atheism

The Mover Out of Time

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , , , ,

It does not take much to demonstrate the impossibility of many gods.  The bigger a god is, the more of the universe its devotees claim is within its sway, the more improbable its powers have to be to make what we do know about the universe compatible with its existence.  A river spirit or trickster that hides your socks when no one is looking has a small effect on reality, and can hide in the statistical noise that keeps our world de facto unpredictable.  A huge god, though, needs to be simultaneously of massive import, so that its influence permeates many facets and phenomena in the world, and utterly minuscule, so that it has an excuse for when it inevitably doesn’t show.  Thus, we get gods defined as controlling the weather, the course of wars, and whether anyone lives or dies, but whose influence is indistinguishable from the sum of the hundred and one worldly factors in and causes of all of these events; gods who can be expelled from their controlling niche by humans having the temerity to document and measure, as if God were mere quantum uncertainty; gods who use mortal movers as their proxies, merely shifting the problem one layer of agents upward with theological sleight of hand.

Christianity, between its native Abrahamic grandiosity and its wholesale lifting of neo-Platonic idealism, offers some of the largest gods.  Many versions of Christianity have gods so massive that they not only inflict weather events on people totally unrelated to whatever ostensibly displeased them, but they also, the soothsayers tell us, transcend time and space.  This god, even Jewish dreamers like to claim, exists outside of and independent of time, such that past, present, and future are all the same to it.  Events at any point in the universe’s progress are like the pages in a book this creature is reading, and flipping backward or forward is as easy for it as the analogy implies.  It created the universe and now sits outside it, a cosmic voyeur that may or may not ever interfere with unfolding events, depending on the version.

It will not surprise my readers, I am sure, to learn that this god is incoherent with both logic and the facts of our universe.

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The Mover Out of Time
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Big Tent, No Flap

Alyssa Gonzalez,

Every young association, whether as trivial as collecting fans of a particular author’s writing or as grandiose as an emergent political ideology, sooner or later has to decide how it feels about issues outside its original mandate.  Labor unions have to decide how they feel about the food in workplace cafeterias.  Book clubs have to decide how they feel about treating gay people badly.  Political movements have to decide how they feel about anthropogenic climate change, whether their country should react to the ongoing clusterfuck in Ukraine (and if so, how), and whether they think it’s okay that American political orthodoxy still imagines that preventing pregnancy in the unwilling isn’t part of the healthcare system’s responsibilities.

And the atheist movement, if there is a single thing that can be called such, has had to sort out its sentiments on a variety of issues.

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Big Tent, No Flap

Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , 2 Comments
TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”  They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well.  Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.
1.       How Did You Become an Atheist?
2.       What happens when we die?
3.       What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
4.       Without God, where do you get your morality from?
5.       If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
6.       If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
7.       Where did the universe come from?
8.       What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
9.       What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
10.   If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Sigh.  Here we go.

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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

Handle Effect

Alyssa Gonzalez, 2 Comments
There’s a platitude that believers like to use to comfort each other in the face of adversity: “God only gives us what we can bear.”
I shudder every time I hear that.  Like Søren Kierkegaard’s mouthpiece Johannes de Silentio, I skip whatever solace believers find in that idea, and go straight to the horror.  It’s poetic shorthand for a longer thought: “This is happening to you because God thinks you’ll eventually come out okay.”
Think about that.
This is happening to you because God thinks you’ll eventually come out okay.
Out there somewhere, a cosmic calculator has determined that I have some threshold of suffering I can endure without breaking, and has responded to that information by burning my crops and giving my mother cancer.

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Handle Effect

Plural Enemies

Alyssa Gonzalez
Religious pluralism is a strange ideal.  It’s a beautiful ideal, envisioning a world where people of dozens of creeds can function peacefully alongside each other.  It’s a fine practice, bringing massive benefits to societies as diverse as Poland, the United States, Lebanon, and India by calling in the dispossessed and unwanted from miles around.  It’s an intriguing intellectual event, forcing very different perspectives to achieve at least a superficial understanding of one another.
It’s also borderline incoherent, because religions do not get along.

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Plural Enemies

Messages from Creationists to Evolutionists Answered

Alyssa Gonzalez, ,
Oh, I do grow tired of the word “evolutionist.”  It’s the kind of word only a creationist would invent.   The creationist / evolutionist dichotomy was designed at every stage to imply that the two ideas are exactly the same thing, implying the same level of slavish devotion to a doctrine and the same level of prima facie plausibility for both.  It’s one of the movement’s most obvious calling cards, and one that makes its adherents trivial to recognize.
With that in mind, the recent much-ballyhooed and much-derided performance piece between Ken Ham and Bill Nye provided the Internet with a variety of new bits of creationism-related entertainment.  One of the better bits of comedy to come from this event, besides the glistening fury of Ken Ham’s bat-strokes against the pulverized flank steak that used to be his dead horse, is this BuzzFeed list of questions posed by smug-faced creationists to their sensible brethren.  I’ve provided it here in text with the spelling and grammar corrected.
1.     Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?
2.    Are you scared of a divine creator?
3.    Is it completely illogical that the earth was created mature?  i.e., trees created with rings…Adam created as an adult…
4.    Does not the second law of thermodynamics disprove evolution?
5.    How do you explain a sunset if there is no god?
6.    If the Big Bang theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?
7.    What about noetics?
8.    Where do you derive objectivemeaning in life?
9.    If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate?  By chance?
10.  I believe in the Big Bang Theory.  God said it and BANG it happened!
11.  Why do evolutionists/secularists/humanists/non-God-believing people reject the idea of there being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extraterrestrial sources?
12.  There is no in between…the only one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds necessary for an “official proof.”
13.  Does metamorphosis help support evolution?
14.  If evolution is a theory (like creationism or the Bible) why then is evolution taught as fact?
15.  Because science by definition is a “theory”—not testable, observable, nor repeatable” why do you object to creationism or intelligent design being taught in school?
16.  What mechanism has science discovered that evidences an increase in genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?
17.  What purpose do you think you are here for if you do not believe in salvation?
18.  Why have we found only one “Lucy” when we have found more than one of everything else?
19.  Can you believe in “the big bang” without “faith”?
20. How can you look at the world and not believe that someone created / thought of it?  It’s AMAZING!!!
21.  Relating to the big bang theory…where did the exploding star come from?
22. If we came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?
As you can see, we have the classics here handily covered, along with some dishonest argumentation and a few reruns from my last visit to a list of creationist false controversies.
Let’s have a rather harsher look than that simpering accomodationist Phil Plait decided to take:

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Messages from Creationists to Evolutionists Answered

Justice Designed

Alyssa Gonzalez, ,

Intelligent design proponents have an interesting conundrum on their hands.

They have the prima facie plausibility of creatures that are, in many ways, suited to their environments and activities going for them.  But they also have the European bee orchid.  They have the too-human tendency toward pareidolia and the assumption that everything complicated is also manufactured, but they also have to answer for the Maltese “fungus.”

That’s where a hidden perversity in the reasoning behind intelligent design emerges, and where the irrational nature of the entire beast becomes particularly obvious.

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Justice Designed

So Yesterday was National Coming Out Day

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , , , , , ,

So it’s National Coming Out Day.

I’m not gay. I occasionally contemplate sexual encounters that, if I’m honest about them, pull me a little back from the far end of the Kinsey scale, but not far enough that I’m comfortable calling myself bisexual. Finding out that someone I’m attracted to is trans* would not change my attraction to them, so I suppose I could also call myself pansexual to a degree. That’s nothing compared to the statements so many of my friends have made today. Hopefully it’s small enough that the family members I have who have tried to encourage my gay relatives into reparative therapy think better of starting that fight with me.

But if it’s permissible here to extend the “coming out” concept to my own experiences, then I’ve spent a lot of my life coming out.

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So Yesterday was National Coming Out Day

Out into the Light

Alyssa Gonzalez,
None of us are “out.”  To a one, we all have secrets, aspects of ourselves we might like to share but which, for our own reasons, we do not.  There are blog posts I won’t write because their very premise would say too much about me.  “Atheist” is far from the most marginalized category to which I belong.
Yet “out” I am, as an atheist at least.  I told the story of how I came from my Catholic upbringing to my current aggressive antitheism in three installments, but it doesn’t spend much time on how my friends and family came to understand it, or not.
I had no concept of atheism as such when I came to the realization that deities were imaginary.  I was a precocious fourth-grader, and I was too excited at the prospect of having solved a big tricky puzzle to even contemplate the perks of not having to go to Sunday school anymore.  My brother faced my epiphany with confusion, offering no hint that he understood it; he may not even remember the conversation.  The friend I shared it with shouted at me as a blasphemer, a reaction I found at least as incomprehensible.  And my parents?  They were no different, and I can’t blame them.  I hadn’t finished forming those thoughts before their magnitude compelled me to air them, and they weren’t impressed, nor were they permissive.  They tried to convince me I was wrong, but they didn’t know what they were arguing against, and I couldn’t have told them yet.  The lesson I learned was altogether different: keep it a secret.  They didn’t change my opinion even a little, but they taught me that all-important lesson of being an American atheist in an immigrant family: keep secrets.  I had found and peeked out the closet door, and shut it firmly.

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Out into the Light