Another Bizarro for you:

Now wait a minute - you might ask - how did Noah get an artillery gun before artillery guns were invented? Well, the answer is simple. How did Noah get all the animals aboard his ship? Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? It’s a MIRACLE. How about that for a theory?

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The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome once again to Monday School - “The Easy Way To Burn Off All Those Nutrition-Free Claims Theists Like To Force-Feed Our Heads Around The Major Holidays.”

In recent days I’ve repeatedly encountered two theist claims which go more or less like this: “We need an absolute morality to guide our lives, and this morality can only come from God.” Although I’m not sure what theists mean by “absolute” morality, I assume it’s something like this: “A perfect, unchanging list of (or criteria for) right and wrong behaviors which may be used to judge the actions of all people, everywhere, at all times.” If you have a better idea of what they might mean, please let me know what it is.

What do I think of this?

1) We do not, in fact, need such an absolute morality in order to live good, meaningful lives. 

No more than we need to make or acquire an “absolute” set of traffic laws before we may safely travel on our roads and highways. If the British want to drive on the left side of their roads instead of the right side and it works for them, fine. Any American who goes to Britain and insists on driving his or her own way because it’s the “absolutely” right one is going to learn just how silly this is in a hurry.

Now, does this mean that we can never judge the traffic regulations of other societies by objective standards of safety and efficiency? Of course not. Those standards, however, must be rooted in scientific examination of the reality of specific times and places and not merely accepted because some Great Highway Engineer in the Sky says “Thou shalt always post School Zone signs 500 yards either side of school property.”

If we grant that the British may safely drive on the left side of the road, must we grant them the right to drive across lawns, into trees, or anywhere else they feel like it? Of course not. Reality itself determines what is and is not safe and permissible. As reality changes, different traffic rules may best apply. A safe dry road speed may not be safe when roads are wet or icy. There is no “absolute” safest speed. Even 0 MPH can be hazardous if you’re sitting in the center of an intersection at night with your lights off and no reflectors on your black sedan….

If we grant all this, must we grant that Aztec virgin sacrifices were OK because the Aztecs said they were? Of course not. One must simply come up with a more sophisticated way of objecting to such practices than saying “My God says you people are being VERY bad!” One may as well try to convince someone in the mall parking lot to get their vehicle out of your “God-given” parking space this holiday shopping season.

2) If we did need an “absolute” morality to guide our behavior, we sure couldn’t get it from God. 

Partly because God doesn’t exist, of course, but partly because - even if we grant for the sake of argument that a God exists - the question merely becomes “WHICH God-given set of absolute moral rules do we accept as genuine?”

Many Christians like to point to the Bible and say, “That’s all you need to know!” Many Muslims, however, point just as certainly to the Koran - a book which often contradicts the Bible. Other people believing in other gods point to other books and moral rules. Unless and until you can prove that your God exists and that He/She/They/It has in fact passed along the one good, true, and intelligible moral code, why should we prefer it over any other? Because it works in practice? Well, hey - if it works in practice, we don’t really need to believe in your God at all, do we? On the other hand, if it doesn’t work in practice, what does that say about your God?

Perhaps we ought to just go with the oldest God-given code of morality we know, hmmm? That code just might be the one the Sun God himself, Shamash, allegedly gave to Hammurabi almost 4000 years ago. Among its roughly 280 commandments are the following:

“2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.”

“108. If a tavern-keeper (feminine) does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.”

“110. If a ‘sister of a god’ open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.”

“132. If the ‘finger is pointed’ at a man’s wife about another man, but she is not caught sleeping with the other man, she shall jump into the river for her husband.”

“145. If a man take a wife, and she bear him no children, and he intend to take another wife: if he take this second wife, and bring her into the house, this second wife shall not be allowed equality with his wife.”

“192. If a son of a paramour or a prostitute say to his adoptive father or mother: ‘You are not my father, or my mother,’ his tongue shall be cut off.”

“282. If a slave say to his master: ‘You are not my master,’ if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.”

(For more: http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/hammurabi.htm)

Don’t like these “God-given” rules? What are you - an agent of Satan!?

3) If there is a God with an “absolute” moral guide we should follow, it sure isn’t the God of the Bible. 

The analysis of the Ten Commandments that I performed in my 6/13-18 and 7/31 entries reveal in detail exactly how useless the OT God is when it comes to morality. He is, after all, a deity who allegedly said “Thou shalt not kill” and then commanded the Hebrews to kill every living thing in whole cities. Enough said.

4) If we do need an “absolute” moral guide, we sure can’t get it from Jesus, the New Testament, or Christianity. 

Why not? Because Jesus and the NT are at least as contradictory as God and the OT. And it doesn’t help that the OT and the NT often contradict each other. First you have God laying down all these “absolute” rules in the OT, then you have Jesus and Paul ripping them up in the NT. To take but one famous example: The OT demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but Jesus says no, we should simply turn the other cheek. Where’s the “absolute” morality in that?

Beyond all this, there’s a very real sense in which Jesus and the NT actually and actively destroy morality as it is commonly understood.

Consider his famous words on adultery:

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” - Matt. 5:27-28

He seems to be saying that the thought is as bad as the action. And because in this case the thought (lust) is an intrinsic part of our nature (which God allegedly gave us!), he seems to be saying we are all bad by nature no matter what we do. If that’s true, it doesn’t matter if we get an “absolute” moral guide or not. We’re inherently immoral sinners, none of whom deserves a pardon, yet some of whom (judging from what the NT says elsewhere) may be given one anyway out of the sheer goodness of God’s heart.

This basic separation of human action from just reward or punishment is stressed by Jesus repeatedly in his parables. The worthless son returns and is rewarded by his father in a way that the good, constantly faithful son never is (Luke 15). Laborers who do vastly different amounts of work are nonetheless all paid the same penny (Matthew 20). When the Pharisees try to be good Jews who obey and uphold the law, Jesus ridicules them and blithely goes about harvesting corn on the Sabbath (Matthew 12). Some may say Jesus was merely following a “higher” law. But exactly how does this differ in practice from his following no law at all? Once one puts thought, belief, faith, or anything else intangible above actions and their consequences in the here and now, it seems any act becomes pardonable, excusable - and essentially beyond human judgment. And how is that reconcilable with “absolute” morality?

Contrast what Jesus said about adultery with what Jefferson said about religious belief:

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

What another person thinks is of no concern to Jefferson. It’s what people do that counts. Jefferson’s approach naturally leads to freedom of religion, of conscience, and of speech as beliefs compete on their merits in an open marketplace of ideas. Jesus’s approach, in contrast, seems to virtually criminalize what we think, and it seems to have naturally inspired the Inquisition and the burning of heretics because of what they believed.

The flip side of this, of course, is that fiends like Jeffrey Dahmer (who confessed to killing 17 young men and eating some of them) can get into a heaven forever denied peaceful, loving pagans.

“It is very hard for anybody to believe that somebody who committed such terrible crimes could come to a faith in Christ that would result in their eternal salvation. It doesn’t seem fair to us as human beings… but… yes, indeed, a guy like Dahmer can be saved. It’s pretty amazing, but it’s what we believe.” - Jim Jewel, senior vice president with Prison Fellowship Ministries in Reston, Va., quoted in the Toledo Blade, Nov. 30, 1994

“Asked whether Dahmer, who was killed Monday in a prison bathroom, deserves to go to heaven, Mr. Ratcliff [Dahmer's minister] said, ‘No one deserves to go to heaven. It’s not a question of deserving it. If you think you get there by deserving it, you don’t understand that at all. All of us deserve hell. All sins are an offense to God. In a very true sense, of course he does not deserve [heaven], but then neither do you or I.’” - From the same article

I highly suspect that anyone who can look at this and see a wondrous absolute morality at work can also look into a dark well at midnight and see a blazing noontime sun….

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NewsBusters (conservative media watchdog group) is crying “tyranny of the minority” in the Washington Post’s and MSNBC’s coverage of Michael Newdow’s inauguration suit. The complaint? Not enough counterpoint.

In the NewsBusters piece, Colleen Raezler laments that WaPo’s (very short) article includes only one counterpoint. Of course the quote in question is the only independent analysis of the suit in the article (no neutral legal scholars for example) and it is characteristically dismissive and condescending:

Scott Walter, executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, called the lawsuit a “publicity stunt” in a statement yesterday. The Becket Fund promotes free expression of religion and has opposed Newdow’s Pledge of Allegiance efforts.

“Newdow’s lawsuit over the inauguration is a lot like the streaker at the Super Bowl: a pale, self-absorbed distraction. And anybody who looks at it carefully can see there’s not much there,” Walter said.

The MSNBC piece, meanwhile, is a tiny stub from a local affiliate; a quick wire-type piece not intended to be in depth or analytical. Much ado about nothing, but if course, righty organizations need to take all the shots they can at their cable bogeyman.

So I honestly don’t understand what Raezler’s problem is, unless of course she doesn’t like the story being covered at all. Perhaps she wants a true counterpoint based on the legal merits and shortcomings of the case. She cites Fox News and the Washington Examiner as good examples of coverage, though the Examiner’s piece merely has this quick dismissal, and it’s not exactly thorough:

Prof. Ron Allen, a constitutional law expert at Northwestern University,
disagrees.

“You can understand the impulse, it seems as though it’s a governmental
activity imbued with religious symbols and a certain sect of religious
symbols, Christian obviously, in particular,” Allen said. “No one thinks the
government is establishing a church by the president saying ’so help be God’
at his own initiative when taking the oath. I don’t think the courts will
intervene.”

The Fox News example is a long radio interview, not a small written piece, so there was plenty of time for explicit argument–very apples and oranges.

Counterpoint is important, of course, but eventually we have to remember Susan Jacoby:

Genuine fairness does not mean the kind of bogus objectivity that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but it does demand that divergent views be understood and taken into account in approaching public issues.

And the counterpoint to an event is not necessarily its denigration by an opposition, especially when the very culture in which the lawsuit emerges is a counterpoint (near universal theism). True counterpoint would not be raw insult, but a legal argument that took apart the merits of the case in question. That level of analysis is rare in any instance, be the event in question from the left or right.

Perhaps she would be happier with Lisa Richardson blogging for the LA Times:

But back to Newdow et al. If you don’t believe God exists, then why doesn’t it follow that phrases like “so help me God” have no meaning? And if that’s the case, then why does something meaningless matter? I have news for Newdow — even if he managed to bar all religious references from public life it wouldn’t matter. The Soviet Union tried that; all it did was send religious fervor underground until communism ended and it came roaring back. Besides, what would Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts be expected to do if Obama were to defy a ruling in Newdow’s favor, snatch away the Lincoln Bible and swat him on the hand?

Maybe it’s not fair to use this example; it’s an opinion piece, not a news article. But it is typical of the quick-draw, unthinking approach usually taken to atheist issues. It is also an amazing example of a writer managing to stuff several anti-atheism canards and clichés into one paragraph: alleged atheist nihilism, the Soviet Union/Stalinism, and the it’s-hopeless-so-why-bother-even-if-you’re-right dismissal.

Cross-post at Bloc Raisonneur: On atheists’ precarious place in American politics and culture.

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A little bit of humor for today:

See more Bizarro cartoons or check out the Bizarro blog.

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I was browsing around Zazzle.com the other day and came across this design:

I think the design is very clever. The red letters, of course, spell “WAR”. God may be for many things, but historically and even today war and religion have been and still are close partners. This design helps remind us that we forget this fact out our peril. The design is available in the store called Ian’s Brain - Busted Neurons - Stuff. Ian has put the design on a mousepad, shirt, and a mug:

What is God for? by flamingboard View other Religion Mousepads

What is God for? by flamingboard Browse Religion T-Shirts

What is God For? by flamingboard See other Religion Mugs

Also, check out this other design by Ian:

How many times have you heard the claim that atheism is a religion? Well, you won’t hear that while wearing this shirt! Bravo, Ian! And keep up the great designs! 

If Atheism Is A Religion Then Clear Is A Color by flamingboard View other Words To Live By T-Shirts

If Atheism Is A Religion Then Clear Is A Color by flamingboard See other Words To Live By Mugs

If Atheism Is A Religion Then Clear Is A Color by flamingboard View more Words To Live By Mousepads

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In a previous post I wrote about the different assumptions that Christians and atheists make concerning the nature of reality. Strictly speaking, atheism does not any assumptions - it is simply a rejection of theism. However, it seems fair to say that most atheists at least make the following assumption:

Image via Wikipedia

Atheists assume that the natural world exists (obviously) and that, as far as we know from the available evidence, this is all that exists.

What about science? Atheism is often associated with science and the scientific method because many atheists point to science as the best method of gaining knowledge about our reality. As a response, some theists, as a last ditch attempt to level the playing field, insist that science is equally as faith-based as religion in regards to its assumptions.

Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, wrote a nice response to this question over at the James Randi forums (thanks to  LarianLeQuella over at AtheistSpot for the link). The whole post is worth reading, but here is a small excerpt that I would like to pass along:

“The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That’s it. There is one corollary, and that is that if the Universe follows these rules, then those rules can be deduced by observing the way Universe behaves. This follows naturally; if it obeys the rules, then the rules must be revealed by that behavior.”

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In my last post I began responding to a piece by Frederick Meekins, titled “Have Yourself A Theistic (Not Atheistic) Little Christmas,“ in which he charged that atheists are just as dogmatic in their epistemological assumptions as the most zealous evangelical Christian. Now I would like to examine the rest of what he wrote on atheists and morality.

He begins with the usual charge:

For example, if God does not exist, who is to say whatever the individual thinks or does is right or wrong? As has been said, in some cultures they are suppose to love their neighbors and in others they eat them. To the cannibal the adage is not so much finger licking good but rather good to lick fingers.

Think about this for a moment. Mr. Meekins is painting a picture of morality in which humans are helpless little babies that cannot reason at all about matters of right or wrong and therefore require a divine hand to set us straight. The Bible itself even makes it clear that this is not the situtation - when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge their eyes were opened, and they recognized good from evil (Gen. 3).

But let’s turn around and ask the reverse question, for I think it is far more illustrative: If God does exist, how are we to know what is right or wrong? Can we just ask Him? Does God periodically send down commandments from the top of mountains? If somebody claims to know what God thinks, or claims that God has spoken a moral command to him or her, why should we believe it? In other words, how do we know what God’s true pronouncements are?

The Christian has an answer: the Bible. It is the word of God and contains all the moral guidance humankind will ever need. Of course, we shall not simply assume that an ancient collection of literature is the actual word of God, but I digress. So, is morality reduced to following the rules laid out in the Bible? I don’t think so. Christians hardly follow all of the hundreds of archaic codes and laws “revealed” to the Jews in the Old Testament. And for good reason. Nobody in this country follows the many rules and procedures for handling slaves. But, you might interject, that was a different culture and a different time - slavery was an accepted practice back then. However, if our only source of morality comes from the Bible then from whence came this notion that slavery is immoral? It certainly didn’t come from a closer reading of the Bible!

The Bible contains many more clearly immoral pronouncements. Take, for example:

Deuteronomy 23:2
Those born of an illicit union shall not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

I would like to know if Mr. Meekins accepts God’s judgement on this matter. A child, and up to ten generations of his or her offspring, are to be damned simply because of an accident of birth that is no fault of and is not under control of the child itself.

Besides, it seems that much of the Old Testament histories is a story of the Israelites disobeying their divinely revealed laws and Yahweh getting angry. After all, what was the first thing that they did after Yahweh freed them from Egypt, led them safely to Mt. Sinai, and presented them with His ten commandments? They worshiped a golden calf. Some example!

So if the Bible cannot help steer us morally, then I believe that Mr. Meekins’ question is a valid one to ask him: Even if God exists, who is to say what is right and wrong?

You see,  it is not about what some individual thinks is right or wrong. The founding fathers of the United States recognized the danger inherent in bestowing upon a single individual all of the power to legislate morality. Humans are social animals, and morality is a social process of back and forth negociation, trial and error, and most of all rational considerations. We are collectively responsible for ourselves and what kind of a society in which we wish to live. That is not such a bad prospect.

But Meekins is not done yet. He has another punch to throw:

If anything, what atheists exhibit when they manifest goodness is remaining Judeo-Christian moral capital. These individuals professing godlessness remain largely good because they have been acculturated in a milieu largely Biblical in its underlying ethical orientation.

So, atheists are only moral because enough “Judeo-Christian” morality has rubbed off on us! We are all indebted to the work of previous generations, but I daresay, given the above discussion, what exactly is this “Judeo-Christian moral captial”? Does it include Deuteronomy 23:2?

If anything, lack of divine restraints seems to send man’s compulsion to prey (not pray) upon his fellow man into overdrive. One only need to look at the histories of regimes with an explicit antipathy towards the God of the Bible such as Soviet Russia, Red China, and Nazi Germany.

Right…but let’s not forget how far more troublesome a firm convinction in divine dictates have been, historically, than a lack of divine restraint: religious wars and persecutions, terrorism, and all the other trouble religious certainty brings. Neither Soviet Russia, Red China, or Nazi Germany suffered because their regimes were zealously devoted to too much rationality, logic, and evidence. And one only need to look at the God of the Bible itself, within the pages of the Old Testament, for a figure that is more brutal and more murderous than all of those regimes combined.

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I just had the unfortunate pleasure of reading this, dare I say, wretched article by Frederick Meekins titled “Have Yourself A Theistic (Not Atheistic) Little Christmas.” While he begins by complaining about how rabid atheists are trying to elimenate public recognition that Jesus is the Son of God - nothing unusual there - the bulk of it is a terribly misguided critique of atheist morals. I don’t want to talk about that - yet. First I would like to draw out this one little paragraph buried near the middle, squeezed between an acknowledgement that children should be exposed to, among other evils, atheism before they are shocked by it in adulthood and his moral arguments:

Secondly, lack of a belief in something is a belief about it. For too long, Christians and allied theists have played into the hands of atheists and agnostics by going along with the notion that those professing unbelief are objective and unfettered by preconceived epistemological commitments and that the believers are the ones holding onto bedrock dogmatic foundations. Many atheists are just as rabid in their assumptions as the most zealous of pulpit-pounding evangelists.

To lack a belief in X only tells you that I do not believe that X is true. It does not mean that I believe that X must be false. I have not been persuaded that it is true, but not necessarily persuaded that it is false. So, if, as an atheist, I do not believe that God exists, this is not equivalent to saying that I am certain that God does not exist or that I dogmatically deny God’s existence. That might be case, but it is not necessarily the case.

More important, however, is the charge that Frederick makes at the end of this paragraph: that atheists are just as rapid and presumably dogmatic in our assumptions as “the most zealous” evangelist.

All right. Let’s examine some of our assumptions, then?

-Christians in general, not just the most zealous, assume that there is a supernatural world that exists and that there are beings within that supernatural world that can influence the course of events here in the natural world.

-Christians assume that, not only does a God exist, but that this said God communicated to mankind through a book, and that this book contains important revelations.

-Christians assume that if you talk to this God, He will actually listen to you.

-Christians assume that our physical bodies are not our entire selves and that there is a non-natural ’self’ which can survive death and, therefore, we will be eternally ‘alive.’ 

-Christians assume that, based on the weak evidence of their special book, a man was once both a man and god and rose from the dead, and that this action remedies that actions of two people they assume to have existed in the beginning.

-Christians assume that this same man, Jesus, will return to Earth someday in the ever distant future to usher in the end of the world.

-Am I missing any?

Okay. That’s a good start. What do atheists rabidly assume?

-Atheists assume that the natural world exists (obviously) and that, as far as we know from the available evidence, this is all that exists.

Gee, I don’t know - which assumptions seem more reasonable to you?

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Cover via Amazon

The January 2009 issue of Scientific American (devoted to Evolution), contains an article called “The Latest Face of Creationism” by two of the directors of the National Center for Science Education. The article also contains a compact time line of the battle between evolution and creationism that has played out over the past 100 years in public schools and courthouses across the country. “It highlights the way creationist tactics have shifted in response to evolution’s advances in classrooms and to court rulings that have banned religious proselytizing in public schools.”

It is actually quite interesting to see how creationist or anti-evolutionist strategies have evolved over time in response to a series of defeats and setbacks. So, for your reading pleasure, here is the Scientific American time line:

Late 1910s and early 1920s:
As high school attendance rises, more American students become exposed to evolution.

1925:
Butler Act in Tennessee outlaws teaching of human evolution. Teacher John T. Scopes is prosecuted and convicted under the law, although the conviction is later overturned on a technicality.

1958:
Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) is founded with funds from a federal government concerned about science education in the wake of Sputnik. BSCS’s textbooks emphasize evolution, which was largely absent from textbooks after the Scopes trial; commercial publishers follow suit.

1968:
Supreme Court rules in case of Epperson v. Arkansas that laws barring the teaching of evolution in public schools are unconstitutional. Teacher Susan Epperson is shown at the left in 1966.

1981:
Louisiana passes the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act. Also in the 1980s legislators in more than 25 states introduce bills calling for “creation science” to have equal time with evolution.

1987:
Supreme Court rules in the case of Edwards v. Aguillardthat the Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

1989:
Of Pandas and People, the first book systematically to use the term “intelligent design” is published; it touts the notion as an alternative to evolution.

2001:
Passage of the No Child Left Behind Act cements the importance of state science standards, which have become a new battleground between creationism and evolution (because inclusion of evolution in science standards increases the likelihood that evolution will be taught).

2005:
Decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District rules that teaching intelligent design in the public schools is unconstitutional. The photograph at the right captures plaintiff Tammy Kitzmiller during a break from the trial.

June 2008:
Governor Bobby Jindal signs the Louisiana Science Education Act into law. Marketed as supporting critical thinking in classrooms, the law threatens to open the door for the teaching of creationism and for scientifically unwarranted critiques of evolution in public school science classes.

~~~~~

In brief, creationists of various stripes have moved from outlawing evolution, to demanding equal-time for “creation-science,” to pushing for “intelligent design,” to finally “teaching the controversy” or including evidence both for and against evolution in science curricula. Clearly, the tactic involved has become less and less extreme as they continue to achieve set back after set back. The latest tactic involves pushing school boards to modify science standards to subtly change the definition of science (so that it is not restricted to natural explanations) and introduce language in the biology sections that stresses that “weaknesses” to Darwin’s theory of evolution must be taught alongside its “strengths.”

These tactics, of course, have conceded a lot but at the same time not much. How far will this latest round go? Time will tell.