Category Archives: Atheism

UK: four year olds to be taught atheism

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From here:

School pupils aged just four are to be taught atheism in a move schools hope will equip them to be ‘citizens of the world’.

Education bosses in Blackburn with Darwen, Lancashire, have radically restructured the RE syllabus to accommodate non-religious beliefs.

Youngsters will continue to learn about the six major faiths – Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism – but they will also be taught humanism, the belief that there is no God or Gods, and that moral values are founded on human nature and experience.

The move recognises that more than 10,000 people in the borough do not have any religious beliefs. Both primary and secondary school pupils will be included in the shake-up.

Fiona Moss, from RE Today, which helped create the new syllabus, said: ‘We really must recognise that some people do not believe in God and do not have a religious background.

‘We have to make children aware of non beliefs. ‘We want to support children to engage and enthuse them about RE to become good citizens in Blackburn and the world.

Teaching four year olds that “moral values  are founded on human nature and experience” is a recipe for disaster. The average four year old wants his own way now and without recognition of moral restraint from something higher than his own nature and experience, would still see wanting his own way as the highest moral imperative when he is forty.

That would equip them to be citizens of a solipsistic little world consisting of nothing but me.

Who created Richard Dawkins' creator?

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Dawkins et al. gibber incessantly that the cosmological argument fails because, once you have concluded that someone must have created the universe and that someone is God, you must answer the question, “who created God?”. The immediate problem with this line of reasoning is the confusion between the categories of what is created and what isn’t. Science tells us the universe is not eternal but was created. By definition, God is eternal and not created: the universe needs a creator, God doesn’t.

John Lennox explains another logical problem with the “who created the creator” view here:

SCIENCE AND religion are not incompatible, but should be seen as complementary fields, a gathering in Dublin heard this weekend. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and the author of a number of works on science and religion, told the annual meeting of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Ireland that the notion that science and religion are inimical is a “myth”.

“Faith is not only a religious concept, it is also a scientific concept . . . Every scientist believes that nature is rationally intelligent. [sic – it should be intelligible]” Describing what he called the “logical incoherence” of atheism, propounded by figures such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, he said the question of “who created the creator” could also be applied to atheists. “I have said to Richard Dawkins . . . if you believe the universe created you and is your creator, who created your creator?

“Most of us have got an ultimate fact,” he said, “for atheists it is the universe, for me the ultimate fact is God. It’s not a question of whether there’s the ultimate fact, the real question is which fact is ultimate.”

An atheist tries to come to terms with morality

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From here:

Recently an atheist, philosophy professor has recounted his repentance in the magazine “Philosophy Now”.

He is Professor Emeritus Joel Marks of the University of New Haven, Connecticut.   A moralist and ethicist, he regularly writes a column: “Moral Moments”.   He is a vegan by ethical persuasion, quite passionately opposed to vivisection and other common uses of animals.  His basic position in ethical debate has been to oppose utilitarianism in favour of Kantian ethics.  He describes his life prior to his conversion as: “morality has been the essence of my existence, both personally and professionally.”

However, Prof. Marks has come to understand the error of his years of atheistic, philosophical, moral arguments.   Turning his philosophic eye on his “own largely unexamined assumption”, he goes so far as to call himself “a moral fool”.  His long standing religious prejudice shows when he describes his conversion as “my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality.”

Professor Marks illustrates some common traits of atheists:

An atheist’s assumptions go unexamined. The usual one is that atheism is entirely rational; in actual fact, atheism is based on assumptions that are no more rational than those of Christianity.

Atheists are fond of laying claim to a morality that they say is not inferior to that of Christianity. The truth is, as professor Marks has noticed, atheism has no objective morality; an atheist’s morality is a concoction of subjectivity that is the result of Darwinian selection – or a piece of less than fresh cheese consumed the previous evening. Jean-Paul Sartre was a rare breed of atheist: he admitted that, without God, we make up our own morality. The so-called new atheists are less honest and maintain that their subjective morality is in some way universally valid, and so, wish to foist it on the rest of us.

The article goes on to note that, rather than believe in God, Professor Marks decided to disbelieve in morality. Now all he has to worry about – well, other than the final destination of his immortal soul – is the inconsistency of his non-belief in morality and living his life as if morality were real. I’m assuming he isn’t planning to become a serial killer.

Sadly Prof. Marks’ conversion was not from atheism to Christianity but rather from morality to amorality.   As he puts it “I became convinced that atheism implies amorality, and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality.”   This is a poor piece of logic for a professional philosopher.  He could just as easily conclude that “atheism implies amorality and since I am a moralist I must therefore embrace theism.”   But presumably he felt his reasoning about God was more secure than his reasoning about morality – even though his commitment to amorality raised the question of whether such a life was even viable.

 

Atheism lacks racial and gender diversity

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From here:

(RNS) Alix Jules is an atheist, but for years he felt uncomfortable at gatherings of nonbelievers. The reason: he’s black.

“I got really tired of going back and forth to free thought events and being the only black person there,” said Jules, 36, who lives in Dallas. “It was not necessarily inviting. I just felt like an outcast … No one was reaching out to me.”

Last year, Jules helped launch a local initiative to address what atheists regard as an international problem for their movement: a lack of racial and gender diversity.

From the smallest local meetings to the largest conferences, the vast majority of speakers and attendees are almost always white men. Leading figures of the atheist movement — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett — are all white men.

The obvious conclusion is that most women and non-white men have too much sense to believe in the non-existence of God. Good for them.

The atheist scam

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Atheists are claiming that all religions are scams; all but theirs.

From here:

American Atheists erected a billboard over the weekend in Huntsville, Ala., that claims all religions are scams.

The ad reads, “You know they’re all scams” and pictures some religious symbols including the cross, the Jewish star, and Islam’s crescent moon and star.

Funny that the biggest scams of all – atheist scams – are missing. Allow me to correct that:

More atheist bus ads

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From here:

The atheist group behind last year’s controversial bus ads suggesting “there’s probably no God” is rolling out a provocative new set of posters on buses across the country that places Allah beside Big Foot and Christ beside psychics.

The new posters bear the slogan: “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence” with “Allah, Big Foot, UFOs, Homeopathy, Zeus, Psychics, Christ” listed below…

“Why is belief in Big Foot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination,”

If atheists were as rational as they claim, the difficult to believe “Extraordinary Claims” list would include a few of atheism’s un-provable sacred cows:

  • A belief that something sprang spontaneously out of nothing at the Big Bang;
  • A belief that life created itself from the aimless interactions of inanimate matter.

A Christian understanding of the universe – the product of 2000 years of accumulated Christian thought – hangs together far more coherently than the conceited, quasi-metaphysical meanderings of the new atheists.

According to Sam Harris, “All we need is science”

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It sounds like the cue for a song, but it is actually another atheist trying to demonstrate that morality can be derived from science. Read the whole thing here (my emphasis):

How could we ever say, as a matter of scientific fact, that one way of life is better, or more moral, than another? Whose definition of “better” or “moral” would we use? While many scientists now study the evolution of morality, the purpose of their research is to describe how human beings think and behave. No one expects science to tell us how we ought to think and behave. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science officially has no opinion.

However, questions about values are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood….

The highlighted section above is itself a value statement that cannot be derived from science; it assumes that the well-being of conscious creatures is “better” than their non well-being. Everything that follows from Sam Harris is grounded on this value, a value that is not based on science: Sam Harris’s claim that his values can be deduced from science is false. Even worse, his foundation is thoroughly antithetical to scientific method, since a concious creature’s longing for well-being is the ultimate expression of subjectivity – at least a theist’s attempt at finding meaning for the word “better” is one which assumes an objective moral reality that was created by a Person who exists independently of “concious creatures”.

Dear atheist

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You don’t understand what time is, what matter is, what consciousness is what life or death are, what beauty, love, self sacrifice or forgiveness are. Who God is.

Worst of all, you don’t understand that you don’t understand any of these things.

In 100 years time, if you are right, you will have ceased to be; in 200, no-one will remember you or care who you were. Your philosophy is without truth, goodness, hope or meaning; all you have is pride and, if you are wrong, I fear you may have it and nothing else for eternity. Poor you.

Atheist morality: shallowness redefined

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Atheist, Sam Harris has written a book explaining how science, not religion, should be the basis for morality.

From here:

His long-awaited new book, “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values,” deals head-on with issues that many atheistic thinkers have been skirting for years. If religion is so bad, where should humans look for a moral authority? The answer, for Harris, is science. Harris defines morality as anything related to the “well-being of conscious creatures.” Since many scientific findings have implications for how to maximize well-being, Harris believes scientists should be authorities on moral issues. As Harris sees it, scientists not only have every right to make moral arguments, but should be the authorities of the moral realm.

Harris has put forward a crassly tautological argument for basing morality on science.

It’s all very well for him to define morality as “anything related to the “well-being of conscious creatures”, but where does that come from if not from a sense of “ought” which science cannot explain?

Harris, in starting from the assumption that when our conscience – natural law – tells us that we ought to care about the well-being of our fellow man, has already presupposed a ready-formed morality that was not derived scientifically – a moral law expounded by that which he so despises: religion. In Christianity’s case: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

Christianity, if true, is entitled to tell us that we should care about the well-being of concious creatures (Matt 7:12); science, true or not, isn’t.

Over-sensitive atheists

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Richard Dawkins described Pope Benedict as “a leering old villain in a frock who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part” and the Catholic Church as a “rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution. “

Dawkins is not only entitled to his opinion – however fatuous – but also entitled to publish it, something he did with a degree of relish that would probably have been absent had he been slandering a pillar of Islam.

The Pope’s visit to Britain has inflamed the pious sensibilities of numerous atheists, many of whom signed a letter to the Guardian bewailing the fact that the Pope acts and speaks like a Catholic and claiming he didn’t address the child abuse problems in the Church – even though he did.

Pope Benedict, in his address at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh pointed out that:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”

All perfectly true since Hitler and his Nazis were not so much atheists as anti-theists – against God – just as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are. Hitchens and Dawkins would protest that they are not Nazis, but they are unable to point to an objective standard of right and wrong that would tell them that they shouldn’t be. A Hitler Youth marching song goes like this:

We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.

Horst Wessel was a Nazi party street-fighter murdered by communists and turned into a martyr by Josef Goebbels.

Also, the 20th century leaders that have been inspired by a rejection of God: Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong-il, Pol Pot have ruthlessly slaughtered more people in 100 or so years than all the tyrants that preceded them put together . This is not particularly surprising: Christianity teaches that each person is made in God’s image – they are shaped by God; atheism teaches that each person has no created essence other than that of a clever animal and therefore can be shaped and moulded by force. The fact that Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot failed is testimony to the fact that they were wrong: a person does bear God’s image.

None of this matters to atheists, who, when not occupied with hurling abuse at the Pope in fits of irrational pique that would embarrass a 3 year old, become quite hurt and hysterical when someone has the effrontery to challenge their cherished articles of unbelief:

The British Humanist Association was quick to respond to the Pope’s remarks, noting in a statement: “The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that it somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.

“The notion that it is nonreligious people in the U.K. today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organization exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people, and many others, is surreal.”

Richard Dawkins fumes:

I am incandescent with rage at the sycophantic BBC coverage, and the sight of British toadies bowing and scraping to this odious man. I thought he was bad before. This puts the lid on it.

Thank you, BBC: anything that makes Dawkins “incandescent with rage” deserves all the license fees it can get.