You can take the boy out of Kentucky but...

...you can't take the Kentucky out of the - wait.. hold on.

I originally made this blog as a class project, and while I never really planned on meandering back here, I felt like a post could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

I've since left Kentucky and I'm currently living in St. Louis. While far less stereotypically southern in comparison, northern Missouri is still full of bible-thumping Christians. The Christians around here tend to be a lot more Catholic than Protestant in nature and hypocritical non-practice. Though far more apologetic, Catholics are much more tolerable than their evangelistic cousins. They may be able to turn the most horrible line of scripture into a mutant line of hope and love, but at least they don't use scripture to justify their hatred (as often).

Still, I feel like every 3 weeks or so, I end up having a nervous breakdown. Constantly absorbing religious idiocy takes a toll on the rational mind. It's no longer easy to just smile and nod. I often wonder, when I'm alone with my thoughts, if I can sympathize with conspiracy theorists... feeling like I'm the only person in a crowd of thousands who isn't being convinced by the lies. I suppose the biggest difference would be that they in turn offer up their own outrageous claims. I just stop at the halfway point. Why is it whacko to listen to someone talk about Jesus and say, "Hahaha.. wait, you guys believe this?" Seriously, if anyone really wants to know why atheists exist, read the bible.

The most convincing bit of literature that shows why religion is bullshit is the Christian Bible. The fact that the world's most popular religion is based on a poorly written (even for that era) and plagiarized fairytale shows that we just can't seem to evolve "dumb" out of our species.

Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, Aeneid, and hundreds of other poems, most written in complex prose formats all predate the hallowed New Testament by hundreds of years, and none of them sound like they were written by a 10 year old. People read the repetitive and grammatically retarded prose of the bible and dismiss it as a product of old times, but when you hold it up to these works, it becomes immediately apparent that they were either written by mostly uneducated men, or they were written specifically so that stupid people would be able to comprehend it. In either case, it should be an insult to anyone reading them.

Religion and Evolution

Many people say that acceptance of evolution is compatible with the practicing of a religion. Now keep in mind, being religious means that you follow a religion. If you believe in a god and don't believe in prayer, sin, or any of the other human-centric traits given to gods by religion, then you're not religious.

Here is my main issue with religion and evolution by natural selection (the only scientific brand): Someone who accepts both a religion and evolution is essentially claiming that we have evolved from a single celled organism over millions of years, following a winding path whose only concern is the environment around it and the options given to it at any moment, and somehow a god has picked one particular creature in one particular spot along the ever-branching road to command worship and impose punishments?

How can anyone that truly accepts evolution, a non-stop process with absolutely no ultimate goal, actually be so self-centered as to think that a being who supposedly created evolution would be satisfied with us? How can people believe that for ~3 billion years, this god simply watched it all happen before him, allowing creatures to live stressful, painful, and dismally short lives?

He was waiting for a sentient being who could worship him you say? How can someone who accepts science believe that for the first 197,000 years of human existence on this planet, god simply watched humans come into the world, grow up, and die a horrible death from illness, weather, animals, or any other nasty affliction? Garbage.

I'm not saying that religious people can't accept evolution. I just don't believe they can actually hold both points of view if they truly analyze both ideas. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

A thought for the day.

Saying that Atheism requires faith is like saying "not playing guitar" requires musical talent.

An interesting conversation

I have had many many interesting conversations over the last year, and though most of them start and end the same way, sometimes a phrase or a question still catches me off guard. Last week in a casual conversation on religion, I was asked if I hated religious people. I pause. Truthfully, I don't hate religious people. Why then, I ask myself, do I get so passionate when the idea of religion comes up? I was never wronged by religion; I was raised without religion and am therefore a lifelong atheist. I have never been wronged by someone on behalf of religion. Why then do I say vehemently hateful things in the direction of religion?

I finally decide that I don't have any blanket hate for religious people, but I do hate religions. I hate people who do evil on behalf of or because of their respective religions, but I generally save my fire and brimstone for the establishment and not the victims. Yeah. That's it.

This is all fine and dandy, and though my partner accepts the answer and moves on, a little section of my brain sounds an alarm. I am annoyed by people who believe in any kind of god, I told myself. Why does that annoy me if such a deistic view has literally zero potential of bringing me any pain or misfortune? The truth of the matter is that I don't actually know any true Deists. I know people who use deistic arguments to support their beliefs, but every single one of them ultimately makes the ridiculous leap from deism to "Jesus" or any other theistic counterpart. That's it, I tell myself. It's the destruction of logic to leap from the possible to the ridiculous. Anyone can make a case for an uninvolved deistic god, but it's the ones who believe in a god that hears prayers, watches everyone at all times, and knows what you're thinking at any given moment... they're the ones that annoy me.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, it's the lack of evidence that truly baffles me. I can understand this idea of a need for religion, and I can even buy this idea of people being predisposed to religion and atheism, but the level of conviction that people hold for something they have never actually seen concrete proof of is embarrassing. "You have the same blind faith in science and reason," they say, usually with a venomous tone upon the utterance of science. "Science needs no faith," I smile back, "It's not a democracy. It doesn't matter who believes what and when. Science wouldn't die if all of its followers left it, like hundreds of dead, now mythological gods." They shrug. They always shrug.

"Faith is faith," they say, as they each mumble to their own respective god or gods, "I don't need proof. I know mine is the truth."

I smile and nod, letting the conversation drift to sin and the afterlife.

That is offensive!

Is there a difference between being an outspoken atheist and being an outspoken Christian?

The very question betrays America's subconscious desire to be willfully ignorant and comfortably stupid. In what other area of knowledge would such an equivalency be drawn? Is someone being offensive when they say, "Astrology is bullshit?" Why on earth am I obligated to grant respect to an institution that not only teaches falsehoods, but teaches them in the face of and in spite of scientific knowledge?

When I am confronted by an evangelical Christian, I am not insulted. In fact, in most cases, I'm quite flattered that this person is genuinely concerned about me. In their minds, I am going to hell if I maintain my beliefs, and frankly, if they didn't try to change my mind, I fear they would be just as evil as they're accusing me of being. No, it's not the conversations that bother me. Nor does it bother me when I am at a friend's house and their family reaches their hands toward me for prayer. No, it's not the traditions that bother me.

I am bothered by the stupidity that comes along with dogmatically accepting to have faith. It is impossible for someone to maintain a sense of empirical analysis while they teach their children that the earth is 6000 years old and that people used to live until the age of 900. The disconnect that one must suffer in order to live in the physical world we inhabit and also to believe with their whole hearts in such ridiculous dogmas is what truly bothers me. It doesn't bother me in the sense that I wish the world had no idiots. I am not naive enough to think that a world like that would even be any better than the one we're in today. No, it bothers me because I know that their children will grow up thinking the same thoughts. It bothers me that just a little bit more of our population accepts evolution, now a concrete scientific school of study, than the Middle East, a region so intellectually and technologically devoid, that every single one of their achievements in the last few centuries, from electrical power to nuclear power, has been stolen or bought with oil. Ever since Islam took power in the region, and intellectualism was shunned as evil (as they knew with intellectualism comes atheism), the culture has been a scientific wasteland. It has been over 600 years since the time of Muslim technological achievement, and this is the culture we want to emulate?

Being an outspoken atheist means that you aren't comfortable sitting back and twiddling your thumbs when the very country you live in is more comfortable in denying science than it is in denying a book that barely resembles the text written by a bunch of Iron Age bigots.

Someone telling me that I'll go to hell for what I don't believe in is nothing like me saying that the belief in a personal God is a symptom of scientific ignorance. One demands you ignore epistemological discourse, and the other demands you embrace it.

Shroud of Turin

I've had 3 people tell me that the recent History Channel documentary on the Shroud of Turin was absolutely amazing and reaffirming for their faith.

I finally got a chance to see it, and one of the huge differences between myself and the people who told me about the documentary (besides the whole atheism thing) is the fact that I've seen 2 or 3 other documentaries on the Shroud. This newest one started by saying, "The authenticity can't be proven." This is a pretty large understatement. The amount of controversy and scrutiny put into this piece of cloth makes the Kennedy assassination look like an open and shut case.

One of the problems is that this only pushes an attempt to prove an historical Jesus (assuming the lettering is legit). It does nothing to provide evidence for the divinity this character supposedly had.

The argument that Jesus may not have existed is rarely used by atheists and scientists in religious debates, and when it is used, it's often used to point out that devoting one's life to a potentially made up character is silly. The reason it's not a cornerstone of atheist debate logic is because we understand that the idea of something being "neither provable nor disprovable" is not evidence for either side. The creation of doubt to one side is not the dissolution of doubt from the other side. This is an example of a false dichotomy - something that the theism/atheism arena is littered with. If something can be neither proven nor disproven, then agnosticism must exist. That doesn't mean one must put equal stock in the options, however. I can be pretty certain that gravity isn't actually invisible ropes pulling me back toward the planet, even though our understand of gravity is "just a theory."

The idea of a false dichotomy comes into play when you pit two notions as opposite poles on a 2-tone spectrum. If I were to say that "Either there are invisible ropes keeping me and all things tied to the planet, or it's gravity," I would be committing the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy. Clearly, if gravity were to be one day disproven, the immediate conclusion, assuming that the dichotomy was legitimate, would be to say, "Well, I guess there really are invisible ropes." Obviously, this is not how science works. When one idea is backed by a study of the fundamental physical laws of the universe and nature, and the other simply feeds off the doubt of its self-appointed opposing viewpoint as well as the fact that it's "possible", then the focus would no sooner shift to that viewpoint than any of the other infinite "possible" viewpoints. (Geeee - I wonder what issue I'm secretly passionate about!)

Back to the original point, most atheists that I know are perfectly willing and able to accept the idea of an historical Jesus. Yet.. proof of the character is so passionately important to people that they will throw their livelihoods behind the cause. If one day there was definitive proof that Jesus of Nazareth walked this planet, it would do absolutely nothing to either atheism or theism. It would not be proof of his divinity nor would it be a blow against the assertion that he was just a man.

Does it actually reaffirm their faith? I'm sure it does. That's the funny thing about faith. The exact same stimulus (I.E. looking out over the Grand Canyon, watching a child come into the world, or even the nirvana that comes when you're relaxed) can affirm the faiths of many people, all with different religions. This, I feel malicious for saying, is also not proof of anything. Delusions by definition spring from a misconception compounded by stigmas and experiences all misinterpreted and filtered through a lens of deceit. When you believe in something, you tend to read everything in the context of your belief. When an atheist sees a huge waterfall or a childbirth, they don't feel nothing, they feel extreme pleasure or nirvana. The very same endorphins and adrenaline pumps through their veins. They simply don't attribute these feelings to a deity.

The Shroud of Turin might be real, and it might not be, but until science comes up with an answer, I'm going to wait patiently and see. I promise I won't have any "life changing experiences" either way.

A Common Bible Belt Dialogue on Belief

"So you don't believe in God?"
"No."
"So you don't believe in anything then?"
"What?"
"You probably believe in evolution and science then, huh?"
"I don't 'believe' in evolution any more than I 'believe' in gravity. It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in science; it's not a religion. It's just an explanation for how the observable universe works."
"So what do you believe in?"
"I believe in kindness. I believe in deep personal connections between two minds. I believe that we as humans have an obligation to make sure that no one starves or dies when we can prevent it -"
"A HA! Love thy neighbor as thyself! Straight from the Bible. Even your holier-than-thou morality comes from my religion."
"They can trace it all the way back to about 2000 B.C.E. One could speculate that for as long as humans have had verbal communication, the Golden Rule has reigned supreme."
"So the Old Testament, then."
"That only came around 400 B.C.E... are you messing with me?"