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Religion and its
"enemies"
Elsewhere in this website I defined 'religious' as
"believing in something that can't be verified." Believing in something
has to include all the facets and ramifications of that belief, which
means all the actions and sub-beliefs which are inherited from it. If one
is to accept that definition as correct, then beliefs connected with god(s)
or God are necessarily to be considered religious beliefs.
I used to think that only if the atheist position (there
is no god) can be proven can it be declared 'non-religious' (unless it's
part of one's religion to do otherwise). Decades ago, Ms O'Hair sent me a
very cherished handwritten memo when I expressed this view to her, in
which she stated I have no balls because of it. I thought that to be a
very strange response for a woman to make. She enlightened me not one bit!
Balls or not, I have since found that only by stepping back
and viewing all the arguments as dispassionately as one can muster, can
truthful and honest answers be found for some (maybe all) of such
questions. I have also learned about a process of evaluation called
'extrapolation', about which I will tell you in just a bit.
I think I have also found that many of the arguments made
for and against doctrine-based beliefs only serve to distract us from the
real questions that we should be asking, and suspect a high percentage of
those arguments served hidden agendas at the time of their origination,
and probably still do.
It often appears that their self-imposed blindness to the
true nature of their own atheology, and the 'isms' attached to it, keeps
many atheists from realizing that much of their material serves the same
purpose as any religious material, in that it keeps the adherent
convinced, but has little effect on the opposition.
For an example, look at our Mr. Cohen's arguments against
Christianity as being a 'revealed religion'. Think about this: Most of the
ideas he uses to present a case against the likelihood of a religion being
'revealed' will be accepted as obviously true by atheistic people, but
would not convince a Christian one whit and, in
fact, serve only as statements that say why he (or she) cannot accept them
as having any value. Maybe, even with all the typos, those arguments are
some of the most succinct and cogent I have seen, but a Christian person
who doubts the validity of scientific methodology, and who has been
trained for a lifetime that all such statements originate in Satan's mind,
will see no merit in them.
Atheists have yet to learn about a method of argumentation George Lakin
has given the name "word framing'. It offers to us one of the very few
effective ways to state our case with the goddies because we learn by it
how to put the burden of evil-doing back into their court, where it truly
does belong.
Other than that, extrapolation is an important process for atheists to
learn and practice. It is, after all, how a great many of us arrived at
our
status of unbelief. To extrapolate, my dictionary says, is:1. To infer
or estimate by extending or projecting known information. 2.
Mathematics: To estimate (a value of a variable outside a known range)
from values within a known range by |
assuming that
the estimated value follows logically from the known values. If, for a
simple example, you are given a series of numbers that begin, "Two, four,
six…" you will feel very confident the next two numbers are eight and ten.
If you, instead, hear, "Two, four, eight…" you would expect to hear,
"…sixteen, thirty-two…" next in the sequence.
Following up on that can open
our eyes to all the wool being pulled over them and in the new light that
gets let in, a lot of scary things become visible to us. For example,
extrapolating from a series of zeroes in a presentation of evidence lets
you know the only place that will take you is to a conclusion that zero
tangible, factual evidence adds up to zero gods, no matter how you
manipulate it, and no matter how many unsupportable complaints you levy
against science while working up a red herring to avoid examining the
actual culprit, religion.
Freedom of Thought
To my mind, if one is to call oneself a 'freethinker', one agrees that if
he would learn for certain there is no god that would be acceptable and,
the moment he might learn of a god that does exist, that is also
acceptable. If truth is whatever proves true, to denounce it after the
fact only serves to emphasize the depth of one's fallaciousness. To insist
that unproven ideas should be the basis of laws for everybody to obey
seems much the same.
I have never yet met an atheist person who agrees he would not acknowledge
a god with verifiable existence. I have met many unfree nonthinkers whose
lack of veracity forces them to deny that could be so.
I would like to point out that many who call themselves 'freethinkers' do
not think of themselves as being 'atheists'. Many people prefer to leave
open the option of adopting new ideas that come along, of being able to
review them, study them, of being able to listen to people without getting
upset, and of trying to actually gain an understanding of them. Such
people may not be seeking to adopt such new ideas, but enjoy the fruits of
increasing their own knowledge about life, the world, the universe and,
most importantly, about other human beings. The ability to truly be able
to wear other persons' shoes, to understand their positions and way of
thinking, to see existence from their eyes, they claim, enables one to
enjoy the only true freedom there is: That which one maintains within
oneself.
Such freedom is too frightening to too many people to be too common. Most
Freethinkers are atheistic, but despise the name; whereas many atheists
think that adopting other names for their atheism is a copout; but, most
atheists do not accept atheism as being only
what it is.
A Higher Intelligence
The Christian concept of god (whose name is God) is as an entity separate
from natural existence, and who created nature. The atheistic statement is
that there are no gods, nothing exists that could be called
'supernatural', and nature does not present to us that attribute we call
'intelligence' in its own actions. A Christian looking at
Mr Cohen's arguments concerning the natural order of gaining knowledge
will simply shrug and say, "That's because God made it that way."
So? If you look at all the arguments from a Christian point of view, Mr
Cohen is saying nothing wrong, he is just trying to make something
important from |
something meaningless.
We are unable, because of our relative diminutiveness, to perceive of the
universe as an entity, and of ourselves as wee occupants of an electron or
proton circling a nucleus in the equivalent of one of its atoms. Once
we could view it as a chunk of something, however, we might
discover the universe is alive, or it may (more likely) turn out to be
only a rock. That the nature of our perceptions disables us from being
able to see more than a slice of the big picture allows a majority to hold
onto the idea that science is wrong, is full of incomplete notions and
errors that lead us into evil deeds and thoughts. They overlook that the
same is true of them and, moreover, they deny what science can show to be
true, while unable to demonstrate why science is wrong, or that they are
'right' and, worse, that the
burden of proof is actually theirs. More than that?– that science has
yielded them lives of unprecedented potential and comfort, even to the
point of enabling their existence, in comparison to the world of no
science humanity has endured until the past few generations.
EXAMPLE: An aspect of our existence we notice, but cannot see in its
entirety however we look at it, is time.
The nature of time has puzzled philosophers for decades, even to the point
of trying to decide whether it is, or is not, something which exists.
If something seems hidden from our view, and from our complete
understanding, it would seem we would study it to the depths of our
abilities before we would make any determinations about the existence of
something, the nature of its existence, and our actual role (if we have
one) within it or alongside it.
To my mind, the idea of something being somehow supernatural does not make
any sense at all. For something to exist, even a god who created it all,
it has to be a part of nature (even if we cannot understand how). It may
be a hidden part, but it has to be a part, or it has to be untrue. There
exist no other choices.
We are said to be made in the image of God: When we create an original
item, it then shares the same realm of reality of our own existence and we
call it 'artificial'. When nature creates an original item (an island, an
iceberg, a snowflake) it shares the same realm of existence as whatever we
create, and we call it 'natural'. Whatever name we apply to whatever a god
creates, we must apply that same name to whatever nature creates, and to
whatever we create, or we must deny that we, and nature, are creations of
a god. OR, if we insist that a god is separate from us, and that his
creations are divine, or whatever, and are therefore not creations of
natural processes, then we must acknowledge that we, and nature, are
unnatural, and must modify our laws accordingly after deciding whether
unnatural acts and creations are godly or Satanic and, if we accredit any
of them at all to Satan, we must acknowledge we have also accredited that
entity with the power to create, after which we must decide once and for
all whether Satan, and not God, created nature and ourselves, and also
decide whether it is Satan people have been worshipping all along.
To me, that would explain a whole lot of our current problems. |
