Irrational stupidity

Lies, damn lies, collossal lies... and religion

• We're tolerance incarnate
  Wrong. Monotheism is intolerant by definition. Monotheism means "there's exactly one god, namely mine", so everybody who doesn't share this opinion is wrong. You can squirm and try to spew forth biblical nonsense until you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact: that's what monotheism means, that's what it stands for and that's why it's intolerant by definition. It's completely irrelevant what any conrete monotheistic instance says explicitly about tolerance (they all have passages where they encourage tolerance and other passages where they encourage extremely intolerant behaviour), the intolerance inherent in monotheism will always be the dominant factor. Anyone claiming the opposite will have some pretty imaginative explaining to do regarding the last 2000 years of history, which happen to prove quite succinctly that not only does the real world tolerance of monotheistic societies leave a lot to be desired, but that they've been rather consistently at the forefront of repression, intolerance and pretty much all forms of close-mindedness you could think of -- and with extreme prejudice, too. Now, to preemptively counter the predictable reaction: no, atheism isn't tolerant either, and for the same reason. However, 1) in contrast to christianity it never claimed to be and 2) historically speaking intolerant acts in the name of atheism have been rare, whereas intolerant acts in the name of religion have been ubiquitous. The most likely reason for this is that, in contrast to (at least) the major monotheistic religions, atheists generally don't believe they're god's gift to the universe, which goes a long way keeping intolerance from getting out of hand (at least compared to those who think they're the people personally chosen by the Sky Pixie). Anyway, back to the topic of imaginative explaining, here's a classic:

• "They" are just abusing it / interpreting it wrong
  Wrong. With concoctions like the Bible there's no such thing as a "right" or "wrong" interpretation because the minimum requirement necessary that such a thing can exists in the first place is source material which is at least superficially free of contradictions. Anybody who seriously claims the Bible is even superficially free of contradictions should really do something about his severe reading disorder. The standard excuse here is that the Old Testament was passé and the New Testament was all about being nice, but you can't separate the two like that. The Old Testament is passé? Then the Ten Commandments are passé too, I suppose? In fact, christianity loses its main point, you know, the whole "doing penance for the unfortunate incident involving an apple and a snake by getting nailed to a tree"-bit (whatever good that's supposed to do anyway). You can't separate the two like that, people who do that just exercise selective reading by ignoring all the nasty bits, same as radicals ignore the bits about tolerance and only see the fire-and-brimstone stuff. And while it's of course better to filter out the nasty bits than taking them seriously and blowing people up in consequence, that doesn't mean either side has the "right" or "wrong" interpretation; both see only what they want to see. The alleged moral institution called Bible is actually highly ambivalent, a mere mirror of its beholder. People who want to confirm their philanthropy will see the corresponding passages, while people of a misanthropic persuasion will also find an ample amount of passages encouraging them to go medieval on someone's ass (when all else fails, you can always slaughter people who refuse to be tolerant, or believe in the wrong one-and-only-all-forgiving deity; or in more enlightened societies where such extremes are no longer possible, at least discriminate people the Bible classifies as "bad" one way or another, and maybe kill the odd doctor known to perform abortions on the side). Neither persuasion originates in the Bible, however, people already had it before they even opened the first page. Which of course means that these religious scriptures don't actually create homicidal lunatics any more than they create goody-two-shoe types, but looking back through history the consequences of encouraging the loons sure seem several orders of magnitude more severe than making the occasional nice guy share his broth with the less fortunate.

• We can give you the answers
  Wrong. Creationism cannot give answers (regardless of the number of gods involved), it can only make unsubstantiated assertions which really go nowhere. Answers to what, anyway? Theists often try to promote the question about the existence of god(s) to the rank of "The Original Question", which is of course ridiculous, or why would primal man come up with something as bizarre as gods out of thin air and for no purpose? Gods are merely a very naive attempt at answering the real Original Question, which is: "Where does the universe come from?" (and where does it go to, while we're at it). So in come the theists and claim "God made it, of course", because as they learned in kindergarten every thing has a maker, so naturally the universe must have a creator, too. And that's supposed to answer what exactly? Starting with the question where the universe came from, you've now ended up having to answer the question where a sentient being sufficiently sophisticated to have created the universe came from. Starting with a universe which just happened to be and neither required you to get up early on weekends nor pester thy neighbours with an obnoxious missionary strain, you now have to suck up to your imaginary master with a typically rather serious personality disorder. Oh right, I forgot, this kind of thinking is blasphemy, of course, can't just put your finger in the blatant hole in the logic and get away with it. It's rather funny, really; until you realize that most people seem unable to make the simple deduction that a creator doesn't explain anything but merely replaces one unknown variable with another, mathematically speaking a null operation. I don't know whether that's because people actually are this stupid or because the theist brainwashing at an early age was so effective they can no longer think straight in these matters (probably a mixture of both), but it's rather unsettling that such a cheap con-artist's trick works as well as it does. A creator doesn't answer anything unless the origin of the creator can also be explained, which is extremely unlikely because if you could explain that sort of thing you wouldn't have had need of this (literal) deus-ex-machina in the first place. To make matters worse, there's no further logical deduction possible from the assumption of a creator, and it goes like this: assuming there's a creator, where did he come from? Possible answers:
  1. "He was in turn created by a meta-creator": this is consistent with the initial assumption of thing-implies-creator, but unfortunately spins us off into an infinite tail-recursion of meta-meta-creators and meta-to-the-power-of-infinity-creators, which really gets us nowhere. I've even seen attempts at "explaining" this sort of ridiculous null operation by people who really should know better, postulating convergence by postulating an infinite sequence of exponentially more powerful meta-creators, but of course neither proving convergence (how could they, really) nor explaining where the infinite energy of all these infinite creators is supposed to come from (at which point the whole thing becomes just as unscientific as the old bearded dude in the sky). The whole thing is nothing but the usual "God is almighty, shut up, doubt is taboo" reaction of religious types cornered by facts, only with pseudo-mathematical go-faster stripes (and all the more odious for it). Turtles and rabbits anyone?
  2. "Don't know, he just is" / "Begone, foul spirit, lest I light up the stake": fair enough, so you admit you don't know. This, however, is inconsistent with postulating the first-generation creator (you chose to answer the origin of a thing (universe) with a creator in the first iteration, but now answer the origin of a thing (creator) with a resounding "dunno", and that simply does not compute). If you don't know, you should have said so from the start rather than give birth to the whole unsavoury mess of creators and the lame excuses that come with it.
  So with one option not terminating and the other being contradictory, there's no further logical deduction possible from the assumption of a creator, in which case logic tells us the assumption was wrong (essentially proof by contradiction). The assumption of a creator defies logic, q.e.d.

• You're not supposed to take it literally, of course
  Correct, for a change, but not for the reasons theists think it is. Since you can't take this crap seriously in the first place, of course you can't take it literally either, that comes with the territory. The reason I'm mentioning it is because this statement is extremely hypocritical since it's only ever made when surrounded on all sides by hard scientific evidence, before that its absolute truth is defended by all means, tooth and nail. "The earth was created in seven days, is roughly 5000 years old, flat, orbited by the sun, man was made of clay and woman of his rib..." used to be taken very literally until not so long ago (around 150 years for some of it, which isn't much, really). Only after science provided overwhelming evidence that these assumptions are spectacularily wrong, with no hope to uphold these beliefs without becoming a laughing stock, then and only then did these hitherto "eternal thruths" suddenly (and conveniently) become symbolic rather than literal. Heck, it's not even like these points are completely settled at this time, since you'll still find people who'd rather believe in a creator meticulously designing each species we see today than in evolution, for instance. It's a pathetic attempt to weasel out of a real excuse after having been proven wrong; they just suddenly change their tune to "of course not to be taken literally" where what would really be required is more along the lines of "we were wrong, we're sorry for our lies, we're sorry for pestering/prosecution people who doubted our lies, we vow not to do it again." Having to admit these errors outright rather than pretending they were just some sort of misunderstanding would strongly stress the vast number of issues religions have already been proven wrong about, and the rather meagre likelihood they're right about any of the rest. Weak, but unfortunately still quite successful with the weak-minded.

• Without religion, the world would descend into utter chaos
  Wrong. I can't see (and history appears to confirm this) any evidence that religious societies are in any way less likely to commit acts of intolerance, discrimination or downright atrocities. Nor do I see any reason why a completely irrational system would be better equipped to address social or racial conflicts than a rational one, on the contrary. The assertion here is that people need to believe in some supernatural entity to refrain from killing each other, and that's a collossal load of bull. First up, people never seem to be happier slaughtering each other than when they're convinced they're thereby doing god's will, and second there are good rational reasons to leave others' lives and propery alone (and, more generally, not bother them), such as the realization that since everybody has the same rights you shouldn't do to others what you don't want others to do to you. So what good is belief in a supernatural agent supposed to achieve here? Or, since we have the benefit of 2000 years of practical data on the subject, what good has belief in a supernatural agent achieved in real life terms? Can't really see anything substantiated to support that theory. On the contrary, religions have constantly been instrumentalized for conflicts, the more so the more seriously societies take their religions. Whether that is the declared intent of these religions isn't the point (and due to their ambiguity impossible to decide anyway). Let's assume Andrej Kalashnikov built his AK-47 for home-defence only, and since that's such a noble cause everybody should have one; and even after it turns out people are blowing each other's heads off with them left right and center, that has nothing to do with the AK-47, of course, because it was (claimed to be) built for the noble cause of home-defence, it's just that some people are "using it wrong". Ring a bell? Replace "AK-47" with "religion" and you should be able to see how ridiculous the whole excuse-by-intent approach actually is. It doesn't matter whether X was made for good things or not (even if that question can actually be decided "yes" in the first place), when it turns out that in real life X is used for no end of bad things, it should be treated as a bad thing. Anything with a similarily nasty track record as religions would have long since been banned and forgotten, but since they're claimed to serve good purposes in spite of massive real-life evidence to the contrary, they aren't just spared but actually elevated to the rank of "shining example", and that's seriously screwed up.

• Christianity and evolution are not mutually exclusive
  Wrong. They are, and it goes deeper than many people realize. The contradiction is twofold, creationism vs. evolution on the one hand and christianity vs. evolution on the other. Creationism claims the flora and fauna we see was created by some god or other, whereas evolution shows (with overwhelming evidence) how higher forms evolved from lower forms and how those best adapted to any given habitat will prosper in that habitat, whereas the less well adapted will eventually die out or adapt to a different habitat. There is of course the bootstrapping question of how life in its most primitive form actually started, before evolution could kick in. Some want to explain that with gods, which first of all is a pointless exercise anyway since, as we already covered above, gods can't explain anthing (but merely replace one unknown with another). It's furthermore another example of a typical wishy-washy response of people cornered by facts yet unwilling to let go of make-beliefs they're used to, which actually doesn't "slightly extend" the concept of evolution, as proponents of intelligent design and similar nonsense would make you believe, but makes a travesty out of the whole process. Evolution does a great job at explaining the origin of species without having to resort to magical agents at any step along the way, thus also neatly refuting all the religious nonsense trying to interpret the variability of species as proof for the existence of god(s), so trying to make it look like evolution was really founded on the myths it so splendidly debunked belies a mind which hasn't understood evolution at all and is too cowardly to openly oppose it; which, in its way, is actually worse then the dyed-in-the-wool fanatics who take the Bible literally, because it doesn't so much oppose scientific facts as pollute them.

  "No problem," says the "modern" christian, "the Old Testament is passé and I don't believe all that clay-and-ribs business, so there's nothing to fear from evolution..." Well, no. There's another reason why christianity and evolution are mutually exclusive, and that concerns christianity itself, namely its allegedly unique virtue of love-thy-enemy it so loves to flaunt in everybody's face. OK, in real-life terms there isn't all that much do be seen here, but it's still the declared ideal, so how does that fit in with evolution? The answer is: not at all. Evolution is about competition, both inter-species and intra-species, that's what "survival of the fittest" means. Evolution would never produce a lasting species which turns the other cheek (be it towards members of its own species or others), any such uncompetitive aberration would quickly and unceremoniously be kicked out of the race (i.e. die out). So it isn't just the Old Testament which is completely at odds with evolution, but most of the New Testament as well, because their declared ideals are diametrically opposites; you can't be for one without automatically opposing the other. You want evolution in a nutshell? The meek shall not inherit the earth.

• We didn't do anything, yet those nasty atheists are attacking us
  LOL. Im mean, seriously, look who's talking: the guys with the intrinsic missionary strain, generally rather vocal about their beliefs and with still far more influence than secular societies should allow. You can have people advertise their delusions by publishing what they think Jesus saved them from; you can't have an event too trivial not to earn some clergymen broadcast time to state their religious views on the issue; you can generally have religious interest groups manipulate public opinion any way imaginable, e.g. by pushing their members into offices, apparently that's all fair game. But as soon as atheists cease to silently ignore the babble and speak their mind about religions (a relatively new phenomenon anyway), it's an "unwarranted" attack. I won't deny it is an attack, but certainly not an unwarranted one. Should religion ever cease to meddle in public affairs and exist in private only, then we'll talk about unwarranted. Should religion ever lose the special privileges it still possesses in abundance, then we'll talk about unwarranted. Until such time, attacks on religion are anything but unwarranted; on the contrary, they are a vitally necessary reminder that we still have a long way to go to a truly secular society.

Last updated 9 Aug 2009.

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