There was a time when the so-called New Atheists were getting a lot of attention online and in the media. The main reason for the interest was famous people with claims to empiricism, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, leading the charge for the New Atheists. Famous people can focus public attention on just about anything and when those famous people have credentials people are conditioned to respect, then those famous people can lead public debate.
The movement ran out of steam for a few reasons. One is Richard Dawkins found out that he could bash Christians as much as he liked, but when he moved onto other religions the priests of the New Religion took exception. In Britain, you cannot mock Islam and nowhere are you allowed to mock Judaism. Although it is unlikely that he ever figured it out, the truth is Christianity in the English-speaking world has come to mean “white” and the New Religion is antiwhite.
Sam Harris, the another famous New Atheist, was largely undone by his own weirdness, which you can see in this old debate. He looks like someone you would see in a documentary about serial killers. Persuasion is as much about how the arguments are presented, as about the facts and reason, and Harris presents as a psychopath who you would not buy a car from much less an argument about God. It turned out that Harris was the best argument against atheism.
The main problem for atheists, of course, is that they do not have an affirmative argument to make in support of their claims. You cannot prove a negative, which means there is no way to prove God does not exist. The best they can do is attack the arguments in favor of the existence of God. This not only makes them sound like jerks, but it can never work for the simple reason that people do not abandon their beliefs when they stop making sense, only when they find a better belief.
The other problem for atheists is that they engage in a form of argument that is inherently dishonest in its form. They start with the assertion that their claim is one of however many valid claims. Therefore, if they disprove the other claims, that means their claim is the right one by default. It is why atheists spend all of their time attacking what they claim are the arguments in favor of God, rather than putting together an argument in favor of their godless universe.
This is the Intelligent Design argument in a nutshell. Since there is no way to prove that God got drunk one night and created the platypus, they spend all of their time “disproving” evolution or asserting that “Darwinism” is a religion. It is entirely possible everyone is wrong, and we live in a simulation and the ID’ers are mistaking what they see for the hand of providence, for what is really just the work of bored child of a race of superbeings in another dimension.
That aside, the biggest problem for atheists, however, is that our moral framework as a civilization rests on the assumption that right and wrong, ought and ought not, are backstopped by something that lies outside the reach of man. This has always meant God, the gods or the shaman who communicates with the spirit world. Often, this supernatural element is bound up in tradition, which is just a handy word for agreed upon ways of acting over a long period of time.
If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it. You can see the problem here in this video of Harris being interrogated by a young YouTuber. It quickly becomes clear that the new moral framework Harris proposes makes no sense, not even to Harris. He is reduced to endless equivocation and restatement. Depending upon your perspective it is either sad or amusing to watch him struggle.
Of course, the main problem for Harris in his quest to create a new reason-based morality is that such a thing is not possible. Every human society has a morale code, a list of things you ought and ought not do. These collective beliefs in what is and is not ethical are either based on tradition or in the supernatural. One of the cornerstone beliefs must be that there are bits of this code that are off-limits to questioning, as they are too important to put to a vote.
This is the problem for late-empire America and the West in general. Once the medieval Christian conception of God was removed, the entire moral superstructure of the West began to faulter. Liberalism itself rests on a priori beliefs that are rooted in the Western Christian tradition. The reason liberal democracy looks like despotic anarchy is that the thing it requires to remain rational has been removed. The result is a Hobbesian moral universe that often appears suicidal.
This brings us back to the atheists. The main reason their project has always failed is that you cannot replace a set of beliefs with nothing. People will believe in something similar until a better option is found. Belief in the supernatural solves a problem, which is why humans share this one quality. For Western man, the zenith of belief was late-medieval Christianity. The long arc of the West that has reached the current state is the struggle to replace that belief with nothing.
In a way, the rise and fall of New Atheism gives us an insight into what lies ahead for the Godless world we have created for ourselves in the West. It is the image of the last atheist stammering his way through basic questions which he cannot answer because how we ought and ought not live lies in the thing he seeks to destroy. Ironically, it means the reality of belief will once against reassert itself because reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.
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Richard Dawkins also came out and said that you cannot have a Christian civilization without Christianity, which is so blindingly obvious that it takes a fedora-tipping atheist to not see it. I give credit to Dawkins for being intellectually honest enough to state that publicly, and he is intelligent enough to know that this means he was free-riding on Christianity his entire life, while attacking and undermining it. I sometimes wonder if we will see him getting baptized at some point before he meets his end. Sometimes I go on the atheist and “I f*cking love science” (aka, cringe atheism)… Read more »
Any totalitarian system eirhert hates religion as a rival (communism, globohomo) or co opts the dominant religion and claims ownership of it (Islamic clerics).
Moran: for any totalitarian regime a monotheistic religion is a rival, as they are always idolatry that can’t exist without their idol: Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Chavez and such.
Today’s idolatry of one world government so far has no successful idol, which gives me hope.
I think they have do many idols they can’t really choose: the black man, the rainbow dildo, on and on and on. They are still figuring out which parts of Sodom they like best
Isn’t the 6 Million at the top? Shrines to it everywhere. None of the lower rung occupants of the intersectional/victimhood pyramid are permitted to run afoul of it, or of hebrews in general.
There certainly seems to be a split between team six million and team Wakanda since October of last year
The part of Sodom I’ve always liked best is where God nukes it.
You’re not the only one
baphomet. the golden calf is on full display Olympics in france.
It was a symbiotic relationship, I believe. Monarchs ruled by divine right. God put them there, or so they liked to tell people. The church also had a seat at the head of power.
As much as I despise the commies, they did a lot of things right and you can’t blame them in a sense for being atheist when the religion you’re forbidding was part of the former government you just toppled.
Look at these loons down voting me. My statement is factually correct. The only reason to downvote it is because you’re a loon. Own it. 😂😂😂😂😂
I can understand why people down voted your comment. Nevertheless, I agree with your comment. It is not evil or wrong to notice the winning tactics of your enemies. If a bunch of atheistic commies overthrow your religious rule, the first thing you would do is destroy their institutions. If we got power right now, we would be destroying globohomo’s institutions. The ones we didn’t destroy, we would load up with ‘our guys’ and wear it like a skinsuit. We’d be running the ministry of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity as a hierarchy. We would redefine their definition of equality with… Read more »
Thank you. The other things that the commies did right was healthcare and education. Oh sure, their healthcare might not have been up to our standards, but compared to what they had before, it was much, much better. The monarchy simply didn’t care about the peasantry. You were cattle to them. Likewise, with education. As my staunchly Reagan/Goldwater Republican father always says, a kid from a village like him would never have had the chance to go to college if it wasn’t for the communists. Again, the people who came before them (the Western installed monarchs) simply didn’t care. And… Read more »
Yep. Commie healthcare was great. Just so long as they weren’t starving you to death, working you to death in an ice-cold labor camp, or putting you up against a wall and shooting you.
Yep. They cared about the peasants alright. With that sort of care, I’d just as soon be ignored.
What kind of healthcare did people get in their villages while their Western-installed monarch was galavanting around Europe rubbing elbows with his other Western installed cousins running all the other European countries? Animals got better health care. You see, the same people you guys hate in our country, that’s the people who were toppled by the communists. I’m not saying they were great, but compared to what they replaced, there were lots of pluses that they don’t teach you about. Think about it this way. Do you know who the carpetbaggers were? 99% Jewish. They don’t teach you that either.… Read more »
Hate to tell you this, Copernicus, but the Slavic world IS part of the West. Saying that the West installed the monarchs is therefore utter nonsense.
P.S. Their medical professionals are world class. Surgeries and treatment regimens have been pioneered in Eastern Europe. They just aren’t as quick to force you to pop pills, for example, instead being ahead of the curve on phages, while we dispense prescriptions for antibiotics like toilet paper. In fact, my nephew, who’s an undergrad, but probably geared towards going to medical school, was pretty impressed with my knowledge of phages. Not an in-depth knowledge, mind you, but that I even knew what they were and that they existed. 🤣 Lots of people here go back to the old country for… Read more »
Eastern Europe has a much higher per captia rate of sincere Christians than the West.
Generally speaking, the Slavic world is a better place than the rest of the white world, but that’s despite communism, not because of it.
Dude I just downvoted you because you have said previously that you love downvotes. Just trying to help you get it up – the downvote count, I mean. Plus your overall comment is kind of stupid. Have you ever bothered to check out how many of these “healthy, educated” young men of the USSR were cut down like flies by their own government? Or sent to Siberian labor camps after coming home – victorious – from Germany? It’s time to get out of this cold war mindset and talk about how things really are (and were). Ok, let’s have that… Read more »
That was 60, 75, 100+ years ago. Like our government (with the help of Israel) didn’t take out JFK, didn’t sic Jeffrey Epstein on the government, didn’t murder Sadaam as a response to the inside job known as 9/11? Nobody is saying the communists were great, just that they had their plusses too.
One could argue that the former Soviet Union wasn’t really Communist. It certainly was totalitarian, but it didn’t strike me as globalist in its aspirations. After Lenin died, the USSR broke into socialist and Communist factions, the latter under the leadership of one Lev Aronovich Bronstein, a/k/a Leon Trotsky. Trotsky and his fellow (mostly) Jewish utopians no doubt cackled about that Georgian thug Djugashvili, only to find that Stalin had displaced them, sending Trotsky to Mexico (after all that good work he’d done putting down that Kronstadt revolt!). Stalin was about “socialism in one country” though he could for a… Read more »
Damn Nick how did you surpass me on the shit list. It’s a pretty high bar. 🍻
I don’t give a shit what the NPCs think. They don’t even realize they truly are NPCs by just swallowing everything from the government and being so stubborn about what they think they know.
Being opinionated and ruffling feathers is fun. Especially when you’re RIGHT.
It wouldn’t be trolling if it weren’t fun!
The Process is the Evil of Communism. Once you rely on murder to win an argument, you’ve delegitimized yourself, which incidentally shows why Islam is essentially demonic, but I digress. The problem with Marxism in general is that it relies on destruction to “build” the future and what we discovered in the 20th century was that its promises could not make up for what it destroyed, not even a 10th of what it destroyed. And really one could argue that we are living out the denouement of 1789 and 1917 and that we will not rise again until we hit… Read more »
Though made up of largely the same people, atheism is like communism in that the “true believers” (useful idiots) think they will run the new order. They are always surprised to find themselves against a wall facing a firing squad.
always love reading the comments. i believe the atheist, agnostic thoughts are for times of peace and plenty, when a majority of the population has agreed to follow a moral code. my wife is a believer of convenience. when times are good she questions if god exists, but when shtf, she is the first one on her knees pleading. i think many men/women believe this way. it is not abnormal. as civil men we have given up the natural man (no moral code) to follow a greater creed for the benefit to all. we are still men who revert to… Read more »
Considering what they accomplished without our technology, people in antiquity, the middle ages or the Renaissance, were not dumber than today. Probably the opposite but never mind that. There is not a single surviving civilization or even a small sheltered jungle tribe, that was atheist. During world war two they did operations research on where returning bombers were hit. They reenforced the parts they never saw hit. Because the sample was bombers that managed to crawl back home. Applying operations research to spiritual traditions, a rational man will conclude that if you want your society to survive, you do not… Read more »
about the WW2 bombers – granted, they assumed that the parts they saw hit (on the planes that returned) survived and were not the most vulnerable parts, but did they analyze the planes that went down after being hit for obvious vulnerabilities?
They did not have easy access to planes lost over enemy controlled territory but I am quite sure they did proper analysis of the information they had access to. The point of this famous (and afaik true) story is the information logically present via sample absence. The same applies to atheist, pacifist, feminist, equality of kin and stranger and several other ideas, civilizations
Atheism requires more faith than does belief.
Atheism in practice seems to require “faith” in the infinite perfectibility of man. That takes a lot of belief, which few religions seem to subscribe to. But I’m not learned in comparative religions however.
I like that Ostei. Both faith and belief push the boundaries of what is knowable. Faith goes further because it has to push harder. Some people just can’t stand to live in doubt, so they take a few extra steps.
This is correct. A proper Christian is agnostic; belief replaces certainty. An atheist cannot doubt; he “knows” that the universe has no Creator, it just “is”. However, as Z incisively observes, the atheist is unable to explain the foundation of this certainty except by denigrating traditional (primarily Christian) belief. These assaults on Christianity may well be useful tools in smashing Christianity itself – if that is in fact the underlying goal – but they in no way establish the truth of atheism. As is said of vegans, so with atheists: Q: How do you know someone is an atheist? A:… Read more »
100%. The most fervent religious people I have encountered have been atheists by a large margin. They are right up there with fundamentalist Christians and radical Muslims. For a fun game, attempt to tell them that they are exactly like the people they choose to deride and make fun of. Watch the reaction for the lulz and prepare for drama. To say with 100% certainty that you wholly understand existence and the universe is the same level of comical arrogance you see from the most devoutly faithful of any religion. Atheists skew slightly above average on IQ so this is… Read more »
“God does not play dice with the universe!”–Al Einstein
Apparently Quantum Mechanics “won” (this is what Albert was inveighing against.) Some wag recast his saying as, “Not only does God play dice with the universe, but the dice are loaded.”
Be that as it may, my point was that scientists at the very highest levels have often been believers in a supreme being or the supernatural in general. And I think we all know something about Newton in that respect.
Ah, but He does. Right now though He seems to be more into Cyberpunk and GTA.
This is like one of those “Democrats are the real racists” clever self-owns.
The people who repeat what you just said are supposed to believe that faith is a virtue.
Are you saying that Atheists are more virtuous, or are you conceding the point that faith is stupid?
What I’m saying is a God-created universe is more believable than one spontaneously arising ex nihilo. Therefore, more faith is required to believe the latter than the former. The judgment is less about faith than about comparative plausibility.
There is also the agnostic position, which argues from an origin that in Latin I’m sure is “ex fuck-if-I-know” 😏
Correct. My decidedly mid-wit brain vaguely sorta kinda groks (yo 3g4me) the Gödel business and seems to me that certain avenues of metaphysical speculation are just Turtles all the Way Down no matter how much one dresses them up hyper-dimensional quantum-fu.
A bit like Gödel wanting to tell the Judge at his citizenship oath-taking that he’d found a fatal logical flaw in the US Constitution — what profit is there in “Going There”?
Yes, exactly. Genuine agnosticism (a very new term) is an intellectually supportable belief. Atheism requires active denial of a whole class of evidence and testimony.
“…people in antiquity, the middle ages or the Renaissance, were not dumber than today.” Woodley a few years ago presented a paper is which he obtained a couple of dozen or so genomes for Greek people. He analyzed/measured a couple thousand or so genes noted for IQ effect, then ranked the findings by period—ancient, classical, modern. Highest ratings for IQ found in classical Greeks of Plato’s era. Oddly, I believe it was Galton who way back when also speculated that the classical Greeks were smarter than the people of the modern era. I also seem to remember recently reading a… Read more »
I used to be an atheist for many years before finally becoming a Christian. I took a passing interest in the new atheists but after a while I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t believe in God any more than I believed in pink elephants living on the far side of the moon. If they wanted me to believe they would have to convince me. I’m not obligated to consider every assertion someone makes at me. What finally convinced me was the morality issue. I had my own code I thought I lived by, but in the end I couldn’t… Read more »
They also failed because what they say is false.
Christ is King!
“The main reason their project has always failed is that you cannot replace a set of beliefs with nothing.”
So basically, they’re Libertarians.
Good quip, but not the problem with Libertarianism.
Oh, I have a very long list of problems with Libertarianism. I was just feeling saucy.
Let me help you out.
There is *one* main problem with Libertarianism. It assumes an environment (in which men dwell) not in evidence. Call it an ideal environment. Perhaps one of lack of government, but rather free association among men. The physics lecturer’s “frictionless plane”. If this environment were in effect, most problems with Lib would go away.
So really, the “long list” excuse you use to avoid defense of your quip, is not really that long—if you really understand Libertarianism well enough to criticize it.
I’ve always preferred to define Libertarians as Liberals who don’t like paying taxes and want to smoke weed.
It kind of gets to the nub of it quicker.
Atheism in the West is for people who think Christianity cramps their style. They don’t like rules, usually sex and “sexuality” based rules. These people get together with outsiders, primarily our small hatted friends and attack our culture.
“Atheism in the West is for people who think Christianity cramps their style. They don’t like rules, usually sex and “sexuality” based rules.” This is true but also in the opposite direction as well with the feminization & in a similar vein jewish influence on the faith making it extremely irritating to masculine men. There’d be millions more Christians today if it was more like the medieval era where masculinity & warrior culture was lionized instead of demonized & not just for the sake pointless foreign wars. I know countless men who absolutely despise Christianity because of its association with… Read more »
The problem is that this is a self-fulfilling problem. If real men walk away from Christianity because of their disgust at effeminate men and their C*nts, well, Christianity will become ever more aligned with the wishes of these effeminate men and their c*nts. Right now, Christianity is SJW converged, at least in the West. Anyone denying this is kidding themselves. BUT, Christianity is not inherently this way. Any institution led by men will reflect the men leading it. Today the institutions are led by sissies, frauds, chomos and women. But if they were run by real men, the institutions would… Read more »
Very well said & your point about being these cucked churches doomed is so spot on, outside of new England & similar utterly leftist places I don’t know how in the hell any of these churches will last. I know a lot of people like a top down style organization but that’s precisely has killed so many churches by creating a single point of authority to subvert. Some overarching church org in my state put out a mandate that every church under their umbrella had to essentially shill leftism & be openly anti Trump. That ended exactly how you would… Read more »
“being led by sissies, homos, chomos and other undesirables, but they will be cast aside eventually.” The Church is as it always was. It’s no more falling apart than she was at the beginning. She has had a lot of bad press though for a long time in the West. Personally, I think this is might a social breeze that is going to destroy most of the large group movements of the last 500 years in Christianity outside the Church. The odd ball groups never seem to go away entirely. But it is odd that Protestantism in particular grew without… Read more »
The religion of athiesm has always held a strong attraction for ‘spergy scientism types. Since hatred of Christianity has long been one of the core bigotries of the current ruling class, any dorky STEM nerd can attract some attention to himself and get patted on the back for being a good boy by loudly trashing Christianity. Harris and Dawkins are typical in that they could possibly be well-regarded by the collegues in their fields were they to limit their energies to their areas of expertise, but that attention is not enough to satisfy their egos so they spend most of… Read more »
Reminds me of libertarians. I think there’s actually a large overlap in atheism and libertarianism. Both of them thrive on holier-than-thou debating (ironically), both provide some large cohort of supposed goobers they can pick on (Christians and “statists”) to feel superior to, and most importantly, both put the spergy guy (and yea they’re all men) at the center of their own universe.
I love it when Christians think it’s a win to call atheism a religion. You’re saying “hey, atheism is just as irrational as Christianity, so STFU!”
There is a little more to it than that. In any case, if you look at the scorecard, atheists have killed a lot more believers worldwide than vice versa. Non-believers too; atheists aren’t picky when they gain power.
Do you also love it when Muslims call atheism a religion? Of course not, because they don’t call it religion at all – they call it blasphemy and punish accordingly.
It’s a wonderful thing that we Christians are here to entertain you, like a clown.
atheists have killed a lot more believers worldwide than vice versa.
So what? If it transpires that believers have killed a lot more believers that atheists ever did, does that mean God doesn’t exist?
I agree with this argument if yours
The point, and you understand it of course, is that certain famous atheists, largely the demon spawn of western post-enlightenment rationalism, kill people by the millions when they have the power to do so. God’s existence is an entirely separate question, which you also know. For the sake of avoiding argument, “God” is undefined, and his existence can neither be proven nor disproven. In fact the adjective “his” has no meaning, really. Unless you buy into a religion that begins with “God the Father”, wherein “his” is used for the sake of grammar, if nothing else. I can prove that… Read more »
demon spawn of western post-enlightenment rationalism
(((Demon spawn)))
Scandinavia is the most atheist region in the world and we never killed anyone very much.
Christian America killed half a million believers in the last twenty years of the Global War on Terror.
“God” is undefined
Very convenient.
Well you Scandis are killing yourselves off slowly but surely in the absence of belief in a higher purpose. Otherwise you’re not wrong about the (very) recent non-violence stuff. The thing with America is that it kills Other People stupidly and indiscriminately not even playing one-dimensional checkers. The nature of an Abrahamic religion, or any State comprised of believers in Anything at All means that either of these WILL/MUST kill people. It’s simply a matter of Who? Whom? Per usual. H L Mencken, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce… Americans should absorb these writers *first* before repairing to the Not so Good… Read more »
Well you Scandis are killing yourselves off slowly but surely in the absence of belief in a higher purpose.
So is America, despite all the Jesus-talk.
What we DO have in Scandinavia, is 20-25% of the population voting for what they believe are white nationalist parties.
How many white nationalists are there in Congress?
“How many white nationalists are there in Congress?”
Is Scandinavia housing half the world’s Jews at the moment? Is it ground zero the corporatist, globalist world we live in?
The issue here is not really religion either way. The US is huge and is essentially the EU at the Federal level.
Your “white nationalist” ain’t helping too much, Felix.
“Scandinavia is the most atheist region in the world and we never killed anyone very much.” Right now, sure after being civilized by Christianity. The history of Northern Europe however looks suspiciously like that of sub Saharan Africa until they were Christianized. Lots of big blanks, with most of civilization some how connected with the Mediterranean Sea.
Also the area is on the most anti-depressants, so that that as you will.
with most of civilization some how connected with the Mediterranean Sea.
You mean to the pagan civilizations of the Med?
You read history like a certain person reads the Bible. Back when we were pagans, we ruled from Kiev to Dublin and from Greenland to the Rhine.
And as with the Roman Empire, it all started going downhill fast once we succumbed to Christianity.
“You mean to the pagan civilizations of the Med?” They were building cities and roads, trading internationally, sailing, writing down their experiences, developing math/philosophy, and just generally laying the ground work for Sid Myer’s Civilization game. And the ancient Swedes…were hunting and gathering as far as we know during all that time. “You read history like a certain person reads the Bible. Back when we were pagans, we ruled from Kiev to Dublin and from Greenland to the Rhine.” Not all pagan civilization were the same. Northern Europeans have come to think of themselves as on top the world since ancient times.… Read more »
They were building cities and roads, trading internationally, sailing, writing down their experiences etc.
Yes, but they weren’t Christians, were they? Your argument was that Scandinavia only thrived after being Christianized, so where does that leave Athens or Rome?
This whole discussion is an offshoot of the “if you don’t fear being tortured for a trillion years, how can you be a good person”-argument. The fairly modern ascendancy of Europe has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with Europeans.
The US is an ocean of fat,depressed ,waddling delusionists claiming that they live in the “greatest country in the world…evah.
I don’t consider Murika very Christian. Probably killed more like a million “believers.”
Felix, If I were a Scan, I’d worry about not getting raped and murdered by the wonderful “believers” y’all have as neighbors and not worry how God is defined or not. Just sayin.’
The lions are hungry.
A religion is a set of beliefs about the supernatural and the human culture that springs from it. Atheism truly is a religion by the broadest definition of it. It has a set of beliefs about the supernatural, which it uses to accept or reject propositions and create a distinct culture. In the West there is a Christian influence to that culture. It largely borrows it’s morality and arguments from it. Religion as “bad and irrational” is incoming from the general modern culture. To have a religion is to be human. There is no other creature on earth, as far… Read more »
It has a set of beliefs about the supernatural No, there is not “a set” of beliefs, only one: that you should not believe in stuff for which there is no evidence, especially if said stuff is over-the-top incredible, like “you’re going to live forever if you pray to my Bronze Age volcano god.” You do not, I assume, believe in Shiva or Ahura Mazda. Does the implication of your Shivatheism occupy your thoughts a lot? Do you derive ethical or existential implications from the fact that you do not believe in Shiva? Do you have clubs where you meet… Read more »
I wonder if Sam Harris would like it if we used Jewish morality (on full display in Gaza) when dealing with his tribe.
That was something I could never put my finger on as a normie as the atheists were hyped not because of some rigorous adherence to “reason” but because of hatred of White people and the structures that make up their societies. Along those lines, I saw a tweet from Keith Woods pondering if Islam is the fix, which of course gets it backwards as they hate the people, not the faith.
I think if we look into the book of Acts we will find a section where the apostles of Christianity were given a dream to go west into Greece and Asia Minor and not east into Persia and India.
Perhaps Christianity is first ” white” because we were best suited and prepared for it in the west.
But that was then.
St. Thomas the Apostle is traditionally said to be the Apostle to India, so they did go to India. A lot of the early Christians were Hellenistic Jews, so Greece is a natural choice. My reading of Acts is Peter chose Rome because Rome was the political/cultural center of the known world at that point, and therefore would spread Christianity to the far reaches. If apostolic times were in the 1990s, he quite probably would have picked DC or New York.
G Lordon – Macedonian call – Acts 16 – Paul had a dream – no small part as to why I’m typing on a keyboard in a place called the USA in a year we call 2024.
Well, government legitimacy has been based on supernatural belief for a long time. (Mt Olympus, Isis/Osiris, Mandate of Heaven, “Dieu et mon droit”, “One Nation under God” etc). Getting rid of this time-tested foundation is a big risk for global Elites. Turning everyone into depraved, godless savages may not work out so well for the rulers.
I’ve long been a skeptic of religion, but in recent years have fully embraced the view that religion is a necessary part of human societies. Christianity is at the very foundation of Western Civilization, as much a part of us as our Greek and Roman heritage is; if it dies, the West goes with it. At the same time, I just don’t see how to reconcile our scientific understanding of the world with a belief in the supernatural. Atheism has major problems as Zman points out, but so too does belief in the supernatural. As much as I might want… Read more »
One can be a skeptic without requiring everyone else be a skeptic. This is one of the biases the atheist inherit from Abrahamic religions. That is, if a belief is correct, it must be enforced.
Hey,
you deleted my comment re your paid-for content vs open-access content.
Big downvote to that.
I did not delete your comment. It is right here: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32374#comment-415953
The spam filter saw the broken English and assumed it was spam.
If the spam filter has some “rules”, it might be worthwhile to post them for your commenters’ understanding.
I assume you must read and authorize a posting held by the spam filter. This of course delays the posting and in some cases, simply makes it a worthless effort due to delay.
(A good example is *right now*. This message was flagged and awaiting approval.) 😉
This is certainly true, and one reason why I’ve told friends and acquaintances that I would actually be OK with the United States having Christianity as its official state religion. It would be much easier, for example, to keep the perverts out of the public sphere and sequestered away in prison if Christian moral claims were brought back into our legal system. Most religious people I know don’t seem to get hung up on the details of whether or not their beliefs are true, at least in the way a scientist might approach claims about the supernatural. I’m a STEM… Read more »
If the guiding principle of your society’s ethics is just some sort of vague “universal morality” or “just be a good person”, then it ultimately becomes whatever the people in power say it is. If the people in power are Christians, there is no problem, really. Everything works more or less fine. If the people in power hate Christians and hate Christ, then you have a big problem. If they also happen to be a pervert who wants to be in the public square, you have a big problem. That is what we have today.
and one reason why I’ve told friends and acquaintances that I would actually be OK with the United States having Christianity as its official state religion. Wow. Thanks for letting us know you’ve been doing this. Getting you on board means this effort just got a huge injection of momentum. Friendly sarcasm aside — what year are you writing from? You’d “be okay with the US having Christianity as its official state religion?” You’d be okay? Well, fantastic! I’m sure the folks back in 1811 are gonna’ be overjoyed to hear this. Otherwise, I’ve told friends and acquaintances that I… Read more »
It might be okay for the government, but it’s not going to be okay for Christianity. Just look at what’s going on with green energy and electric cars. If people perceive that government is trying to cram something down your throat, they rebel against it.
“Americans” don’t rebel against dicksquat.
They may not rebel for anything important, but they rebel in their own way. How are those electric car sales going?
That’s not rebellion, it’s rejection.
Oooooh. Don’t you just know the Power Structure is just quaking in its boots?
Depends on the importance of the correct belief. If religions important to man, it should be enforced. Catholicism was the state religion of Columbia until Paul6 leaned on the country to embrace vatican2s religious freedom dogma. Before that, jehovas witnesses couldn’t go a knockin. Protestants couldn’t spread their poison publicly. I would have to check to see if Protestant churches were allowed to exist, maybe they were but you couldn’t spread the nihilism of Protestantism as some sort of fargin “right”! the government can’t get in your mind. So you can refuse in your mind, but who says the government… Read more »
“he atheist inherit from Abrahamic religions” Abrahamic religions is itself a term from atheism. It does not see the God for the Abraham in 3 very different religions, all of which are post Christ.
I am not particularly religious but I am very pro traditional western religions
So you are happy with the functional results of religion, but can’t really be troubled with supporting an actual religion? This is the big problem that we have in our present society in that we have been enjoying living with the positive effects that Christianity has produced but we don’t want to make any effort to support the Church so it can continue to produce these positive outcomes. We don’t want to let that “religion stuff” get in the way of enjoyment of some of the decadent products of our prosperity (materialism, porn, weed, sex outside of marriage, etc.) but… Read more »
The issues are a little deeper than that
Perhaps I should have said “one of the major problems” but destroying the moral system that built and upholds your society through malice or apathy is certainly one of the reasons why we are where we are. The demons that maliciously undermine and destroy the faith are evil but the apathetic have played their role as well.
Im not exactly apathetic. That is why I support religion. If I were the emperor I would stop there. Since I’m not I can indulge my personal doubrs about the specifics of particular religions, with no adverse effects on society
Good post. The only thing I can add is that the “supernatural” helps to fill in the gaps that science can’t explain. I went from considering the priesthood and being a Pastor, to believing because of what I see. How else would one explain the order of the universe? Im not saying it’s perfect, but how do cells “know” how to divide to create life. How do amino acids combine to make blue eyes, or a tall or short person. Maybe it’s sophomoric, but entropy is a law, and yet nature typically finds a way to keep order. I often… Read more »
“I often think that if God,(the uncaused first cause) whispered in my ear the reason and explanation of everything, I wouldn’t understand a word that was said.”
One need look no farther than the Book of Job. God tells Job that he—as a finite being—cannot fathom the works/thinking/morality of God—an infinite being.
It makes perfect sense once you think about how you explain complex concepts to very small children. They don’t deal in terms of abstraction. So you have to use small words and speak slowly and leave out a lot of details. You have to dumb it down.
“How do amino acids combine to make blue eyes, or a tall or short person.”
Ninety-nine percent of the human body is comprised of 6 simple elements (Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorous). How did these simple elements come together at random, in such a way as to create something so infinitely complex that it can split the atom, travel to other planets, and even contemplate its own existence? Yet we cannot take these same simple elements and create a single-celled organism in a lab, with our supercolliders, harnessed nuclear power and electron microscopes.
Only God can make a tree, right?
Even if you could prove once and for all that God created X, you still have a problem. Where did God come from? And you can’t say, “He’s always existed.” That’s a cop-out. This is a fundamental and (so far as I know) unanswerable problem with philosophy. You cannot have an effect without a preceding cause (determinism.)
“Scientific discoveries have replaced nearly all supernatural explanations for natural phenomena”
Somehow I can’t wrap my head around this. Not to get off into the weeds, but where does Christianity claim or is considered, in the main, some sort of “scientific” explanation for the world around us as verses a “moral teaching”? In short, how to live decent lives in this fallen world?
Look, you could point to a part of the Bible stating that the world rests on the “back of a turtle” and it would not change my respect for Christianity one iota.
There are two that science has not really breached: the origins of the universe and the nature of consciousness. That many not seem a lot but 120 years ago they really thought they were about to wrap up physics as an active science. There was just that annoying black body radiation problem….. In that small unilluminated corner the door to relativity and quantum mechanics was waiting to bring down the roof on the Newtonian universe. Hubris is common and foolish un the history of science 😊
If Social Science were to be considered a legitimate field of scientific inquiry, I would argue that “scientific discovery” hasn’t even figured out the basics of human relationships, communication, etc. because it cannot predict the future of all things. Christianity, in particular, deals with morality, love, forgiveness, death, and the hereafter. None of these can presently be explained by “science”. All the Social Scientists are able to do is generate observations, not predictions. Einstein’s theories were able to accurately predict the deflection of light around the sun that emanated from stars trillions of miles away to 8-zeros of precision. There… Read more »
My devout–if not terribly pious–Christianity is rooted primarily in the direct and very tangible experience of divine intercession. This is personal, anecdotal Christianity, and as such, won’t cut any mustard in symposium debates. And you know what? I couldn’t care less. I know the Christian God exists because he has solved insoluble problems for me. Perhaps I’ve been blessed with God’s grace.
You and me both Brother when something happens to you that should of killed you and you survive without even a scratch then you know you have God watching over you and it wasn’t your time to go yet… Tell you the truth we are all blessed just some of us know it and others don’t…
Indeed, sir, you Have Been, and Will Be.
Science addresses one magisterium, faith another. Have I always known this? Yes, intuitively, and it’s not dualism, I am talking about spiritual and material realities in coexistence.
It is very simple, and frictionless, for me, and I am always astounded at how difficult a problem it is for so many.
Your experience is personal and anecdotal, yes. But it is one of billions of data points of individuals with similar experiences. Science would say not to disregard data points, even if there is no visible proof of a causal relationship. Yet those espousing atheism in the name of science claim billions of organisms acting in a similar fashion is just voodoo.
Just so. An anecdote is a datum. And a huge data set is a discrete body of knowledge.
“operates according to rules and laws that seem coldly indifferent to the affairs of men”
I wonder where those rules and laws came from. Who made them? ‘Tis a mystery….
felis harenae,
Please consider giving “Miracles” by C.S. Lewis a read. It addresses the points you’ve brought up. It may well be the best work of philosophy of the 20th century.
“Scientific discoveries have replaced nearly all supernatural explanations for natural phenomena.” This is simply not true. Science is no where near explaining how life came from non-life and order came from chaos. The best science can do is conjecture about magic lightening strikes into some random chemical mixture. Until the last century, science had the origin of the universe and earth completely wrong. Until a Jesuit priest proposed the big bang theory less than 100 years ago, science believed the universe always existed. The Genesis account of creation was written over 3,000 years ago, but the science just caught up… Read more »
“Science is no where near explaining how life came from non-life and order came from chaos. The best science can do is conjecture about magic lightening strikes into some random chemical mixture.” In defense of science, let’s not allow the “new atheists” to use science as a club to beat up Christian theology. Many of these “new atheists” are not scientists. They are more like commentators claiming to speak for science. There are any number of practicing scientists who readily admit their lack of understanding at this point in the game—that their tools to understanding nature have limits. The honest… Read more »
And then imagine God having to tell that story to a bunch of pre-writing goat herders who could only pass on what they learned through oral tradition… I think where people struggle with God in the modern age is they think God is or ought to be George Burns walking around interacting with humans. It was when I stopped trying to explain everything and just listened that I started to realize there are no coincidences. That thing was put there in front of me, a choice, an event, another person, for a reason. A few weeks ago my daughter applied… Read more »
After reading thru this thread, finally the essence of a creative force is brought up. “Something from nothing” and we are barely cognizant of the something bit and don’t even have a clue about the nothing bit, or the transition between them. We are related more closely to viruses than the creative force, however it manifests itself and I don’t expect viruses to understand diff eq any time soon, nor us the creative forces. Being mortal myself, I always thought religion provides us with method of coping with our own mortality, not just public morality. Perhaps I missed the comment… Read more »
It’s not clear to me which supernatural events in the New Testament are explained by scientific discoveries. It’s not even clear to me that things like the biblical plagues are explained away by science. Maybe Adam and Eve are a myth, but the bible is the Word of God as given to us. It would not be surprising to learn that God had to dumb it down a bit for a bunch of people living in tents herding sheep. Jesus spoke in parables largely because he was trying to make complex concepts about love and forgiveness understandable. Sure, it’s true… Read more »
I’ve never been particularly religious myself, but have never denounced or held negative feelings for those who are. Religion fills a lot of voids in some people’s lives and if it lifts them up, it’s all good as far as I’m concerned. And the fact is, no one knows with 100% certainty that God does not exist – but in the end, we’re all going to find out. Further, over the years, I’ve come to despise the fervent atheists, who are absolutely convinced they’re right and anyone who doesn’t agree is an idiotic simpleton – and of course there are… Read more »
no one knows with 100% certainty that God does not exist – but in the end, we’re all going to find out.
That is the basis of Pascal’s Wager.
But some of them do believe. And they’ve chosen to worship Satan rather than God.
They all worshiped the darkness most just weren’t honest about it because they didn’t want to be rejected completely at that time period…Now that the world is a darker place they don’t mind stepping out more and letting people know where they stand…
People “worship Satan” like goth club kids are Victorian vampires. It’s a fetish costume—in this case, to attract you.
But the rulers aren’t particularly ostentatious about it. The Hilldebeeste, certainly one of the more evil of the demon-rulers, doesn’t go about with an upside down pentagram amulet around her neck, goat horns on her head, and a grimoire tucked under her arm. In time we may see this, but right now they’re a bit more circumspect.
Those same atheists who mock people for believing in “the invisible man in the sky” believe that black people aren’t dumb and violent, men can be women, and diversity is our strength.
who’s beliefs are more ridiculous?
“who’s beliefs are more ridiculous?”
Why, Felix Krull’s of course…. 😉
Just having fun with Felix. He doesn’t believe that crap about equality and diversity either. I can live with his atheism.
Krull is a rightwing atheist, and that’s just about the rarest of all rare breeds.
It’s quite common where I live, at least if you factor in that right-wingers are a bit thin on the ground to begin with.
Religion and politics are only weakly correlated in Scandiland – there’s a slight bias towards Christians being more to the right, but virtually all the priests we have in Denmark are raging Commies, probably because they are civil servants beholden to government.
I’m afraid the ecclesiastical structure is part of the Power Structure, and that’s true across the entirety of the West. If you want to get away from Leftist clergy–and who doesn’t?–you must venture into Orthodoxy or some of the more homespun, grassroots churches. Or you must home worship with fellow rightwing believers.
Christian churches are the driving force behind the injection of diversity into small-town America – indeed they make a lot of money on this business.
But does that really tell us anything about whether God is real or not?
“This is the problem for late-empire America and the West in general. Once the medieval Christian conception of God was removed, the entire moral superstructure of the West began to faulter.” It is the problem with the Cold War. Russia went down the road of non-belief and total destruction of tradition. For the GAE and its vassals in The West, they threw everything away to try and convince the potential satraps in the 3rd World to join the GAE. Hey! We put you above us in our homeland. We value your diaspora above our own people. That happened with Africa… Read more »
“Russia went down the road of non-belief and total destruction of tradition.”
Yes, but one must note that when Putin came to power he found an Orthodox Church quite healthy, organized, and in good working order. He (wisely) embraced it and never looked back. That the Church could suffer 70+ years of communist repression and rebound has to give us hope—as well as lend credence to Z-man’s thoughts.
My heritage came from one of those commie Orthodox countries. I think what happened there was analogous to the race religion in this country. People are publicly color blind, but behind the closed doors, they still have their prejudices. In fact, enforced kumbaya probably amplifies many of those prejudices because people don’t like being told what to do and what to think Likewise with Christianity. My uncle was a teacher. When my grandfather died, his funeral was going to be at a church. People told him it would look bad if he attended the funeral. He still went. It was… Read more »
“But fortunately, the boomers are dying out and hopefully their ideas will be dead and buried along with them.” You never will know what you had until it’s gone. The Boomers are a mixed bag, you’re just looking at one side of the coin. Nonetheless, it may be a tough recovery wrt religiosity and Christianity in particular in the West. The Jewish tradition has a precept of the highest order…that the most important duty is for a father to teach his son Torah! In that manner, some religious indoctrination is passed across generations. Some descendants become weaker in the religion,… Read more »
Unfortunately, a lot of people in your generation thought they were too enlightened for religious hocus pocus. For a lot of people that did indeed break the chain from one generation to the next.
I’m not a hyper religious guy myself, but I think it’s important to the social order and to have a common understanding in society. I’m very pro religion for that reason. If nothing else, it’s the right way to live. You are very unlikely to screw up your life if you follow the basics that Christianity teaches you.
The Enlightenment project to substitute reason and rationality as the basis for ought claims rather than God and the transcendent has failed. However, for a certain class of people you would never know it, for new atheism and the Enlightenment serve to differentiate between the Enlightened and the Ignorant, the Serious and the Unserious, the Real vs. the Imaginary. More importantly, it feeds the ego of those who believe themselves evolved beyond religion. In that sense, while New Atheism joins the dustbin of history along with other failed modern ideologies, I doubt its adherents will let go.
it feeds the ego of those who believe themselves evolved beyond religion. The far right or dr is loaded with people who think this. As much as I respect him, from his book trial of Socrates, g Johnson implies that religion is fake but people need an religion except for the over man. If I’m misreading it, I apologize. the problem here is which religion. If it’s a matter of “culture” then religion truly is fake in a way. It proves that there is a true religion. If man must have religion to govern his life, and there are a… Read more »
I remember back in the 00’s the leading atheists/skeptics started calling themselves The Brights. Such arrogant a-holes.
There seems to be a correlation between aggressive atheism and moral narcissism yes
Every day is the time to thank God for your life and existence.
it was the death by 1000 cuts, the infiltration of the catholic church (by non-christians) was also damaging the cause long before the new atheists came around. the likes of dawkins, harris et al saw the blood in the water and pounced. The midwits fell for it and went all in, academia even more so, the “it takes a community to raise a child” group sacrificed the kids to their new god of swf and tranny teachers, not to mention the damage 10x more vaccinations is doing to their mental development and overall health. All along there were those saying… Read more »
I was blue pilled until around a decade ago and I only started to see the cracks on the wall around 15 years ago despite being a devout Catholic, then lapsed, when young. I am a STEM professional with a drop of autism so I do not represent the average person. That said, I really was into the matrix, daily NYT reader, The Daily Show fan, IFLS subscriber… Midwit all the way. In retrospect I see the power of the machine as many seeds of my mental jail were planted by a good high school education that drilled the “liberalism… Read more »
My path involves the majority of yours, along with few others. Z has certainly provided a significant amount of resources. Peter Bogosian was doing some interesting work on how you “know” what you believe is true, which oddly enough I used to debunk the new atheists down to the level of the most deceptive of false establishment religions. I’ve since found a local Baptist church that does a good job of explaining the Bible in a manner that convinces me my early instincts of wondering wtf was wrong with the catholic church that I had come to hate so much.… Read more »
The impact of the demise of Christianity in the West is intertwined with the new morality coming from a hostile tribe that hates Christianity, Christians and normal life. Maybe white civilizations that moved away from Christianity could have stayed functional as has China without religion. However, when the people who led the way for the destruction of Christianity have a very long track record of successfully introducing and promoting dreadful moral views that undermine normal life, the West simply can’t survive the shift away from Christianity. In Western white countries even the churches have largely abandoned Christianity and are now… Read more »
“One of the cornerstone beliefs must be that there are bits of this code that are off-limits to questioning, as they are too important to put to a vote.” Who decides that though? Every single time a religion spreads it gets morphed to match the population, why there’s so many denominations. The bible itself certainly made being transformed every which way very easy to do with its seemingly endless interpretative contradictions. That was also done deliberately to make it more palatable to the various peoples the missionaries were spreading it to. Then theres the glaring flaw that Christianity plays fast… Read more »
”Playing fast & loose with acknowledging such an important reality as genetics, not just race, needs to be solved if Christianity is to return to being a unabashedly positive influence on White people.”
Bingo, which is why for all my talk, I really can’t get back into the flock. There’s no place for me at this point in time.
“There’s no place for me at this point in time.”
Same. Been that way for a long long time now, not happy about it but I’m used to it at least.
The entire athiest project is a combination of “look at meeeere” types and those who want to open the doors to kiddie (and sheep, horse and… platypus) diddling.
I’m a contrarian by nature. I doubt everything but something our church architect once told me stuck with me. He said if you look at the human body, to him it’s analogous to designing a building. The human body has plumbing, wiring, different mechanicals that do different things for the body. It’s impossible that this happened on its own, trillions of years of pond scum gestating. It looks like somebody had to build it. Then you look at things like the ozone, magnetic fields, the Van Allen Belt. That didn’t just all happen on its own. It seems to me… Read more »
This is a point I make about space aliens. When you factor in all of the perfect things that had to happen “just so” for us to get to this point in human civilization, it just staggers the mind. just the right kind of star in just the right part of the galaxy formed from just the right composition of former stars and galaxies that formed 13B, 10B, 5B years ago (you can’t get the elements you need without supernovas…and gosh do those take some time to plan!) just the right size orbit at just the right distance just the… Read more »
I have been wrestling with Alex O’Connor for quite sometime and while I enjoy his debates, it simply reminds me again of Christopher Hitchens (a noted tear down artist and sophist)- ironically it was Alex who made a comprehensive vlog of Hitchens’ sophistry (up on YouTube). He then recently interviewed (tried) Peter Hitchens and that went nowhere (Peter walked off the set). At this point outside of him doing interviews with Pints w/Aquinas, I don’t think he stands for anything and certainly would never apply his reductionism to any biological questions of ethnicity and race. The same with @ Rationality… Read more »
I am new to O’Connor, but my first impression is he is slightly different version of Rationality Rules. There is a cleverness there, but the sort that sits in the stands and critiques the play on the field.
Christopher hitchens was very overrated
Having worked through the comments, here are my philosophical thoughts for the day: There needs to be some clarity on the meaning of words. There are belief systems, and while every religion is a belief system, not every belief system is a religion. Atheism, like any cult, is a belief system; it is not a religion. Communism, veganism, climate alarmism, mask-fetishism, Jonesism, Randism (or whatever it was called), you name it, are belief systems, but to call them religions is as wrong as wrong can be. A religion is a particular belief system that incorporates authoritative traditions, institutions, texts, holy… Read more »
What everybody misses, both religious and atheists, is function. Function is the “why”, even, ultimately, of morality. But I’m not going into that. Instead, reading about Rhodesia, I figured out who the Whore of Babylon is. Rhodesia was pretty much single-handedly destroyed by an evil nigger named Andrew Young, the American ambassador from 1977-79. This evil nigger could not have happened without those mulatto human demons, the Jews. The Jews would not be in power were it not for their much-abused Bride. Gangsta beats her, gangsta rapes her, gangsta kills her, but she still worships, adores, and fucks Gangsta. She… Read more »
I tried to figure out a moral foundation for atheism (more accurately agnosticism where you only take empirical evidence seriously), best I could do is that you should eat anyone with whom you can’t have procreative sex. Preferably with fava beans and a nice chianti, hsshsththth.
A recent Harris book, fortunately short, was on “Free Will.” It boiled down to saying recent biochemical-electrical research shows everything we think, including free will, is just chemicals reacting in our brains. Which is an update of an old argument, just with different chemicals than the old arguments that proved nothing.
Imperium Press has a good series on religious traditions and morality, essentially saying it is a primordial command that is not up or debate. It is then transmitted to a folk who continues obeying the command and passing it to their children, then their children’s children. Their argument is it’s the core prerequisite of being a people, and once a folk stop obeying the command, they stop being a people.
The core issue with the New Atheists is they assume morality is a science that can be dissected and studied. It’s not, and points to something even deeper than science.
2 — SOMEWHAT AGREE To make politics a “shape rotator” academic field, to pretend it’s calculable so that (only) the unphilosophical can opine expertly on it, nerds so debased The Science Of Morality that it now rests entirely on unverified survey results. Jonathan Haidt is Theodor Adorno for an age of universal illiteracy. Even /ourdweebs/ can’t resist. They so desire to trade all their books for one poll, any poll, to succumb to any passing graph, numerable “trend,” etc., to prove they’re Just Being Realistic About Things. See Keith Woods’s embarrassing display today at Unz’s place. He’s right that Trump… Read more »
There is no fundamental conflict between “Intelligent Design” and “Living In A Simulation.” The only disagreement there is about the nature of the Creator, which is a disagreement Christians, and others, have been having for centuries. Millenia. Indeed, any “atheist” who expresses openness to LIAS is no longer an atheist.
Not very far from my thinking. I believe physics implies the multiverse and more than one reality (NOT relevant for everyday life just to be clear). It is hard to differentiate between a universe as a subset of another and a simulation, especially when you know nothing about what/who erected that one way barrier between the subset and the greater universe
The difference is that LIAS doesn’t require that the laws of nature are set aside for the creator.
He defined the laws governing the simulation so logically wrong
But philosophically, the guy creating the simulation is himself subject to laws of nature, as is the hardware the sim runs on, even if those laws are different from the laws inside the simulation.
E.g., you don’t need to be omnipotent or omniscient to run a simulation, but that is what we’re expected to believe about God.
Yes but he is in another reality. That is why ours is a simulation from his pov. It is easy to make a simulation where there is a slight variation on some natural law like gravity or nuclear forces. From the perspective of that simulation, gravity is as we defined it. That’s the point of the simulation of course, to see what would happen. There are strong reasons, but not unanimous agreement of course, to think that physics demands multiple dimensions of time and space not accessible to us. This has profound implications for any conception of the nature of… Read more »
I was going to write a long response refuting this but I’m feeling far too lazy so I’ll summarize in the words of someone far far smarter than I ever will be.
“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong” or the original since I know you sprechen ze Deutsche. “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!”
(With apologies to Wolfgang Pauli for this brilliant critique)
Liberalism, the notion that all men are created equal is rooted in Christianity. With the irrelevance of Christianity to future generations we will eventually see the death of liberalism. At least that is my hope. Then the new elite class that forms can build a new ethical structure for the plebs. One that is not so cucked.
Well, disproving the theory that evolution/natural selection can explain radically new species is child’s play…for anyone who can do math..It would take an eternity for natural selection to find that many beneficial and co-dependent mutations and fix them in a population…Of course, most biologists, and many atheists can’t do math….
Hummm. Might want to look at our variety of dogs before putting such a timeline to natural selection, and of course there are those fossil artifacts they keep finding…
“…for what is really just the work of bored child of a race of superbeings in another dimension.“
What you’re saying is the tranny movement is the equivalent of bored interdimensional teenagers drawing dongs on the desk. Gotta admit, I would buy that.
“If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it.” Not necessarily. There is the idea of karma, which is quite independent of any notion of divinity, and which you find in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. If you do bad things the negative karma will come back and bite you in the ass. If you do good things, those deeds and intents get credited to your account and buy you a better life here or in the next incarnation. The Catholic idea of hell, purgatory, and paradise (as in… Read more »
If only Christianity had come to mean white, in the sense of Gentile.
I think empiricism is necessarily atheist, as it’s evidence-based— no faith iow. I’m OK with that, but it’s not a basis for morality.
If you don’t have all the answers, and none of us do, you have to take some things on faith, iow, you must have some kind of morality. Scientific/empirical people should know this best and be the most humble about it. They can think it’s superstition, but what do they know, really?
No empiricism is not atheist. There is no evidence that atheists are right. Atheism is not the absence of belief, although they like to claim that. It is the active belief that there are no gods, not even one
The method is atheist, is my point. If God is measurable and comprehensible, God does not exist. If complete knowledge is possible, God does not exist. I think that’s the proof of atheism when you get down to it, yet to be proven, and I don’t think it’s possible to prove because of the limitations of the method— but I take it on faith, as they take their position without acknowledging it.
We don’t quite agree here, unlike a lot of other times . I think what you describe is closer to the scientific method than to atheism. Atheism is an active belief about something I think us unknowable.
But we already know that there can never be complete knowledge. It starts with Goedel in math, continues with Heisenberg in quantum mechanics. So it is known that knowledge will never be complete, not just in practice. The laws of math and the universe both disallow it
I don’t think it’s possible to be atheist. I think people get hung up on the idea of a personal god and miss the fact that they believe in something.
What we think of as God is an understanding built up over millennia, just like everything else humans have managed to pass down. Like I say, I think some people get caught up and miss the point.
Qe quite agree suddenly!! I am convinced the only meaningful definition of an atheist is one who believes there is no God. An agnostic also has an active belief, that that question is either unknowable or undefined from his pov. This happens to be my position
Z you have been in fire the last month or so. Looks like the new digs have boosted your mojo.
No wonder great writers like Emerson, Hemmingway produced some of their best work in quiet natural surroundings… 🍻
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to… Read more »
Just imagine if Thoreau didn’t have to mooch off all his friends to survive.
Marx too.
I like to think that some of the ice they cut from Walden Pond made it to Hong Kong to chill the champagne of opium traders. There’s still an Ice House Street here in Central.
You cannot prove a negative, which means there is no way to prove God does not exist. Just so. That’s why we usually demand that onus of evidence is on the party making the specific claim about the world. Atheism doesn’t need to prove anything because atheism makes no positive claims about the universe whatsoever. Christianity – like all religions – makes extraordinary claims about the nature of the universe but offers zero evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot It is why atheists spend all of their time attacking what they claim are the arguments in favor of God, rather than putting together an… Read more »
Irony of ironies, I can help you with that argument that made you uncomfortable. While still thinking that you misrepresent atheism when you say there is no positive claim in it. We’ve been over that before so I’ll kyst get to the argument: it is not randomness that created complex organisms. A set of three simple nonlinear equations can form fantastic and complex graphs called fractals. This is simply built into math and into physics. Therefore initially simple chemical interactions can form i increasingly complex patterns in both time (oscillations) and space (structures). This is the mathematical foundation for why… Read more »
it is not randomness that created complex organisms
I understand that, and I understand how evolution by natural selection works, and I also noted that the design argument is not based on rationality.
But emotionally, it is extremely powerful and only becomes more so the more you learn about nature. This, most likely, stems from the inability to conceptualize what “a billion years” actually means.
In other words, the best argument for religion is not a real argument at all. If you have any profound arguments against atheism, I’d love to hear them because that would be a first.
We had a interchange about atheism once. I daresay my arguments were logically unassailable and you have nit moved an inch. Seems very unrewarding to type it all our again on my phone
I like a lot of your comments on other things being discussed here at Z’s little cyber bar. But with regard to atheism you are a true believer fanatic. No one’s perfect
We had a interchange about atheism once. I daresay my arguments were logically unassailable… Please refresh my memory. I have had many interchanges about religion over the years, and none of them have led anywhere. I do, of course, not accept that atheism is a belief – indeed atheism is not even an -ism because there is no set of dogmas or ethics or system of ideas that is derived from not being superstitious. Thus, one cannot be more or less fanatic about not being superstitious, one simply is or is not. But if you measure fanaticism by how much… Read more »
“…you are a true believer fanatic…”
Humm, I remember going a round or two with Felix in the past. Seems we agreed to live and let live, nor did tempers flair and untoward words said. Respect is the word here. “Fanatic” is a bit strong. If all atheists were like Felix, I’d not need to qualify atheism into “new atheists” and run of the mill “atheists” like Felix of the old school.
Felix is any discussion not involving ultimative reality or physics. I do not wish to offend him. But I think “fanatic” is the correct term for his staunch advocacy of atheism. It is impervious to argument. I say that because, if you walk into the Cavendish lab at Cambridge or the Harvard physics dept and say “I believe there are many universes” chances are excellent that some of the people you meet will say “so do I”. Now the good Mr Krull is convinced that in none of these universes could something that would be a God, exist. That is… Read more »
If you walk into the Cavendish lab at Cambridge or the Harvard physics dept and say “I believe there are many universes” chances are excellent that some of the people you meet will say “so do I”. And if you followed up with “oh, so that means you must believe in God then!”, there’s an excellent chance that he would look very confused and say “hold on, what’s that got to do with the price of fish?” – even if he did, in fact, believe in God. he’s no physicist Neither are you, so it’s a good thing this discussion… Read more »
I’m technically not a physicist true. I am in a very related field though. You’re implication that neither of us grasp the subject academically is not true. Or well, half true 😁
This discussion is exactly about the physical world smh
Then, it should be possible to produce physical evidence, not mere theoretical musings.
Nope, that’s like one cave man saying to another, “if you think that moon up there has a backside, show it to me”
The state of best scientific estimate today is uncountably infinite universes (yes some physicists would disagree but most probably wouldn’t ). That is an interpretation of QM and relativity but a very realistic one. I think you treat this as a Newtonian would. Ie one giant room called space with one universal clock. This is not reality. And that has profound ontological implications.
Nope, that’s like one cave man saying to another, “if you think that moon up there has a backside, show it to me” It is eminently possible to produce physical evidence for the existence of the back side of the moon, all you have to do is fly around it. The fact that cavemen were unable to do that is neither here nor there, it is enough that they can imagine doing so. You are not able to imagine an experiment that would prove or disprove the existence of God. I think you treat this as a Newtonian would You’ve… Read more »
“If you have any profound arguments against atheism, I’d love to hear them because that would be a first.” This may not meet the threshold of “profound” but every single self-described “atheist” I have ever met was an obnoxious person. Some, of lesser obnoxiousness, returned to their original faith and became less obnoxious. Anecdotal, obviously. I also find most self-described “vegans” to be eccentric. Same for veterinarians. When I come across the occasional atheist, I usually just advise them of my opinion that my faith is effective as a praxiology, say it turns out there is no God. The best… Read more »
every single self-described “atheist” I have ever met was an obnoxious person.
Probably because all the atheists you’ve met are apostates suffering from red pill rage or, since atheism is reviled in America, they are spiteful mutants being attracted to atheism because of its transgressive role in American life.
”…they spend all of their time “disproving” evolution or asserting that “Darwinism” is a religion.”
I’d say that this sentence would be improved by inserting an “ersatz” before religion.
Q. 516. Why can there be only one true religion?
A. There can be only one true religion, because a thing cannot be false and true at the same time, and, therefore, all religions that contradict the teaching of the true Church must teach falsehood. If all religions in which men seek to serve God are equally good and true, why did Christ disturb the Jewish religion and the Apostles condemn heretics?
There can be only one true religion Jesus was a human who practiced a religion, but this religion wasn’t Trinitarian Christianity. (Did the mangod need to be saved?) He went to synogue and temple, approved of the priesthood’s low, worthless sacrifices, and affirmed other nonsense of the torahs of no authority. Jesus’ disciples, on the other hand, believed Trinitarian Christianity, or so the Trinitarian shamans of Rome and Constantinople have led us to believe. The shamans are wrong, of course. Simon and the others were followers of the Levites’ religion, at least while Jesus was alive. They were heretics who… Read more »
I think the problem with atheists is that they’re stupid
lets start with a few facts. Someone made the universe. Someone can maybe make his bed. Someone put you here and can take your life away. And you can’t do shit about it.
ok, so clearly there is a superior force or being as to us. The definition of superior is being able to make you and take you. Against your will.
call it what you want. But don’t be stupid about the reality of the situation.
Maybe morality is just a set of rules, traditions and practices that have been found to make life with other people at least tolerable.
How do you figure that… If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it Permitted by whom?? Permission is an act of the will. So don’t you just mean permitted by you? or by some being whom you prefer to believe is an authorized permitter and lawgiver? The very idea of an unwilled law of action and effect is, it seems, completely beyond your ken. Intoxicated you are with egoism, authoritarianism, commandment, obedience, judgement, vengeance called punishment, and the idea that willpower is (more or less) supreme… Read more »
I would like an atheist to consider that the God of Christianity, if in possession of the powers ascribed to Him, could make it impossible to actually objectively prove His existence. IOW, they never ask themselves, what if God doesn’t want to be proven real? How would we mere moral beings ever know the difference?
I would like an atheist to consider that the God of Christianity, if in possession of the powers ascribed to Him, could make it impossible to actually objectively prove His existence. That would be hilarious if true. Once upon a time, the omnipotent, omniscient god knew how to rigorously demonstrate His existence with a valid argument which uses only true premises. He chose however not to declare this demonstration, say, to Moshe so that it could be transcribed and published in Scribbling. Instead he willed that such demonstration be impossible, upon which moment knowledge of the demonstration was annihilated from… Read more »
Felix Krull will never recover from this.
I’ll be fine, thanks. Not believing in God isn’t the deep, identity-defining trait that religion is for religious people, at least not in Scandinavia where atheism is the uncontroversial default. I’ve seen videos of what passes for ((atheists)) in America, so I can’t say I don’t understand the animosity or the misconceptions of what it entails. So I usually ignore all the shit-talk about atheists in the right-o-sphere because it is a sterile conversation as this thread has superabundantly demonstrated, but sometimes you have to put down a marker, especially now where “Christian Nationalism” is trying to highjack and undermine… Read more »
I’m probably not going to change anyone’s mind here, but it’s worth a try. I’ve often played the Devil’s, or at least the Atheist’s, advocate. I’ve read some of the New Atheist books. With time I’ve become, as it were, a lapsed atheist. By that I mean I’m more of an agnostic. Z here is asserting the superiority of a moral system “backstopped by something that lies outside the reach of man.” This is a crucial point and one that needs to be examined. If the moral foundations (or authority) are not accessible to Man, how could anyone possibly… Read more »
How do you assess late Daniel Dennett?
One aspect of Christianity and Islam is that they are historical religions: they rely on the existence of certain historical events that took place in 1st Century Palestine or 5th Century Arabia as the basis for their teachings and the way to personal salvation: Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected and Mohammed received a revelation about the nature of God. Eastern religions, by contrast, are a more “here are a set of moral and ethical principles, take it or leave it.” Judaism is “follow the law.” Christianity has been subject to higher criticism for about two hundred years–scholars reading the… Read more »
Confucianism is Civic Religion with Hierarchy and none of this equality nonsense. Can’t see anything like that working in the West if not imposed by the sword (just as Christianity was in large measure). The issue with more intellectual religions is that they only appeal to intellectuals. The common people require ritual, talismans, comfort, hope. So despite the intellectual heights reached by the higher forms of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc….when you get down to the common folk at the coal face dealing with the daily joys and miseries and tragedies of human life, it’s all superstition and ooga booga… Read more »
Perceptive comment, thanks!
For most of our evolutionary history, unknowns dominated the human condition and many of these unknowns could get you killed, which tends to eliminate your genes from the gene pool. We needed a means of minimizing the adverse effects of unknowns and the inculcation of wisdom proved quite beneficial. And the most effective way to inculcate wisdom proved to be via the notion of an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent supernatural being who validated this wisdom using both positive and negative reinforcement.
Just the observation on unknowns in human history which was very good, earned mu up vote 😁
*nods in Ed Dutton*
The other big “atheist fighter” is the conservative novus ordo ed feser. And he came out with a book about how Catholicism has always been against muh racism, so the disappearance of the new atheists have let these conservatives run buck wild
I appreciated his explanations of various Thomist arguments. Haven’t read anything from him about muh racism so not sure where he gets that.
Falsification is independent of replacement
I missed the new atheist heyday. Wasn’t that the late 90s? Early 2000s? I remember my brother reading me a passage from thte spaghetti monster book. I don’t remember why I didn’t care….
refuting atheism is the great joy of conservatives like Robert Barron. He doesn’t have to get into the icky problem of which religion is the one true religion, so he goes buck wild for refuting atheists. For the Vatican2 sect, as long as you have some vague idea of god, you’re good to go.
good article
The point of the Enlightenment was to make the icky problem of which religion is the true religion go away, by introducing a secular religion instead. Main problem is that the secular religion proves to be even worse.
So the icky problem remains even here.
Christianity has been chiefly replaced with political ideology, not atheism pure and simple. Those ideologies are the new Messiah.
I never paid much attention to the new atheists. As our said, you cannot prove a negative. Additionally, most of these new atheists were leftists and became increasingly authoritarian over time. I think it was Sam Harris who said people refusing the covid-19 shots should be put in camps. Atheism is indeed an irrational position because it cannot be proven. One can only be agnostic. But I disagree on the morality. If you cannot prove either the existence or non-existence of a god or supernatural, there is little sense in basing a concept of morality on such. You have to… Read more »
I admit, I bailed at “Game theory alone suggests….”
that allows for people to get along with each other.
Why do people need to get along?
We should give it our best shot 😛
One problem with your conception of morality is that it cannot encompass all of humanity. What constitutes treating others “well” varies tremendously from one culture to the next. And indeed, some peoples would argue that what is best for the “people” is prime, and that treating individuals “well” is secondary. In other words, you sometimes have to treat some people badly in order to defend the people as a whole.
“A person who treats others well and with respect is a moral person. A person who victimizes others is an immoral person.” Not to belabor a well thought out comment, but “who says”, *is*, the issue here. The adage “he who does not cheat, steals from his family” is commonly attributed to the French author Honoré de Balzac. (I’ve also heard it referenced to the Arab world.). Why is your expressed morality superior to his? It seems not. Now we have an interesting dilemma, “personal morality”. And oddly, we have that also mentioned in the Bible…Judges 21:25 (KJV): “In those… Read more »
That’s a thought provoking quote, about he who does not cheat steals from his family. The implication is that one has a family and that the family is one’s first duty, or at least very high in the hierarchy of what one owes duty to. So what then in clown world, where families are less present, individuals more atomized. Is cheating still moral, in the family’s absence? If I do not cheat, I am cheating myself?
One can only be agnostic.
Agnosticism is intellectual cowardice: “I can’t prove Santa exists and I can’t prove that he doesn’t. That logically makes it a 50/50 chance, and that way we don’t upset little Billy.”
No it is “atheism” for people who understand some modern physics
Physics, modern or otherwise, has nothing to say on the subject of the supernatural.
This seems to me a variant of the God-of-the-gaps argument, that if science can’t explain life, the universe and everything, it must mean talking snakes, angry volcano gods and a Mormon theme park in the sky.
Straw man re the supernatural. Your arrogance, “physics, modern it otherwise” betrays some ignorance. You’re a Newtonian, “reality is just what happens in a big box called space as a clock called time keep track of the order of events”.
And with such insight you propose to ordain on the nature of the origin of ultimative reality. Brave indeed sir
And with such insight you propose to ordain on the nature of the origin of ultimative reality. I propose nothing – on the contrary: what atheism demands is that if you make proposals about reality, you need to present some kind of tangible evidence if you want me to listen, and extraordinary proposals require extraordinary evidence. And modern physics is not fundamentally different from classical ditto in that both rely on the usual stuff of observation, replication and evidence. The double-slit experiment is no more mysterious than the notion that there’s an invisible rubber band pulling the planets towards each… Read more »
You’re looking at the wrong end of physics, the methods. In results and even more in implications modern and classical could hardly be more different than they are. As I’ve said elsewhere both quantum mechanics and relativity become inconsistent if you assume just one reality of three space dimensions and one of time. So there are probably many. I understand that string theory says so but I didn’t like abstract algebra in college so, unlike with QM and relativity I don’t really understand string theory. You propose something.ø indeed, that there is no God. You may not say it but… Read more »
You propose something.ø indeed, that there is no God. You may not say it but that is what you believe. Technically, I propose that you don’t believe in things for which you have no evidence, especially if said things involve phenomena that are far outside the realm of the ordinary. So yes, you could say I believe there is no God, but saying “well, how do you know He doesn’t exist in a parallel universe?” is not exactly a strong argument for religion. You’re doing the motte-and-bailey thing, with the bailey being Genesis, Deuteronomy, talking snakes, resurrection, the works, and… Read more »
I do assume you believe in electrons and neutrons. Yet you’ve never seen them. There is evidence for them, true. Admittedly far weaker yes but there is growing plausibility of multiple universes. So why would you believe none of them contain what you would consider a God? The only difference usythe strength of the evidence, ie the magnitude of the probabilities. And the lesser one is growing. The simulation question does not ontological difference because the proposed simulation is our reality. So from our pov it is reality. It might not be from outside. Hence these are not identical realities.… Read more »
So why would you believe none of them contain what you would consider a God? Because “God” by definition is a supernatural being, something that transcends physical reality. An electron is not. You seem to argue that God is just a natural phenomenon we haven’t discovered yet, thereby changing the definition God in That is the bailey-level of your argument and clearly formatted for discussions with atheists rather that with fellow believers. Because the God-of-the-multiverses is not what actual Christians believe. Christians believe in quite specific divine characteristics – in the case of Denmark, those in the Augsburg Confession. To… Read more »
Of course something that is defined not to exist does not. Which is implied by “supernatural”. But your definition of God, which requires him not to exist to be God is not universal (I’m reminded of Descartes:” I think, therefore I am. Therefore I cannot be God” lol) Suppose this world were a simulation. Then whoever is running it, has most of the characteristics of a god from our pov. He could reverse gravity if he wanted to, turn Michelle Obama into a woman and other “supernatural” things. I’m not discussing the Christian image of God. I’m indeed trying to… Read more »
But your definition of God, which requires him not to exist to be God That is not even close to a good-faith interpretation of what I said. I said that God needs to posses an aspect that is outside the natural – that is supernatural – to be a god. A clever alien with tech beyond human understanding, is not a God, even if the humans he dupes with this tech may believe so. And playing around with the settings on your world sim is not circumventing any laws of nature, even if it might seem so from the inside.… Read more »
Very good comment