John Lennox on the faith of atheism:
Atheists Running on Faith
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Category Archives: Atheism
An atheist delusion
When a person dies, there is little that is more fatuously stupid than saying that the person will live on in the memory of those who loved him. A few months ago when I attended a funeral at a Diocese of Niagara church, that is more or less what the priest told the mourners: no mention of the Christian hope of resurrection at all. If it were not for the inconvenience of having to recite the liturgy, I suspect he would not even have mentioned God.
The priest in question, while appearing to enjoy the pomp and pageantry his office affords, gave a passable impression of a functional atheist who hasn’t yet come out; after all, he wants to continue to collect his salary. For an evangelical atheist who has to try and make sense of mortality, it’s even worse: the memory that lives on is nothing more than the mechanistically meaningless firing of a collection of synapses. Nevertheless, that is how atheists – the champions of reason – choose to comfort themselves and their children when faced with death.
From here:
For Julie Drizin, being an atheist parent means being deliberate. She rewrote the words to “Silent Night” when her daughters were babies to remove words like “holy,” found a secular Sunday school where the children light candles “of understanding,” and selects gifts carefully to promote science, art and wonder at nature.
So when she pulled her 9- and 13-year-olds together this week in their Takoma Park home to tell them about the slaughter of 20 elementary school students in Newtown, Conn., her words were plain: Something horrible happened, and we feel sad about it, and you are safe.
And that was it.
“I’ve explained to them [in the past] that some people believe God is waiting for them, but I don’t believe that. I believe when you die, it’s over and you live on in the memory of people you love and who love you,” she said this week. “I can’t offer them the comfort of a better place. Despite all the evils and problems in the world, this is the heaven — we’re living in the heaven and it’s the one we work to make. It’s not a paradise.”
This is what facing death and suffering looks like in an atheist home.
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Atheists against Charlie Brown
Well, not exactly: atheists don’t want to be that offensive. It’s more like: atheists against the Christ who is represented in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Unhappily for the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers though, Charlie Brown’s creator, Charles Schulz, was a Christian so it is no more possible to get Christ out of Charlie Brown than it is to get him out of Christmas.
Face it, atheists: you really are Charlie Brown haters.
From here:
An atheist group is accusing an Arkansas grade school of violating students’ constitutional rights by inviting them to a performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at a local church.
Students at Terry Elementary School in Little Rock were invited to a performance of the show at Agape Church. Teachers informed parents in letters home that a school bus would shuttle children to and from the show, which would be performed on a school day, KARK 4 News reported.
According to the station, the letter the teachers sent home indicates the play will be held on Friday, Dec. 14, at 10 a.m. at the church. Children attending will be taken on a school bus and will need to pay $2 to cover the expense of the bus rides, the letter states. Students are not required to attend the production, according to the school district.
One parent contacted the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers after receiving the letter.
“We’re not saying anything bad about Charlie Brown,” Anne Orsi, a Little Rock attorney and vice president of the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, told KARK 4 News. “The problem is that it’s got religious content and it’s being performed in a religious venue and that doesn’t just blur the line between church and state, it oversteps it entirely.”
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
The extraordinary claim is: “God exists”.
The extraordinary evidence is the self-evident existence of the self-awareness that is able to doubt the truth of the proposition: “God exists”.
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Atheism and the body/mind problem
A recent article about Christopher Hitchens quotes him saying: “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” This is a proposition that all atheists would affirm, but how rational is it?
Alvin Plantigna argues for dualism – that the mind and body are separate entities. The argument goes along these lines:
I can imagine a possible scenario where my mind exists separate from my body. I can even imagine that it is possible that my mind continues to exist if my body is destroyed.
I cannot imagine the possibility of my body existing separately from itself; if my body is destroyed, it is gone and I cannot imagine the possibility of it continuing to exist.
Therefore, my mind cannot identical to my body because I can imagine something is possible for it that I cannot imagine is possible for my body.
You can see Alvin Plantigna discussing the argument below and for a formal presentation of it go here.
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The Lord’s Prayer causes an atheist to suffer “anguish, discrimination, exclusion, rejection and loss of enjoyment of life”
Well good, you might be thinking, serves him right for being an atheist. The atheist in question, Pete the Atheist, has persuaded Secular Ontario – I’m sure they didn’t need much persuading – to sue Grey County council for $5000 to soothe his excluded, rejected, anguished ego and restore his “enjoyment of life.” It’s well known that recitation of the Lord’s Prayer has been cutting a swathe of excruciating angst through its hearers for centuries: it’s time someone put a stop to it.
As he points out:
He said councillors are infringing upon his Charter right to freedom of conscience and religion, referencing a 1999 Ontario Court of Appeal decision that ordered the town council in Penetanguishene to stop reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“I don’t like politicians who break the law, and our county council is breaking the law,” said Mr. Ferguson Tuesday from his home in Kimberley — one of nine municipalities within Grey County. He said if he wins the case, he’ll donate the $5,000 to Canadian Civil Liberties Education Trust.
“I don’t really care about religion that much, I care about the law. I care about being fair.”
So it’s a matter of the Law. But as one of Pete the Atheist’s probable heroes, Sam Harris has pointed out in his book Free Will, the councillors had no choice but to recite the Lord’s Prayer. What appears to be choice is actually rigid determinism disguised as choice: their chemicals made them do it. They were not responsible, so there is no point in punishing them.
As a corollary, Pete the Atheist has not chosen to be an atheist because if he is right, according to Sam Harris – and I agree with Harris on this – there is no such thing as choosing.
Thus, if Pete the Atheist’s views are correct, they are little more than the inane divagations of an automaton to which no-one should feel obliged to listen. And that’s where we came in.
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Atheists Anonymous
“Hello, I’m Jerry and I’m an atheist.” Nothing unusual about that, you might think – other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue, to atheism, he was a Pentecostal minister.
Since he wasn’t an Anglican minister, this presented Jerry with a bit of a dilemma which, on hearing of his new-found lack of faith, his congregation helped him resolve by firing him.
From there, he fell into the welcoming arms of The Clergy Project, a “confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs”: TCP, the spiritual formulation, guaranteed to disinfect the bacteria of Faith, Hope and Charity from contaminated souls.
Having come out, Jerry has been photographed with Richard Dawkins and become executive director of Recovering from Religion; that’s about as transcendent as it gets for an atheist.
A brief perusal of this clip will confirm that, although Jerry has abandoned Pentecostalism, it hasn’t entirely abandoned him: his intonation, gestures and stagecraft are all standard Pentecostal minister fare. I was expecting a “preach it, brother” from the audience; Jerry needs to attend a few more Reason Rallies to purge the remnants of what used to intoxicate him from his system.
From here:
In the span of just a few months, Jerry DeWitt went from a respected pastor with a vibrant congregation to an atheist without a job.
DeWitt, 42, is the first “graduate” of The Clergy Project, a program supported by several atheist organizations that assists pastors who have lost their faith to “come out” as atheists to family, friends, congregations and communities.
DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other “freethinkers” in Houston.
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An exercise in contrasts: remembering an atheist and a Christian
Christopher Hitchens remembered for how clever he was and, by association, how clever his friends are; a homage to ego:
They came to mourn Christopher Hitchens in the Great Hall of New York’s Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that launched his campaign for president in 1860.
The hall was filled with family, friends and readers; intimates of 40 years’ standing, and those who knew him only from the printed page and stage appearance; all still wounded by a loss that remains fresh at four months’ distance.
Most of the memorial took the form of readings from Christopher’s own works, occasionally enlivened by editorial comment. The biggest laugh was claimed by the writer, actor and gay-rights exponent, Stephen Fry.
Christopher, he said, had condemned as more trouble than they were worth: champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics. “Three out of four, Christopher,” said Fry.
Chuck Colson remembered for the positive influence he had on others – a homage to redemption:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Colson “a fine man whose life proved that there is such a thing as redemption.”
Evangelist Billy Graham acknowledged Colson’s “tremendous ministry reaching into prisons and jails with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ” for three and a half decades. “When I get to Heaven and see Chuck again, I believe I will also see many, many people there whose lives have been transformed because of the message he shared with them,” Graham said in a statement, adding, “I count it a privilege to have called him friend.”
One Andrew Mullins from Georgia tweeted to testify of Colson’s ministry. “The man changed my life in High School. His prison ministry changed other lives, as well,” he said.
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Atheist threatens human rights complaint after public prayer
From here:
A Christian prayer by a city councillor at a City of Saskatoon volunteer appreciation dinner discriminated against non-Christians, says a volunteer who intends to complain to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.
Ashu Solo, a member of the city’s cultural diversity and race relations committee, was among the guests at the dinner Wednesday, where Coun. Randy Donauer said a blessing over the food in which he mentioned Jesus and ended with “amen.”
“It made me feel like a second-class citizen. It makes you feel excluded,” said Solo, who is an atheist.
What can one possibly say to an atheist who feels excluded by prayer? A number of things spring to mind, but I will confine myself to this: Good.
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Atheists believe in unholy water
Unable to think of any positive activities with which to occupy their brief sojourn in this pitiless, indifferent universe, atheists in Polk county have decided to busy themselves with scrubbing a road with “unholy water” – water cursed by Richard Dawkins, one presumes. Their intent is to wash away any remnants of a blessing bestowed on the road by Christians.
The Christians prayed that “God would protect us from evildoers, mainly the drug crowd, that they would be dissuaded to come in to the county”. The atheists are bent on “welcoming everybody into Polk county”. Obviously, atheists enjoy the company of drug dealers.
From here:
Atheists in Polk County symbolically scrubbed away at a major highway leading into the county Saturday.
The were removing a blessing placed there a year ago by a group of religious leaders.
Brooms, mops and water hoses in hand, the atheists gathered at the roadside.
“We come in peace .. now that’s normally what aliens say when they visit a new planet, but we’re not aliens, we’re atheists!” Humanists of Florida director Mark Palmer shouted to the group along Highway 98.
Representatives from various atheist groups in the area scrubbed the road at the Pasco-Polk county line. They were figuratively removing holy oil that had been put on the road last year by a group of area religious leaders. That group was Polk Under Prayer, or PUP.
PUP director Richard Geringswald said his group had been blessing the county line.
“And praying for that entryway in to the city, that God would protect us from evildoers, mainly the drug crowd, that they would be dissuaded to come in to the county,” Geringswald said.
But Humanists of Florida members don’t see it that way. They say it makes them feel unwelcome.
“It sends a very bad signal to everyone in Polk County, and (anyone) who travels through Polk county who doesn’t happen to be Christian,” Palmer said, “This event is not about atheist rights; this is about welcoming everybody into Polk county.”
So they took their “unholy water” and washed the road.
