Atheist Memes on Facebook: Consciousness Is Physical

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

We don’t yet understand what consciousness is. But all the available evidence is that, whatever consciousness is, it’s a biological process of the brain. And there is absolutely zero good evidence suggesting that any metaphysical process is part of the picture. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Consciousness Is Physical
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Atheist Memes on Facebook: Why Atheists Care

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

The reason many atheists care what other believe is that people act on their beliefs. We care for the same reasons Democrats care what Republicans believe, and vice versa: we think religion is a mistaken idea about the world, and we think it does more harm than good. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Why Atheists Care

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Atheist Countries

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

Countries with high rates of atheism tend to be countries with high rates of happiness and social health. This doesn’t prove that atheism causes happiness and social health (in fact, it’s probably the other way around). But it does show that atheism doesn’t lead to misery and chaos… and that people don’t need religion to be happy and good. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

And now, a quick poll about the Atheist Meme of the Day: Do you like having them every day? Or would you rather they came a little less often — like two or three times a week? Would you be more likely to pass them on if they came less often? Or you like having them more often, so you can pick the ones you like best to pass on?

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Atheist Countries

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Intuition and Emotion

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.
Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

Intuition and emotion are valuable… but they’re of limited use in figuring out what is and isn’t true in the external world. They’re too subject to rationalization, confirmation bias, etc. And “Does God exist?” is a question about what is or isn’t true in the external world. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Intuition and Emotion

Brief Blog Break, Self-Promotion Op, and Atheist Conference!

Ingrid and I are off to the Atheist Alliance International conference today, so I may not be blogging much for a few days. In the meantime, let’s call this a shameless self-promotion opportunity! If you have a blog you want to flog, a particular blog post you’re particularly proud of, a project you want to brag on — speak up about it in the comments here. No commercial promotions, as always they’ll be deleted the moment I see them… but plugs for your personal or political projects are welcomed.

And if you’re going to be at the conference, come find us and say hi!

Brief Blog Break, Self-Promotion Op, and Atheist Conference!

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Unexplained /= Supernatural

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

“We don’t currently understand X” is not a good argument for why “X must be caused by God or the supernatural.” Without solid, positive evidence for why X is caused by God or the supernatural, this isn’t a real argument — it’s just dodging the question. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Unexplained /= Supernatural

Atheism and Uncertainty

Uncertainty

How important to atheism is the difference between absolute confidence and a fragment of uncertainty?

How important is the difference between the statement, “I think some gods are hypothetically possible, but I think they’re wildly implausible and there’s no good reason to think they exist, and unless I see some better evidence I’m going to conclude that they don’t exist”… and the statement, “I am 100% convinced that there is no God or gods”?

As regular readers know, I’ve been doing an Atheist Meme of the Day project on Facebook. (BTW, if you’re on Facebook, friend me!) Yesterday I posted the following meme:

We can acknowledge that something is hypothetically possible, and still reject it in any practical sense if it’s implausible, unsupported by any good evidence, and inconsistent with what we know about the world. Including God or the supernatural.

And it sparked a debate with an atheist who insisted that no god was even hypothetically possible, and that she was 100% certain of the non-existence of any god. A position I found myself opposing almost as passionately and stubbornly as I oppose religious beliefs.

Why?

Why do I think this difference is important? Why do I think it’s important for atheists to acknowledge that — as wildly implausible as it is, as utterly unsupported as it is by any good evidence, as thoroughly inconsistent as it is with everything we know about how the world works — at least some God hypotheses are hypothetically possible? Is there any practical difference between being 99.9999% sure that there is no God… and being 100% sure?

I think there is.

Here’s why.

For one thing: When atheists claim they can be 100% sure God does not exist, it gives theists — especially progressive and moderate theists — a big piece of ammunition. “See!” they can say. “Atheists are just as dogmatic as hard-core believers! They claim to have 100% certainty about something we can never be certain about! Atheism is just as much an article of faith as religion!”

More importantly: I think “We can’t be 100% sure that there is no God, but we can be sure enough” is a much, much stronger argument than “I am 100% sure that there is no God.”

God failed hypothesis

“We can’t be 100% sure, but we can be sure enough” puts the God hypotheses squarely into the category of any other hypothesis that’s theoretically possible but wildly implausible. It removes the question of God’s existence or lack thereof from a simple matter of opinion or faith, and projects it into the realm of real-world hypotheses: hypotheses that are always provisional, always subject to change if new evidence appears, but that we’re nevertheless willing to accept if the evidence supports them — and willing to reject if the evidence doesn’t.

In other words: It nudges believers into seeing their belief as just one more hypothesis about the world… one that, when you look carefully, isn’t very likely. It lifts the ridiculous burden of proving that atheism is 100% definitely right from atheists… and puts the burden of showing why religious belief is probably right onto believers. It pushes religious belief out of the lofty realm of “You can’t prove this, you shouldn’t expect to prove this, this is special and beyond our powers to comprehend, that’s why we need faith”… and into the down-to-earth realm of “This is a claim about how the world works and why it is the way it is — what reasons do we have to think it’s probably true?”

A realm where it doesn’t stand a chance.

And that is hugely powerful. Much, much more powerful than expressing atheism as simply one more opinion in a sea of opinions. The more we can get people to see religion as simply another hypothesis about the world, the more rapidly it’s going to dwindle.

Finally — and maybe most importantly of all —

I heart truth

I think it’s true.

I think it’s true that we can’t be 100% absolutely certain that there is no God.

Yes, there are some specific God hypotheses that are logically contradictory, and therefore impossible. (I’d argue that the all- knowing, all-powerful, all-good God who nonetheless causes great suffering and permits evil to flourish is one of them.) But many religious beliefs are textbook cases of unfalsifiable hypotheses: hypotheses that can’t be proven or disproven one way or the other. Invisible visions, inaudible voices, intangible beings, a final proof that happens after people die… all of that adds up to a big fat set of moving goalposts, beliefs that we have no evidence for but that, by their very nature, can’t be disproven with absolute certainty.

And yes, I agree that, in any useful or interesting or important sense, the possiblity that God might exist is so remote as to be… well, useless and uninteresting and unimportant. In any practical sense, I feel entirely confident in rejecting religious belief. This debate about whether atheism is 99.9999% probably true or 100% definitely true is entirely theoretical. But sometimes theory matters. And given the 99.9999% probability that we’re right, I don’t see any reason to insist on a 100% theoretical certainty that we can’t have.

Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

I mean, it is hypothetically possible that there is a God who communicates through imprecise prophets and will punish or reward us in an invisible world after we die based on how well we followed his vague, contradictory instructions. It is hypothetically possible that the fossil record was placed there by the Devil to tempt us (or by God to test our faith). It is hypothetically possible that gravity is caused by the Flying Spaghetti Monster holding us down with His invisible noodly appendages. It is hypothetically possible that we’re living in the Matrix, and everything we experience is a maliciously induced hallucination. We have absolutely no reason to think any of that is the case… but we can’t disprove it with absolute 100% certainty. That’s true.

And I care about what’s true.

The whole reason I became an atheist is that I care about what’s true. The whole reason I became an atheist is that I think reality trumps everything. Reality, by definition, is far more important than any of our opinions about it. And it’s a lot more interesting to boot. I became an atheist because I cared about reality, more than I cared about being comforted by my spiritual beliefs… or about being right.

I became an atheist because I care about what’s true.

And if we can be models for caring about what’s true more than we care about absolute certainty that our opinion is right, then I think we’re far more likely to make atheism a force to be reckoned with.

Atheism and Uncertainty

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Coincidences Happen

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I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

“That can’t be a coincidence! It must have had a supernatural cause!” isn’t a good argument for God or the supernatural. Our minds evolved to see patterns, even where none exist; and our intuitive understanding of probability is not very good. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Coincidences Happen

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Hypothetically Possible But Implausible

Scarlet letter

I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through. If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

We can acknowledge that something is hypothetically possible, and still reject it in any practical sense if it’s implausible, unsupported by any good evidence, and inconsistent with what we know about the world. Including God or the supernatural. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

Atheist Memes on Facebook: Hypothetically Possible But Implausible

Atheism and History: A Grandiose Thought

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I was thinking about the atheist movement the other day, and I had what I freely admit is a very grandiose thought. I’m actually a little embarrassed to say it in public: but I’ve been finding it inspiring and sustaining as well as grandiose, and it seemed like a thought my readers might be interested in, so I decided to get over my embarrassment and just say it out loud. (Some of you may already have reached this conclusion, btw, in which case I’ll be even more embarrassed for being late to the party… but oh, well. Part of writing fearlessly means saying what I have to say without fear of making an ass of myself.)

The thought is this.

If the atheist movement succeeds?

If those of us who are trying to persuade people out of religion, those of us who are offering atheism as an alternative, eventually succeed?

If current trends continue, and the number of people who don’t believe in God continues to grow larger and larger, until eventually everybody (or almost everybody) abandons the idea entirely?

It will be one of the most important developments in human history.

Zeus_Louvre_G204

Think about it. For the entirety of human history, our thinking about the world has included religion, as a crucial, even central, part of our world view. As far as we can tell, human beings have believed in gods, spirits, and supernatural entities for as long as we’ve been human beings. And these beliefs have been a powerful force in shaping how we think and act. They’ve shaped the broadest sweeps of political history, and they’ve shaped the most intimate and important personal choices of individuals. For thousands upon thousands of years.

If atheists — or those atheists (like me) who are working to persuade people out of religion and welcome them into atheism — are eventually successful?

Historians History of the World

It will be one of the most important developments in human history. It will be like the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution. It will be the sort of thing historians write about. People will see human history as divided into two eras: When We Believed In Gods, and When We Stopped Believing In Gods.

I told you this was a grandiose thought.

I’m not sure why I feel compelled to bring this thought up. But ever since it occurred to me, I’ve been finding it comforting, and sustaining. Inspiring, even. When I’m up against one of the 37 Terrible Arguments for Religion for the five hundredth time? When I’m butting my head against one of the many pieces of armor that religion has built to protect itself from any sort of questioning or criticism? When I’m debating people who think I’m a bad person just for trying to make my case? I’ve been finding it comforting, and sustaining, and inspiring, to remember what a huge struggle we’re involved in, and what a massive impact it could have an human history.

It’s a sustaining thought for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it helps me have empathy with the believers I’m debating and trying to persuade. It reminds me that when we ask people to consider giving up their religion, we’re actually asking a lot. I don’t think what we’re asking is unreasonable, or unfair, or wrong… but it’s a lot. We’re not simply asking people to give up a major foundation of their life, a major component of their sense of meaning and their place in the world. We’re asking them to participate in a massive, serious shift in human thought. It’s kind of a big deal.

Patience

It’s also helping to give me patience. Realizing what a tremendous societal shift we’re trying to create… it reminds me that this is going to be a long struggle, one that I almost certainly won’t see achieved in my lifetime. It helps me be patient in my one- on- one debates and engagements; and it helps me be patient with the molasses- like change that’s happening in the broader political and legal and social arenas. When I feel like I’m banging my head against a rock, it helps to remember that major social change is slow in coming, and the effect is rarely sudden. It’s more like water on stone.

And maybe most importantly:

It helps me feel like this fight is worth fighting.

When I get frustrated and discouraged, when I start to wonder whether this particular rock is one that’s worth banging my head against… I remember how big and important the thing is that we’re trying to do. Even the remote possibility that I might be part of one of the major sweeping changes in human history? Even the remote possibility that I might be a small footnote in one of the more obscure histories written about this movement 200 years from now? Even the remote possibility that, out of the billions of minds we hope to eventually change, I’ll have been partially responsible for changing one thousandth of one percent? That’s enough to sustain me through a whole lot of dark nights of the soul. (Or, more accurately, the soulless.)

Utopia

Now, before I go totally off into the grandiose deep end, I do feel compelled to add some caveats. First, and very importantly: I don’t think this change will bring about a utopia, or anything resembling a utopia. I do think it will be an improvement: I think religion is a mistaken idea about the world, I think on the whole it does more harm than good, and I think humanity would be better off without it. But I’m not naive enough to think letting go of religion will bring an end to all wars, all bigotries, all hatreds, all frauds, all shoddy excuses for bad behavior, all manipulations of the weak by the powerful. I’m a dreamer, but I’m not totally high.

We also might not be successful. It may be that the impulse towards religion, and the human psychological wiring that leads to it, are so strong that humanity as a whole will simply never let go of it. It may be that the most atheists will ever achieve is an increase in our numbers, and an increase in tolerance and acceptance by non-atheists, and a better separation of church and state. Worthwhile goals, to be sure, and significant in their own right… but not quite as grand as bringing about the Post- God Era of Humanity.

Plus, we have to last long enough as a species for this change to make any difference. If we don’t get global warming and clean water supplies and nuclear disarmament and whatnot handled, we may not stick around long enough to see this change take place… or for it to matter.

Galaxies

And, of course, we’re still only one big rock circling one of billions of stars in one of billions of galaxies. And in a couple billion years that one star will have become so hot that all life on Earth will be obliterated… thus rendering the whole question moot. (Whenever I start to get grandiose about my importance in the scheme of things, these brute facts usually drag me back into perspective.)

I get all that.

I’m just saying:

What we’re doing has potential to be, within the limited perspective of humanity, huge. What we’re doing has potential to be one of the most important developments in human history.

And if it helps us be patient; if it helps us be empathetic; if it helps us stay strong and resilient in the face of frustrations and setbacks… then let’s remember that.

Atheism and History: A Grandiose Thought