Dear Believer:Why Do You Believe?

The standard questions but slickly and movingly presented.

Confronting the fear of religious violence.

"I shall give in to your demands to suppress freedom of speech, purely because I fear your threats. But don’t for one nanosecond confuse fear with respect. I do not respect you, I despise you and everything you stand for – especially given that your faith is apparently so weak in argument that it requires violent threats to shore it up." ~ Richard Dawkins

A Manual for Creating Atheists

 

 "Manual for Creating Atheists" by Peter Boghossian.

Bibleheads

"Biblehead" is a very apt name for a particular type of religious nutter that atheist bloggers will be very familiar with. They use the bible as a substitute for rational thought, and have convinced themselves that a crushing response to sceptics is provided by quoting lengthy tracts, often with little relevance to the subject under discussion. They simultaneously seem have blinded themselves of the provenance of the bible; of its long, long history of oral transmisson, translation, editing, selection, so that, whatever the literary merits of the modern version they happen to be familiar with, it  bears little resemblance to whatever Moses thought God had said or to what Jesus himself said, if he existed, and that is by no means certain

The bible is simply a distillation mostly by 'chinese-whispers' of  the myths and superstitions of nomadic bronze-age goatherds who lived short, fear-ridden, violent lives, that bibleheads have indoctrinated themselves to believe has some relevance to the modern era. Any good that has come out of it has been filtered out by the developing humanity and rationality of the intervening generations.

So having a book handed to you with the explanation that it contains everything you need to know is very comforting, allowing you to believe that you are far more in control of your scary world than you would be otherwise. It's delusional, but for most people not being hit by lightning, or succumbing to infectious diseases, or being killed by natural disasters, there is no reason to believe otherwise. And those exceptions, well, they can be rationalized away too, simply by referring to this book.

With such a handy dandy guide to life, you really don't need to even think about or acknowledge your real ignorance.

Simple Faith

Faith

Also:- "Faith is a means of control of the gullible".

The Sea of Faith

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

from Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

Women

"Here and now, everywhere, those with eyes to see can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half our species. Half of the great minds our peoples have produced have lived and died unknown and forgotten, their educations neglected, their lives spent doing laundry and other menial tasks for men — their merits unrecognized and buried under lies promulgated by religion, in cultures soaked in the destructive myths of faith which codify misogyny and give it a godly blessing.

Isn’t that reason enough to tear down the cathedrals — that with this one far-reaching, difficult change to our cultures, we double human potential?"~ P Z Myers

Faith

"Faith is the gap left in the justifiable belief jar which is left by evidence."

                                                                                                                  ~ Jonathan Pearse

The arrogance of religion

"The fact that stares one in the face is that people of the greatest sincerity and of all levels of intelligence differ and have always differed in their religious beliefs. Since at most one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. One would have expected this obvious fact to lead to some humility, to some thought that however deep one's faith, one may conceivably be mistaken. Nothing is further from the believer, any believer, than this elementary humility. All in his power ... must have his faith rammed down their throats. In many cases children are indeed indoctrinated with the disgraceful thought that they belong to the one group with superior knowledge who alone have a private wire to the office of the Almighty, all others being less fortunate than they themselves." ~ Sir Herman Bondi

Yes! - We're ALL individual

. . but you could have fooled me . . . 

Note to the rationality-challenged . . .

A quick reminder to any of the great tribe of the 'rationality-challenged' who happen to light upon this blog:-

What goes on inside your head is only evidence for what goes on inside your head.

Bad Faith Awards 2011

"It’s time once again for New Humanist readers to vote to decide who walks away with our annual Bad Faith Award. Now in its fifth year our award is a means of dishonouring the year's most outspoken enemy of reason. Previous winners include Sarah Palin, the Pope and last year's victor Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, the head of the UK Islamic Sharia Council, for his assertion that it is not possible for a man to commit rape within marriage. 2011 has been a bumper year for irrationality (aren’t they all), and we’ve been flooded with nominations. We have whittled them down to a field of six arch adversaries of human advancement – take a look, make your choice, then deliver the click of shame using the poll below."

Read-on: Bad Faith Awards 2011: place your vote now

At the moment Nadine Dorries is in clear lead.

Agnostic or Atheist

"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about God, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.

     Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

     The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so."

From "A Challenge to Atheists: Come out of the Closet", by Richard Dawkins.

Putting faith in its place.

A beautifully presented  demolition job on fuzzy faith-based 'reasoning', including William Lane Craig's.

A thought for Sunday church-goers

‎"The most powerful being ever created a universe of over 100 billion galaxies, each with over 100 billion stars, which existed for 14 billion years, and then picked one of the 100 billion galaxies and picked one of the 100 billion stars in that galaxy, and picked one planet revolving around that star, and of the million species on that planet he picked one animal member of all those species and said: ‘I’ve really got to tell that guy to stop gathering sticks on the Sabbath’.” ~ Michael Nugent

Faith requires self-delusion

The following is an extract from: "Why We Believe in god(s): A Concise Guide to the Science Of Faith." The author is psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson, JR., MD.

“The human ability for self-deception is crucial to religious belief. If many believers could see their own minds more clearly, they would see that self-deception plays a role in their acceptance of faith.

Maybe there are ONLY atheists in foxholes. If the faithful truly and fully believe in a protective deity, why would they dive into a foxhole to protect themselves from the bullets whizzing by? A part of their brains knows damn well that if they do not protect themselves, the bullets will hardly discriminate between those who claim faith and those who reject it. They may say and think they believe, but their instinctive actions expose the lie.

Why do the faithful buy health insurance? House insurance? Most people live their lives as if there is no god. We stop at red lights, we put our children in car seats, and we act responsibly to protect our safety and the safely of those we love.

If a person is religious, he is an atheist in relation to others’ gods and the gods of history. He also will almost invariably live as an atheist in relation to his own worshipped deity.

We expect others to live as atheists too. We want them to stop at red lights and not assume we drive under divine protection. We in the West have become so used to religious people NOT really, truly, and fully believing what they say they  believe that we are startled when, as on 9/11, we encounter people who really do believe their religion and put their beliefs into murderous practice.”

Richard Dawkins & P Z Myers in conversation

Prayer can make things worse

The next time some faithhead offers to pray for you best be on the safe side and try and convince them not to. The scientific study summarised here demonstrates that: if you don't know that they are praying for you it doesn't make any difference; but if you do know they are, it can actually make things worse.  True this has only been investigated for patients recovering from a cardiac bypass, and one can find oneself the subject of offers of prayer for all kinds of reasons, but why take any chances. . . .?

Your faith is a joke

"Faith doesn't transcend reason: it sidesteps reason" ~ Pat Condell