Skepticism, Religion Archive

Friday, April 28, 2017

How much does it bother me that people believe in gods?

I came across a Quora question not too long ago, Does it bother atheists that people believe in God?. Here's my answer.


The Out Campaign: Scarlet Letter of AtheismIt does bother me that people believe in gods, but the extent to which it bothers me depends very much on the specifics of how the person acts.

Look, most of my friends are Christians. And for the most part, we only discuss religion a bit, and have a live and let live attitude. As long as people are reasonable and tolerant, religion isn't the type of thing that gets me up in arms. But even then, it still bothers me some. I mean, I think back to when I was still a Christian, and all the cognitive dissonance I experienced, the fear of Hell (especially for others besides myself), the Catholic guilt, the wrestling with secular ethics vs. Biblical rules, etc. It may have taken me a few years to get to this point, but I'm happier now as an atheist than I was as a Christian, and I'd like for others to have that. But, I also don't want to be that guy that's always arguing and being pushy about beliefs. So here's a list of examples stepping through different types of believers and how I feel about them.


Type of Believer: Tolerant believer who keeps their religion private and doesn't impose on others
My Feelings: This bothers me on the same level as people who believe in urban legends, or who root for different sports teams from me. They're wrong about the nature of reality, and I would like to help them see the world more clearly, and recognize that the Steelers are the one true... sorry - wrong topic
Level of Opposition: Good natured discussions over beer (though I hardly ever bring it up, waiting for others to broach the subject)


Type of Believer: Somewhat tolerant believer, but who lets their religious beliefs influence the way they vote (particularly if they vote against women's rights or LGBT rights, or think global warming can't be real because God wouldn't let it happen)
My Feelings: Well, now your religious beliefs aren't as private anymore, since they're having real world effects. So, now I do feel more justified in trying to get you to change your mind.
Level of Opposition: More heated discussions over beer, Possible end of friendship depending on how they treat individuals


Type of Believer: Door to door proselytizers
My Feelings: Hoo boy. I love debate, and I have strong opinions on religion, and you actually came to my house with the purpose of talking about religion, so here we go.
Level of Opposition: Debate for as long as they're willing to stay at my house


Type of Believer: Parents who withhold real medical treatment from children in favor of faith healing
My Feelings: I don't personally know anyone like this, but I know they're out there. The case of Makayla Sault was a heartbreaking, recent example. Children shouldn't have to suffer or die for the religious beliefs of their parents.
Level of Opposition: Push for laws to outlaw this type of child abuse


Type of Believer: Intolerant believer, who lets their religious beliefs influence the way they vote and how they treat individuals (particularly women, the LGBT community, and people outside their faith)
My Feelings: Yeah, now they're definitely into the strong negative effects of religion, and I don't just feel justified to try to change their minds, but see it as a moral duty to society.
Level of Opposition: Strong debate, definitely not going to be friends


Type of Believer: Creationist/Evangelical/Fundamentalist Preachers/Leaders
My Feelings: You're not just misleading yourself, but misleading all the people who follow you. And these brands of religion are usually the more close-minded branches that lead to negative effects, so I'm definitely going to speak up.
Level of Opposition: Pointed blog entries and Quora answers


Type of Believer: Intolerant Religious Politicians
My Feelings: We have a First Amendment for a reason. Government and religion aren't supposed to be intertwined. It really, really bothers me when politicians pass religiously based laws, or give preferential treatment to certain religious institutions.
Level of Opposition: Pointed blog entries and Quora answers, Vote for opponent


So, that's how I feel about it. We live in a free, multicultural society, where people have the right to believe anything they want. As long as religious people are tolerant of others and don't use religion as a reason to discriminate or make bad decisions, the most they'll have to fear from me is talking about religion over a beer every once in a while. However, if a person's religious beliefs are having harmful, real-world consequences, then I'm going to speak up.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Answering Quora - Why are you not preparing for the tiny possibility of a literal Hell?

A few months ago, I came across a question on Quora, Why are you not preparing for the tiny possibility of a literal Hell?. Here's my answer.

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I don't prepare for the Christian Hell for the same reason I don't prepare for this afterlife:

Egyptian Book of the Dead

The ancient Egyptians believed there were seven gates the deceased must pass through on their way to the Field of Reeds, and each of those gates was guarded by some type of supernatural creature. The only way past was to recite the appropriate spell for each one. If you made it past all them, then your heart was judged on the scale of Maat:

Scale of Maat

Your heart had better match the feather of truth, or else Ammit will devour your soul. If you pass that test, then you get to go on and enjoy the afterlife.

If all that was true, that would be pretty important for your eternal afterlife. Would it make sense to memorize all the spells to recite at the seven gates? I mean, even if there's only a tiny possibility of it being true, what's a few hours worth of memorization compared to eternity?

Or do you, like most people, dismiss the Egyptian afterlife stories as just ancient superstition, and consider the 'tiny' possibility they might be true to actually be a negligible, virtually non-existent chance? Perhaps it's interesting, but no, it's not even worth devoting a few hours worth of time to memorize spells that you will never use, ever again, except perhaps as some interesting bit of trivia at cocktail parties.

That's how non-Christians feel about the Christian Hell. The whole religion is so obviously not true. The 'tiny' chance that Hell might be real is on par with the 'tiny' chance that fairies may exist - i.e. virtually no chance at all. Why worry about such obvious superstition? And even if you were going to worry about it, why pick that superstition in particular? There are lots of proposed possibilities for the afterlife. If you really wanted to be safe, you'd have to prepare for all of them.

Images from Wikipedia - Book of the Dead

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Related Entries:

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Recommended Reading - Religion

Religion?I've written an entire book on religion, plus a ton of other essays for this site. That's a lot to expect anybody to read, so if you want the quick introduction, this is it.


For the super quick summary, I grew up as a Christian, with a strong and sincere faith. But as I grew older and learned more about religion and the world at large, I came to realize that religion simply wasn't true, and that atheism was by far the most likely explanation of the universe. The essays below explain all of that in a lot more detail.


Introduction

For Anyone Interested in Luring Me Back Into the Fold

  • How to Convert Me Back to Christianity
    This is a list of all the issues you would have to address to get me to reconsider the validity of Christianity, and whether or not to even be a Christian if you could demonstrate that it was true.
     
  • Standards of Evidence for Religion
    This is the type of evidence that would be required to convince me of the reality of gods or religions.
     

Additional Info

I've written a lot about religion. Here are four collections.

  • My Book, online
    I tried to keep the book short enough that it wouldn't be overwhelming, but long enough to be a good, informative introduction.
     
  • Religion Archive
    Pretty much all the religious essays I've ever written for this blog.
     
  • Friday Bible Blogging Index
    This is an ongoing effort to re-read the entire Bible as an atheist. I started off pretty good, but progress has been slow for a while.
     
  • My Quora Profile
    I write a fair amount about religion on Quora, though those answers are mixed in with all my other Quora answers.
     

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Putting This Blog in Perspective

PerspectiveI wanted to expand on something I wrote a few years ago in the entry, The Misleading Image of Bloggers. If you come and visit this blog and read my entries here, I think it would be very easy to get a misleading image of what I'm like in real life, and maybe even some misunderstanding over just how strongly I really feel about certain issues.

First of all are the topics I discuss here. I write an awful lot about religion and politics on this blog, as well as skepticism in general. Those are topics that interest me, but I know they're not topics that interest everybody, and even if they did, they're not necessarily polite topics for dinner conversation. Nobody wants to be that guy that's always starting a religious or political debate every time you hang out with them. Granted, I do like to discuss these things when they come up, but I usually wait for other people to bring them up. If you happened to meet up with me on a Friday night to go grab a beer, chances are that these topics wouldn't even come up. So, this blog gives me an opportunity to write about these issues without boring my friends.

Plus, it's not like I only think about religion and politics. Like I wrote in that older entry, "Nobody except my friends and family really cares what TV shows I've been watching, what I've been eating for supper every night, the chores I did around the house last weekend, the grades my daughter makes in school, how she did at her piano recital, or many of the other things I do or talk about on a daily basis." I write about certain topics because I do think there's an audience that will like reading about them. And even if it's not a huge audience, at least it's a bigger audience than just my wife and parents, who are just about the only people that would want to hear about all my mundane day to day experiences.

Second is how I feel about the 'opposition'. I criticize religion, creationism, conservative politics, climate change denialism, etc. And while I may at times call out certain individuals holding those positions, I don't mean to imply that all people holding those positions are bad people, nor necessarily even the specific individuals I'm calling out. All people have a multitude of views on a multitude of issues, and I seriously doubt that any one person is going to agree with me on everything. So, when I criticize creationism, for example, I'm specifically criticizing just that one belief. I don't think most creationists are bad people. I think they're just mistaken about that particular issue.*

Moreover, while I criticize religion a lot and think that on balance it does more harm than good (see the previous entry, Why Do I Spend So Much Time on Religion, for plenty of examples of the harm of religion, including fire bombings and persecuting children as witches, or a recent entry, Christian Privilege, showing the undue privilege religion receives in our culture), I don't think it's universally horrible in every aspect. Religiously motivated soup kitchens and homeless shelters do good in the world. Christmas bazaars and pot lucks can foster a sense of community. People who have had traumatic experiences can often find comfort in religious beliefs.

In addition, I hold people to different standards depending on the situation. I've already written about this in the entry, Run of the Mill vs. Big Name Creationists. Most people never had evolution presented to them well in high school biology, and don't have much reason to study it, now. As I wrote previously, "It's hard to get good and pissed off at someone who believes something and hasn't ever been shown a good reason not to believe it." But when someone like Ben Carson, a respected neurosurgeon, goes and gives a presentation to the public, or participates in public debates, then I do expect him to have done enough research to understand the issue and speak about it knowledgeably. And then there are the prominent creationists / creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis, or Kent Hovind, or Ray Comfort, who I know have been exposed to credible science, yet continue to spread their falsehoods. And even though I just used creationism for my example, that's not the only issue where I look at things this way. It applies to politics, science, and a whole bunch of other fields. I get much more upset with people who should know better but continue to spread misinformation.

In real life, I have friends of all types of religious and political persuasions. I have friends ranging from fundamentalist Christians to Muslims to agnostics and atheists, from young and old earth creationists to evolutionary biologists, from die hard Trump supporters to people who are far more liberal than me, from gun rights absolutists to people who would like to see more gun control (though no one I know of who would advocate outright bans). We get along because most of the things we do on a daily basis are talk about work, or vent about personal problems, or get together for a crawfish boil, or go out to happy hour, or help each other move, or, well, all the normal stuff everybody does.

So, if you're reading this blog, and you think I'm attacking you personally, please keep in mind that that's usually not my intent. I try for the most part to be civil and criticize ideas, positions, or policies. If I've crossed the line and written something offensive, then I apologize, and I would ask you to point it out to me so that I could address it in the future.

And keep in mind that this entire blog is only a small slice of my views - the ones I think people would be interested in reading. If you ever met me in real life, even if we disagree about these issues, there's still a very good chance we could get along just fine and find common ground in other areas.

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*As a side note on that, though, I'm not so naive and idealistic as to think that everybody is always acting honorably. I've written quite a bit about Ray Comfort on this blog over the years. I know he's been exposed to the science regarding evolution, but he repeats the same falsehoods year after year. And he still uses dishonest tactics like quote mining and selective editing to make documentaries. It gets harder and harder to believe that he's not knowingly using dishonest tactics.

Image Source: Return of Kings

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

The Ray Comfort Index

The Atheist's Worst NightmareI've written quite a bit about Ray Comfort on this blog. In fact, he provided me with my inspiration to start the blog, back when a guy in a flea market gave me and my wife a copy of a Ray Comfort CD. The arguments Comfort used were just so bad that I had to vent about it somewhere, so I wrote my first real substantive blog entry, A Meandering Tale About Fundamentalism.

I don't normally go out of my way looking for things to criticize about Comfort. In fact, other than just now looking it up so that I could provide a link, I can't remember the last time I've visited his website, Living Waters. But from time to time I come across something he's done or said or written that I can't pass up commenting on, so I've actually ended up with quite a few entries devoted to him. So, I figured I'd create one entry with links to everything I've ever written about Comfort, and which I plan to update with new links if I ever write anything else about him.

Ray Comfort Entries, in Chronological Order

Archives

Selling Out