of Narnia, she had us sing religious songs and our craft projects would have the occasional religious iconography (especially around Christmas). I definitely knew about God. Did I believe in God?

It's hard to say. I suppose that it would be accurate to say that I believed in him (and yes, he was a him) in the same sense that I believed in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. This isn't to say that I had some advanced theological sense whereby I knew that God had to be considered a fiction. Rather, I had the same sort of relationship that five year olds have to all things that are outside of their immediate experience. For a child, the border between reality and fantasy is thin, blurry and permeable. I seriously believed that my best friend and I were actually alien dinosaurs, for instance. At the same time, when my friend announced that the whole alien dinosaur thing was just make believe, I had no trouble nodding and agreeing with him. Reality, at that age, is malleable.

There is also the factor that I didn't really quite understand what God was supposed to be. I knew that God was supposed to be able to do anything, and that God was supposed to be invisible and that he was, most confusingly of all, supposed to be everywhere. Beyond that, the sum of my knowledge about the subject was conveyed to me by the sort of religious claymation specials that they showed around Christmas and Easter (but Christmas and Easter were definitely about presents and eggs, respectively).

It should be noted that my parents never introduced me to religion (more about that later) so it's possible that my own understanding of God was thinner than the other kids. I don't think that's necessarily the case, however. I remember an incident where one kid claimed to be God and one of the other kids demanded that he prove it by picking up a nearby motorcycle. To me, this suggests that God and Superman occupy the same niche for kids that age.

Around the age of seven, I learned that I was an atheist. When I say that I learned this, what I mean is that my parents told me that we were atheists and that we didn't believe in God. This does not mean that I had any more of an idea of what atheism was than I did of what God was. It was just a label. If I had been told that we were Jewish, I would have happily considered myself a Jew. If I had been told that we were Buddhists, a Buddhists I would have been. If I had been told that we were Martians, I would have cheerful and proudly been a Martian.

Past the point of correcting my mother for her occasional "God bless you," in that smugly insufferable way kids have when they catch an adult in an error, I just didn't think much of it. The closest it came to being any sort of issue was one day, in the third grade, when I got into a lopsided shouting match with the rest of my class over whether or not there was a God. It was the typical sort of opinion exchange that kids have with them yelling "Does too!" and me yelling "Does not!"

I think that our teacher was more distressed about this than any of us. For us, it was just the sort of argument that kids have over anything where there can be a difference of opinion. It was no more serious than arguing over whether Mickey Mouse was better than Donald Duck.

I didn't have my next brush with religion until the age of nine or ten when I was vastly surprised to find that I needed to go to Summer Bible Camp. So, how is it that my so-called atheist parents sent me to what amounted to a Christian summer school? Well, the answer to that question is that I am not sure that my mother was really much of an atheist. I know this for a fact: through her childhood and up into her adulthood she was raised a Catholic. At some point between there and then she became an "atheist". At least, she said that she didn't believe in God but, I suspect, that she was probably just going along with my dad's stance rather than stating her true beliefs. I think that she was actually somewhere between a lapsed Catholic and an agnostic. To which of the sides she was closer, I cannot say.

Be that as it may, this wasn't an attempt to sneak some religion into me under my dad's nose. Her reasons were humanitarian: my best friend was apparently worried about my soul. At least that's what my mother heard from his grandmother. So, to sooth my friend's alleged concerns, she cheerfully sent me to "camp" with him. His grandmother was a saintly woman but could she have made that up, herself, in order to save my soul? I honestly don't know.

It was not a grueling ordeal. It was, actually, pretty fun. Now, I should disclose one thing. At no point did I display my atheism. I decided that it was best to just blend in and go with the flow. When the pastor asked for amens, I gave them mine right along with everyone else's. When we were asked to affirm our belief, I affirmed mine, too. I even ended up giving a one-boy presentation, on our graduation night, where I gave a free flow talk about religion (and got many compliments, I might immodestly add, afterwards).

But at no point did I start believing. It wasn't that I was being deliberately deceptive so much as that I found that the subject really didn't concern me. It didn't really bother me that people were claiming that God actually did exist. We just didn't agree. I even thought that it was kind of nice that my friend was concerned about me. I certainly didn't feel adverse to Christianity or anything like that. It just wasn't for me.

My overall indifference didn't last. By the age of twelve I started to get this urge to find religion. I remember giving God a test, once. I prayed for him to show me the location of something that I had lost. Naturally, I found it at some point after that and decided to construe that as a sign and a miracle.

I just could not sustain my belief. The harder I tried to open myself to God, the less I could bring myself to feel anything. It literally felt like I was clutching at air. In the end, I gave up and didn't think about it, again, until I was fourteen.

By that point, my understanding of religion had become more sophisticated. I had, at least, a passing familiarity with all of the major world religions as well as a good sense that there were even more religions out there. I had a feeling that I ought to believe in a God but I had no clear sense of which one. Attempts to find Christianity continued to fail and none of the other attempts had born fruit. I studied and I prayed. I felt an acute need to find something.

Finally, I found Islam. There's a story that had a lot more meaning to me at the time which, now, simply seems embarrassing. One day, while I was studying the Koran, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I miraculously "knew" that Islam was the one, true religion.

Yeah, I know. It's pretty thin. Conversion stories often are, though. How many of the great religious stories revolve around having a vision or an epiphany, after all? All I can say is that it seemed like a genuine revelation and I embraced it with all my heart.

Why Islam? Who knows. I did know an Islamic girl whom I was attracted to, but I retained my newfound faith even after she utterly rejected my claim to be a Muslim (and I can only imagine how outlandish that claim must have seemed to her). She stopped talking to me, and I continued believed. She moved away, and I still believed. I remained a believer for a full three years after she disappeared out of my life (for a total of four years of religious conviction).

Did puppy love have something to do with me choosing Islam? I think it's plausible and even likely. Did it have anything to do with me remaining a Muslim? No. That was part of something deeper.

When I believed, I felt fulfilled. I felt part of something bigger and more important than myself. I felt like I was, personally, part of some grand design. Most importantly, I had a wonderful feeling of certainty – that I had an inside scoop on the answer to the most profound mysteries of life and existence. I knew God and felt his presence in my life and in the cosmos as a whole.

I liked that feeling and wanted, very much, to keep it. That's why it felt so awful when it finally came tumbling down.

In the end, I found that had to keep making compromises between my religion and the rest of what I knew. I have always been a bookworm and one with an appetite for scholarship. I read voraciously on a wide range of topics. Whenever some random fact came into conflict with my religion I would invariably (and, often, instantly) reconcile it with my religious beliefs with a typically small change in perspective. I actually got quite good at being a lay apologist.

"Perhaps this passage where God tells us that we start out as a clot of blood isn't actually meant to be taken literally and – hey! – that's really not that far from embryogenesis, is it? Of course it’s not!"

It couldn't last. Eventually I reached a point where I had to decide whether or not I should trust in knowledge or if I should trust my faith. It was a slow and grueling process but the conclusion was, I feel, inevitable. When put on the scale of my beliefs, knowledge won.

This is not to say that I gave up hope on religion, just Islam. I devoted myself to serious study to see if any of the religions I was aware of, or any potential religion, could bear the scrutiny of examination. I have given every modern religion, and quite a few ancient religions, close scrutiny. The more I looked, the more elusive God (or Goddess, or the gods, or God knows what) became. The more I learned, the harder it was to hope for conviction.

The final deciding point came when I start debating the merits of atheism on the Internet. By that point, I already considered myself to be an atheist, but I wanted to hear the best arguments for theism that I could find. It was a very educational experience. I was exposed to all of the arguments for religion, both the good ones and the bad ones. The arguments had the added virtue of being delivered by their most sincere proponents.

I threw myself into that debate with passion. I tried (with varying success) to avoid the mocking of opponents that so typifies online debate but, rather, tried to focus on the serious arguments. I encouraged my opponents to make their best argument and I debated them vigorously.

At this point, I really have seen all the arguments. It has been, literally, years since I last heard a new case for theism. I've heard arguments ontological, epistemological, qualitative, deductive, inductive, emotive, rhetorical and satirical. I have had gentle discussions with theists of the highest caliber and I've gotten into shouting matches with grievous morons (and have acted the part, myself, now and again). I have thought, I have contemplated and meditated, and I've even had some very good and kind people try to pray for my soul, to no avail.

For me, at least, there is simply nothing there to find. I haven’t stopped considering the question. At the utter least, I think that religion is an interesting mirror upon which we can see a curious reflection of the human psyche. I also reject the assumption that religion can only be the source of hatred and evil. I have yet to encounter a religion from which I can take nothing of value or insight; it’s just that the insights seem, to me, to be human ones and not the works of transcendent beings or processes.

So, how do I reply to the well-intentioned suggestion that I just give God a try? I’ve never found a good reply. I don’t want to summarize my travels through the religious spectrum each and every time but I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m dismissing the consideration out of had. Usually, I’ll simply say that I have and try to leave it at that.

It is not a perfect solution.