"That's not what I mean when I say 'God,'" Revisited

Years ago I posted an essay on this blog entitled "That's not I mean when I say 'God,'" in which I vented some frustration because belief in God came in so many different forms, some of which didn't seem like theism at all to me.

I'm not frustrated about it anymore. I'm come to appreciate much more the slack which is routinely cut me by others, and I am much more glad to cut others slack, when it comes to religious beliefs. Who am I to tell other people what's what about such things? This represents a great change for me.

Some theists believe God is a man, or that God is male. Others think God is female, and still others think that the concept of gender does not apply to God. Some believe that God is a conscious, omnipotent being who created everything, knows and sees everything and cares about every living creature. Others think that God is an idea, which might sound to some of us atheists as if they are atheists, but no, they call themselves theists or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or what have you, and when they talk about God, often they sound very much like the ones who think that God made everything and is a man with along white beard who sits on a throne. 

It would be nice if there were some sort of general agreement about what people mean when they say "God," but there isn't. Not even close. This of course makes everything very frustratingly murky and inconsistent to some of us when we try to have some sort of rational debate with theists about God. But it's been this way for somewhere between 500 and 3,000 years, or longer (we don't know how long monotheism has existed). So perhaps -- and I do mean perhaps! I'm not trying to tell you or anyone else how to go about things -- perhaps the first thing someone should do, if they want to talk to a theist about God, is to have them explain what they mean when they say "God." and sit comfy, cause it might take a while, and if they are able to explain it to you at all I'm not saying that this will be enough to permit a nice logical conversation -- imagine! Theism conflicting with rational discourse! -- and I'm certainly not encouraging anyone to debate theism with anyone. 

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Message to a Fellow Atheist About Atheism, Veganism and Feminism

Okay. I'm going to try to explain to you -- AGAIN -- why I sometimes get annoyed with you on the subject of religion.

This post may be annoying to you, too -- but suck it up, it'll be good for you, if you let it. If you freaking LISTEN.

It's not because you're an atheist. I'm an atheist too. I hope you realize that. I really hope you do. And I hope you also realize that other atheists probably have the same problem with you. And, for example, with Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher and Sam Harris and Stephen Fry.

 

 

Except that they're not trying so freaking hard to HELP. They won't go to the excruciating effort to try to explain it to you. They'll just stop talking to you.

This time, I will try to explain by comparing atheists, vegans and feminists.

Probably, most people you meet who are vegans will never mention it to you. But there are a few who who are a huge pain in the ass about it. Even if you agree with them that veganism could solve the climate crisis and wipe out human poverty if every human became vegan.

 

You might agree with them about that. You might agree with them about many more benefits of veganism. You could BE a vegan, and still find them to be a huge pain in the ass the same way you and I do, and for the very same reason: over and over again, whether the subject is politics or history or technology or whatever, as soon as they see a connection to veganism, they make the entire conversation about veganism.

The same thing can happen with feminism. You could be a huge, committed feminist. You could believe that feminism is the most important topic that humans could possibly discuss. And I might just completely agree. And still, it could be between extremely difficult and impossible to stand talking to you sometimes, if you made conversations grind to a halt by making them all about feminism. 

Some conversations ARE all about feminism. But some aren't. Some conversations are all about veganism, but others aren't. Until they're highjacked by some pain in the ass who is incapable of discussing anything else. Then the conversations grind to a halt, unless two or more such pains in the ass happen to be present. Everyone else will leave and find something much, much, much more interesting to do.

This brings us back to you, and the subject of religion. Religion, which has permeated human life for most of the time that there have been humans. So that it's fairly hard to discuss history, archaeology, anthropology, politics, economics or sociology while entirely avoiding the subject of religion. But some people will try anyway, if you're around. Because the conversation was interesting and they wanted it to continue.

Okay. I tried. Again. I guess I'll try again. Even though it's exhausting and a huge pain in the ass. Because the odds are very slim that, this, time, you got it.

Edward Gibbon and Anselm's Ontological Argument

People continue to accuse Gibbon of being unfair to Christians, a charge which from one point of view is about as true or false as it's ever been. After 15 years of New Atheism, one might be inclined to chime in and say that Gibbon is just annoying already -- if you forget that Gibbon was writing in the eighteenth century, and fighting for freedoms of expression which people by 2004 had started taking for granted.

Freedoms somewhat less in evidence in Anselm's day. I find it very difficult to believe that his ontological argument (Google anselm ontological argument, cause I just can't get into the details right now without endangering the serenity for which I am so famous) would not have been about as savagely criticized as it is today, had Anselm's contemporaries been as free to speak and write about it as we are. About as difficult as it it is for me to believe that he had a horror of every worldly advancement, this Archbishop of Canterbury.

I had already encountered Aquinas' fivefold proof of God's existence, and rolled my eyes aplenty at it. Still, I felt quite positively disposed toward Aquinas as I heard about his attack on Anselm's proof, even cheered him on a little bit. Did Aquinas develop his fivefold proof because Anselm's ontological argument seemed embarrassingly flimsy to him? Was there no more to it than that?

I find it quite hard to conceive of anyone who doesn't already believe in God having their mind changed by Aquinas, and much more difficult still to imagine them having their mind changed by Anselm. I find it quite easy to imagine people rolling their eyes back when Anselm and Aquinas were alive, and holding their tongues because it wasn't worth being tortured and then burned alive.

A few days ago, I was made aware of the title of Richard Dawkins' latest book, by walking past it in a bookstore: Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide. And I felt quite embarrassed, as an atheist. As with Aquinas and even more so with Anselm, but in reverse, I thought about Dawkins' lack of appeal with non-atheists. Even a lot of us who are atheists find Dawkins thoroughly obnoxious. Is a believer going to see a book with a title like Outgrowing God and feel any way except personally insulted and less well-disposed toward atheists than they were a moment before?

It's hard for me to imagine.

And Dawkins doesn't have the excuse which embarrassed defenders of Anselm or Aquinas -- if any of them ever do feel embarrassed. I can't think of any such at the moment, but than again I haven't subjected myself to many of their fans -- always have at hand: that Anselm and Aquinas rarely came into contact with someone who is allowed to say that they think differently.

Anselm with his argument and Aquinas with his proofs, were they answering Lucretius? Or their own subconscious minds? That's one thing which still puzzles me: to whom were they talking? Were they actually trying to change anyone's mind, beyond some purely imaginary mind of some non-believer who was not ever at hand? Is this the Glass Bead Game I've wondered about my whole life, the one they played (and still play) just because they loved the game so much, with no further point to it at all?

I'm an Atheist, BUT --

-- I know that doesn't guarantee that I'm bright.

-- it's no excuse for me to be a jerk.

-- I DO care if you're insulted.

-- everything about religion all added up together is not as important to me as our friendship.

-- I cringe every time I hear Dawkins or Harris or Stephen Fry or Maher talk about religion.

-- I hope there's a Heaven and that it's great and that we'll all go there forever and ever.

-- I'm not Islamophobic.

-- I'm not blind to the kind acts done all around me every day in the name of some religion or other.

-- most of my friends are religious believers.

-- my experiences with New Atheists have been so horrible that now, when I hear that someone is an atheist, my first reaction is to cringe.

-- it's possible to have polite and pleasant conversations with me about all sorts of religious topics.

-- I don't judge a religion based on the dumbest, most hateful adherents of it whom I can find.

-- I see absolutely no reason to compare Dawkins or Harris or Hitch to Russell or Sartre or Nietzsche or Twain. (The latter group: I LIKE those guys.)

-- I now completely understand atheists who deny they're atheists. Completely.

Irish Police Investigate Old Boring Person For Blasphemy

I see headlines saying that Irish police have investigated Stephen Fry for blasphemy.

He's being investigated because a clergyman asked him on a TV show what he would say to God if, against all of his expectations, he were to find himself at the Pearly Gates, and he replied that he would say to God,

"How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It’s not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"

If Fry were actually to end up going to prison for blasphemy, it will be a tragedy comparable to Oscar Wilde going to prison because some aristocrat was deflecting attention away from his poof of a son who'd had an affair with Wilde.

But he won't go to prison, assuming that this article by The Explainer is accurate. It says that the most that could happen to Fry is that he would be fined 25,000 Euros.

That would hardly be a tragedy for Fry personally, unless he's spent every cent he's ever made. He very likely makes 25,000 Euros a day, between all of his movies and TV shows and books, and he's been making enough money for long enough that 25,000 Euros is probably just a chuckle to him.

If it establishes a precedent and encourages Ireland to prosecute poor atheists, that's quite another story.

If this case causes Ireland to finally cease to prosecute blasphemy as a crime, that would be very good.

If Fry somehow engineered all of this so that there would be a huge amount of publicity around a blasphemy trial, causing Ireland to finally stop persecuting blasphemy as a crime, then that was brilliant. I don't think that's what Fry did, but if it is, then major congratulations are in order.

Now: it's getting harder and harder to remember all the way back to when Fry wasn't completely tedious. So Fry's mad at God? I'm not mad at God. You know why? BECAUSE GOD DOESN'T EXIST! I accuse Fry and all the rest of the New Atheists of atheisting improperly, of giving atheism a bad name and making the general public think that all atheists are horrible and boring. It's gotten so bad that many atheists are denying that they're atheists, calling themselves skeptics or nonbelievers or some other thing which means exactly the same as atheists, just because they don't want to be associated with Dawkins and Fry and Harris and Ricky Gervais and the rest of those idiots and bores.

But I would never want to see anyone be convicted of a crime just because they were boring.

Not even if they were as boring as that quote above by Fry, or as boring as Gervais' movie The Invention of Lying.

Vegans and Atheists

I assume that most vegans are pleasant and intelligent people with great senses of humor. However, I do not have any direct evidence to support this assumption.

I just assume that, just as Dawkins and Harris and Myers and (from beyond the grave) Hitch are making us (atheists) all look bad, so the humorless, self-righteous and just generally stupid among the vegans, because they make so damn much noise, are making vegans in general look bad. Surely you've heard something along the lines of: "I'm a vegan, and the joke you just told offends me because[...]" and the remark ends with something other than "[...]because I'm a humorless stiff."

There are few atheists who are constantly jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm an atheist, and I hate the way that the New Atheist keep talking about historical topics without bothering to learn about them first, and I've actually read the Koran, and I don't think we all should be afraid of Islam. Muslims are pretty much just people like others," and so on and so forth. In fact, I may be the only one.

Likewise, there are few vegans jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm a vegan, and I have a sense of humor! You could even tell me a joke about vegans and I'll probably think it's funny. Especially if it's a joke about those vegans everybody hates because they have no sense of humor! 'Everybody' meaning 'including almost all vegans', cause Duh!"

I assume that almost all vegans are like that, even in the absence of the jumping up and down and yelling.

The alternative would be to assume that a sense of humor actually is dependent upon ingesting animal protein and fat.

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.

Overcoming Bad Mental Habits

Western civilization: 2000 years ago, although the mass of people were in some senses less free than they are today -- for example, as many as 15% of the people in the Roman Empire, and as many as 40% of the population of Italy, were slaves -- still, most of them, even the slaves, were somewhat freer than we are today to speculate about religious matters.

That freedom of discussion began to go away as Christianity began to take over in the 4th century, and by the end of the 5th century, like the Roman Empire's territory in the West, it was almost completely gone.

Western civilization had adopted a very bad idea: that there was only one true religion and that no-one was allowed to have any other opinions about it. We in the Western world began to shake off this intolerance of discussion of religious things in the 17th century, and we're still shaking it off.

As Christianity has faded, capitalism has grown. As there was with Christianity before, there is very little tolerance for people (socialists) who say that capitalism is a bad idea. There is constant discussion about what kind of capitalism is best, much as the Western universities were once dominated by discussions of what kind of Christianity was best, but to say that capitalism itself is something which must be overcome is still today a lot like saying several centuries ago that Christianity itself was nonsense: it's bad for a career in business or politics.

Now I want to make it as clear as I can that I did not just say that capitalism is a religion. I said that I saw a similarity in the development of the two and their places in Western society in two different eras. But they're not the same thing.

If I point out that a cat and a dog both have fur, I am not saying that a cat is a dog or that a dog is a cat. That would be ridiculous.

But a lot of Christian theologians have said that capitalism is a religion. Other people have said it too, but it seems to be very common among the theologians to say that this or that thing which is not a religion, is a religion. Karl Barth said that everyone has a religion and that therefore everyone is a theologian of some sort.

Theologians are constantly saying completely nonsensical things like that. It seems to me that they have to say all sorts of nonsensical things in order to sustain religious belief, or, more precisely, in order to impede clear thought about religion.

Capitalism is not a religion. Neither is socialism, or golf. But because we in the Western world have become so inundated with theological nonsense and so used to it, many of us fall for absurd notions such as that a way of doing business or a sport can be a religion.

Clear thinking about religion tells us that, although it may have been very useful in the past, and may still serve many functions today, its major premises about supernatural creators and guardians and eternal reward and punishment and so forth, are all unsound.

Similarly, and once again I am by no means saying that capitalism is a religion, clear thinking about capitalism tells us that it has many shortcomings among its basic premises, and that we can do better. Capitalism is dog-eat-dog. It rewards sociopathological behavior. It is deeply, inherently unfair.

It is not particularly unusual for me to say that I am an atheist. It's becoming more and more common for people to just come right out and say that they're atheists. And we're not all extremely pugnacious and unpleasant about being atheists, the way that the New Atheists are. We're getting closer and closing to the level of religious tolerance which existed in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when it was taken for granted that anyone was free to say want they wanted about religion and to believe and practice as they wished, and it was considered quite rude to denigrate anyone else's religion and insist that one's own was the only correct one.

They may be very many people today who believe that it would be best if society were organized so that everyone contributed to the well-being of all according to their abilities, and was cared for by all according to their needs. That's socialism. Capitalism and socialism are incompatible. Almost all of us are part-capitalist and part-socialist: part-capitalist because we have to be in order to survive within the capitalist system which dominates the world today; and part socialist, because we're decent human beings. There are very few people who are purely capitalistic all the time. They are awful, disgusting people like Donald Trump and the AIDS medication douchebag. But they are following the rules of capitalism very strictly: buy lo, sell high, put off payment as long as possible, don't let your effect on others even enter into your thoughts -- and because they've followed these rules so consistently, they're very rich. Very rich, loathesome sociopaths. The AIDS medication douchebag was always smirking in court and during interviews because he knew he was following the rules of capitalism. What's clear neither to him nor to most of the people nauseated by his behavior and smirk is that following the rules of capitalism all the time makes you a disgusting person.

Not all investors are the same, of course. Not all extremely wealthy people are the same. Not all capitalists are capitalists all of the time. Different billionaires get their billions in very different way, and do very, very different things with their billions. If Bernie Sanders grasps that, he's trying very hard to make it seem as if he doesn't. Prejudice is forming opinions about someone based on their membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals -- even if that group is the group of billionaires. Some billionaires are socialists to a very great degree, whether Bernie can grasp that or not, and whether the part-socialist billionaires realize it themselves or not.

"Antisocial" means both that you're against socialism and that you're an unpleasant person. "Social" means the same thing in both cases, and also in the case of the term "sociopath." Exactly the same. If you're an investor and you take actions which will tend to extend the life of the petroleum industry and hinder the growth of green energy, because you calculate that it will make you more money, you're a sociopath -- and a perfectly good capitalist. Watch the money shows on TV: the effect which investments will have on others never enters into the conversation unless someone has made a calculation that "green stocks" will make more money than others. On the money show this is all completely out in the open. Nobody's even the slightest bit embarrassed about ruining things for other people. The effect on other people is 100% beside the capitalist point of why they're there.

Capitalism = getting more and more money for yourself. Socialism = making the world a nicer place: cleaner air and water, fewer starving people, etc.

And none of that is exactly rocket science, but very few people are willing to face what they're able to understand about socialism and capitalism, the same way that very few people were able to face the fact that the stories in the New Testament made absolutely no sense, and that is was absurd to base all of society on them, although that, too, was quite plain to see, if one would but look.

Larry Alex Taunton Is Morally Disgusting

Specifically: Taunton is a douchebag who has written a book claiming that Christopher Hitchens was "shaky in his atheism." I'm not going to give a link to the book or even tell you its title. All I'm going to say is that Taunton is both a bad person and completely mistaken.

It takes a lot to get me to defend Hitch. Taunton made it there easily. Anybody who knows anything about Hitchens knows that he was extraordinarily committed to atheism and to combating religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to), and that he wavered on that about as much as the Washington Monument is going to crumble into a heap of dust because someone stands beside it and sneezes.

What makes Taunton's effort to re-write Hitch's biography so vile is how important Hitch's atheist cause was to him. It was nearly everything to him. That cause is significantly different from my own atheist cause. I'm not here to defend Hitch's stance on religion, I'm here to defend simple common decency. This behavior on Taunton's part is disgusting.

That's all.

Well, wait, there is more: I've noticed a widespread tendency for Christians to mis-represent history which has to do with religion. Claiming that fundamentalism is no more than 200 years old, claiming that Christianity is responsible for everything good in Western society. (Calling certain things in Western society good which are not good at all...)

So, unfortunately, I can't really say that Taunton's bad behavior comes completely out of the blue. In some Christian circles, and by no means only fundamentalist or conservative circles, it's downright typical. Perhaps if more Christians were expert in history, some of them would become ashamed and speak out against this mendacity. I don't know. If Christians are reading along here who respect my honesty, my interest in history and primary sources, and my commitment to getting historical statements right, perhaps they will heed my call to be on the lookout for Christians who are supposed to be historians, who are lying. Lying to themselves in many cases, I am sure, and convinced that they are telling the truth, and so it is perhaps more accurate to say that they are mistaken, than to call them liars.

Philip Harland Says Early Christians Were Widely Considered To Be Atheists

Breaking news: Early Christians were impious atheists...in the eyes of some angry Greeks and Romans, that is. So claims Harland.

Well, Professor Harland and I disagree. Harland says that Tacitus and Pliny the Younger "imply" that Christians are atheists. I disagree with him about that. It could be that Harland is much better at reading between the lines than I am. Or it could be that he pulls the charge of atheism in Tacitus and Pliny the Younger out of -- thin air, so to speak. The offense of the Christians in Tacitus and Pliny -- and Tacitus implies that Nero trumped up the charges -- is that they refused to go along with the public offerings to the gods which included deified Emperors. The concern is not so much with what the Christians believe as with whether or not they are loyal Roman subjects. Politics and religions were very much combined in pre-Christian Rome, and everyone was expected to go through the motions of making sacrifices to the deified Emperors, much the same way that everyone was expected to pay whatever taxes were levied on them. If people refused to go along with the public sacrifices, it was suspected that they might refuse to pay taxes also. (And this suspicion sometimes turned out to be right.)

The only texts Harland produces in which Christians are called atheists are the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Acts of the Christian Martyrs -- hardly the most reliable historical sources. (See "The Myth of Persecution" by Candida Moss.)

And in any case, being an atheist was not an offense to pre-Christian Romans, not the way it became an offense under Christian rule. Many ancient Romans -- for example, Pliny the Younger's dad, Pliny the Elder, the celebrated author of an encyclopedic work we know as the Natural History -- made it quite plain that they didn't believe any of that religious stuff, and many more made ambiguous statements which certainly could be taken as implying that they didn't take any of religion's supernatural claims seriously, from Ovid pointing out in his Metamorphoses that since his subject in that work was deities, it was certainly practical to behave as if he believed they existed, to Suetonius' account of the Emperor Vespasian crying out on his deathbed, "Oh no, I think I'm becoming a god!" The general reaction to this passage in Suetonius -- respect for Vespasian's character, because it seemed he had a sense of humor about himself right up to the last, and not outrage because he was making light of the supernatural -- seems to indicate that among the Romans skepticism about the supernatural was widespread, and not a big deal. They just weren't in the habit of going out of their way to rub believers' noses in it, nor did they connect their atheism with a rebellious attitude against the Roman Republic or Empire. Occasionally a believing Roman got offended anyway, the way that Manilius was offended by Lucretius (deceased when Manilius wrote) and other Epicurians, but Manilius didn't get anyone killed over the issue, nor do I see any evidence that he would have wanted things to have been taken that far. He just felt that Epicurus and Lucretius and their followers were mistaken and that the gods existed, and he wanted to make that point very clear.

So. Professor Harland says that the early Christians were widely regarded as impious atheists. I agree that they were widely regarded as impious, as were all monotheists, whether Jewish, Zoroastrian or Christian, because to the Romans piety meant respect toward all of the deities in the world. But atheism was not required in order to be impious, nor was it guaranteed, just because someone was an atheist, that he was impious as well. Lighthearted statements of disbelief in all supernatural things seems to have been widespread, and accepted. But grim attacks against the reality of this deity combined with the worship of that one -- that was impiety, to the pre-Christian Romans.

Seen On The Internet: "ATHEISM IS RATIONAL!"

Well, yeah, sometimes it is.

Unfortunately, though, just because a person is an atheist doesn't mean that everything they do and say is rational.

For a while there it seemed to me that there was absolutely no reason to think that atheists, as a whole, were more rational than religious believers, but then I reminded myself that my observation is limited to the behavior of a small number of people, and that, like everyone else, I select what I pay attention to, and that I focus on atheists who are dumb. The reason I focus on them is because it seems to me that many atheists are not practicing nearly enough self-criticism, neither of themselves nor of other atheists. If you're not stupid already, just assume that everything you say and believe is factually correct, and you'll become stupid soon enough.

In addition, not everyone who is an atheist announces it all the time or puts it in large all-caps at the top of their Facebook page. It may very well be that the average atheist who announces his or her atheism very aggressively is less intelligent than the average of all atheists. It may be lately that some of the more intelligent atheists are announcing it less than they used to, because the thought of being associated with dimwitted, agressively-atheist atheists embarrasses them.

Sometimes I'll say something like "not everything an atheist says or does is necessarily rational" to someone who's said something like "ATHEISM IS RATIONAL!" and they'll agree with me. And if all they meant is that skepticism of religious belief, all other things being equal, is more rational than belief, then I agree with them.

Other times they'll get hostile.

It may happen that a person who is as atheistic as anyone may ask when Jesus died, and someone may reply that Jesus never died because He never was born and that the Bible is completely fictional. In such as case, sometimes it turns out that the person saying that Jesus never existed means that the supernatural things related in the Bible never happened. In that case, I agree, but wonder when the word is going to get around that some of us occasionally discuss a completely non-supernatural Jesus. If by saying that Bible is completely fictional, someones means no more than that they have no belief in the supernatural, well then I'm sorry, but I think they expressed themselves unclearly. The Bible is studied by quite a few people who have no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, and there is quite a lot of historical content alongside the tales of the supernatural. How much historical content?

That's exactly what we're discussing, a lot of the time: how much history the Bible contains. And the reason that it's such a significant topic is because for many historical topics, we currently have few or no written sources other than the Bible. Completely ignore what the Bible has to say, and you've chosen to completely ignore centuries' worth of the history of large areas of the Middle East. Yeah yeah yeah, we know, you don't believe in the supernatural, neither do we, we're talking about something else now, is how we often feel when you interrupt our conversation because you think we believe in God. And you know what? Sometimes some of the people in these discussion do believe in God, but everybody understands that we're discussing something else at the moment and everyone's discussing it rationally.

By the way, discussing how much history a written work contains? That's exactly the same thing we often ask about works written by historians. We don't consider anyone to be infallible, not even historians, not even *gasp* scientists. (Not even atheist scientists.) We question everything. Everything.

Where was I? Ah yes: atheists are rational. Yes, occasionally we are. I often try to be. In spite of constant misunderstandings.

We Don't Know Nearly Enough To Make Any Rational Assertion Beginning: "Religion Has always Been [...]"

It seems to be a currently popular New Atheist talking point that religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses. But it's nonsense. We don't even know how old religion is -- it appears to be more than 30,000 years old, judging from artifacts which have been found. How much older than that? Nobody knows. (Some say that recently-found 70,000-year-old artifacts show the presence of religion, but that's controversial.) And you know that for that entire time it's been systematic manipulation? I don't think so. Writing which has been discovered so far goes back less than 6000 years. When we think about human behavior before that, to a very great extent we are poking around in the dark and guessing -- much the same way that we are only guessing when we try to understand what may be going on the minds of other species.

How old is religion? We don't know. When it began, was human society organized into anything which could be called elites and masses? Sing it with me, children: we don't know.

"Religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses." That sounds as if religion has always been controlled by elites who themselves don't believe in it. As if it has always been a con, a lie. That fits in very well with the New Atheist black-and-white, atheism-good, religion-bad dichotomy. But is it justified in any way by the actual history and prehistory of religion? No doubt, there has been a very cozy relationship between religious authority and political power for a very long time. No doubt today much of this relationship is maintained in a cynical way by powerful elites. Some neoconservatives, not all of them, are atheists who think that religion, while not for them, is good for the masses, or at least good for keeping the masses in line. But the thing is, we're very far from being able to prove that all of the elites who say that they have religious beliefs are insincere. The fact that a religion is very beneficial for someone does not prevent that person from believing in it. Robert Musil thought that the very opposite was true, and it's not an entirely daffy thought.

As far back as ancient Rome we have records of people having said cynically that religions in which they themselves clearly did not believe were good for controlling the masses. But not any longer ago than that. As far back as back as ancient Greece there is evidence that a few people were atheists, but not any longer ago than that, and it was not more than a handful of ancient Greeks.

We can't make the mistake of assuming that there were always people like us. We have to reckon with the possibility than religion may be much, much older than atheism. We can reasonably conjecture that religion is more than 30,000 years old, and ask how much older it might be. We can reasonably conjecture that atheism is more than 2500 years old, and guess about how much older it might be. But there's a real possibility that for tens of thousands of years, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years, ALL of our ancestors believed in gods.

Cities began to develop thousands of years ago -- how many thousands? And all the people said: We don't know. And all the people said: We don't know. But in the remains of the oldest cities we've found, 10 or 12 thousand years old, a big honkin' temple always seems to have been in the middle of town, suggesting that priests and kings were one and the same category. But it doesn't follow from that that the priest/kings were manipulating people, or that they didn't believe in the religions which they preached. That's a premature conclusion, the evidence for it is entirely lacking. And as I mentioned above, religion seems to be much, much older than city life. We don't know very much at all about how human -- or humanoid -- or primate societies may have been organized when religion first arose, inasmuch as we entirely lack such crucial pieces of the puzzle as when religion arose, to name just one.

Nietzsche On His Atheism

From Ecce Homo, the chapter "Warum ich so klug bin" ("Why I'm So Clever"), in the middle of the 1st paragraph:

»Gott«, »Unsterblichkeit der Seele«, »Erlösung«, »Jenseits«, lauter Begriffe, denen ich keine Aufmerksamkeit, auch keine Zeit geschenkt habe, selbst als Kind nicht, – ich war vielleicht nie kindlich genug dazu? – Ich kenne den Atheismus durchaus nicht als Ergebniss, noch weniger als Ereigniss: er versteht sich bei mir aus Instinkt. Ich bin zu neugierig, zu fragwürdig, zu übermüthig, um mir eine faustgrobe Antwort gefallen zu lassen. Gott ist eine faustgrobe Antwort, eine Undelicatesse gegen uns Denker –, im Grunde sogar bloss ein faustgrobes Verbot an uns: ihr sollt nicht denken!

("God," "immortality of the soul," "salvation," "the beyond," all concepts which never held my attention, to which I also gave no time, not even as a child. Perhaps I was never childish enough for that sort of thing? I'm not familiar with atheism as the result of thinking, even less as an insight. With me it's a natural instinct. I'm too curious, too questionable, too arrogant to be satisfied with a crude answer. God is a crude answer, an impoliteness to us thinkers. In essence it's even a crude prohibition to us: "Thou shalt not think!")

I don't know how Nietzsche could have answered the question of whether or not he was an atheist much more clearly than that. Of course, some people will not be satisfied even with this. Some people are just impossible.

"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby."

Not entirely. Because various atheists atheist in various different ways. Some atheists -- whom I and many other atheists call New Atheists -- have some tendencies which are reminiscent of religious behavior. Like repeating a handful of quotations over and over and over and over and over and over like fundies quoting their favorite half-dozen Bible verses. Like being blind and deaf to valid criticisms of Dawkins, Harris, Hitch & co the way that many religious believers simply refuse to see flaws in their leaders.

And of course, some atheists actually meet on Sunday mornings in places they call atheist churches, with services sometimes led by ex-Christian preachers. That's a particularly obvious way in which atheism is sometimes like a religion in some ways.

Some atheists, including Dawkins, Harris, Hitch & Myers, are unfortunately quite Islamophobic in a manner strongly reminiscent of Christian fundies.

New Atheists and Christian fundies share a profound ignorance on historical topics combined with an unceasing flow of clueless remarks about the history surrounding Biblical topics, New Testament and Old.

Seriously, New Atheists: if there wasn't quite a lot about you which reminded people of the fundies, do you really think that so many of them would say so often that there is? Astonish me: come to grips with some piece, any piece, of valid criticism aimed at you. Admit at long last that some of your critics might have had a point now and then.

I Just Encountered Someone Who Called Himself A Post-Theist

As always, when I meet an atheist like this one who calls him- or herself something other than an atheist -- non-believer, skeptic, post-theist or what have you -- I wonder whether he or she has chosen the exotic self-identification in order to distance him- or herself from the New Atheists.

Assuming that this is indeed the case, I sympathize with the motive -- I rarely let a chance go by to distance myself from the New Atheists -- but I disagree with the tactic. I do not wish to surrender the name "atheist" to the New Atheists.

Before they came along, the most famous atheists were people like Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Twain, Russell and Sartre. I am one of the intellectual heirs of those earlier atheists. The non-believers, skeptic, post-theists and what have you may or may not also be among their heirs and worthy successors. The New Atheists most assuredly are not.

Because those earlier atheists were more than just atheists. After they had told you that they were atheists, they still had interesting things to say. They weren't one-issue people, declaring all atheists to be good and all religion to be bad. They all realized that things are much, much more complicated than that.

One of the few things upon which New Atheists and I agree, and upon which I and all of the non-believers, skeptic, post-theists disagree, is that the term "atheist" denotes someone who does not believe in the existence of God or gods, and that it means nothing more or less than that.

Usually, theologians have favored, and atheists have rejected, terms which obfuscate rather than explain. Unfortunately, these atheists who insist they're not atheists have picked up a bad habit from the theologians. And it doesn't make atheism look any better when onlookers finally figure out that non-believer, skeptic, post-theist and all those other terms which some atheists these days choose to identify themselves as atheists while avoiding the term "atheist" -- that what all of those other terms really mean is "atheist," no more and no less. If we have to choose another term, then let's do like the New Atheists, and choose a term which leaves the term "atheist" in it, and call ourselves, for example, Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

(Sartre won a Nobel and gave it back. I'm sitting here thinking how rich I would have to be to follow suit. Sartre was stinking rich when he turned the Nobel down.)

"Why Do You Feel The Need To Identify As An Atheist?"

Why do you feel the need to ask me that question? Couldn't you go out and play in the middle of a busy street instead?

The answer is: Because I don't believe in the existence of deities. That's the usual answer.

But that's not what all these passive-aggressive little rodents are really asking. What they really want to know is why don't I just keep it to myself, please? And the answer to THAT is: Why not talk about it? The answer is: Screw you.

I identify as an atheist because I can. Just doing my little bit to try to keep theocracy from returning.

Andrew Brown On New Atheists

Interesting how religious people keep insisting that atheism is a religion -- well, actually it's not so much interesting as it is utterly tiresome. Other than that, I agree with most of what Andrew Brown says about New Atheists. And I'm an atheist. I suspect that Brown may very well be an atheist too, but one of those atheists who insists that they're not atheists, because that just makes things too awkward between them and their theist friends. What good are such friendships, which require such nonsense and insincerity? Maybe they've been denying they're atheists (although they don't believe in God, which of course is the only definition of "atheist," which of course means they're completely full of shit in a completely obvious way) ever since that Archbishop of Canterbury caused such an uproar by publicly admitting that he was an atheist.

Maybe that public admission was the cause of all of this bullshit about not being atheists while not believing in God, which amounts to a campaign to change the meaning of an extremely-old and perfectly-servicable word, "atheism."

Well. Language has never been entirely about making sense, or being consistent, or honorable.

So. I guess there are two, at least two, main categories of atheists to whom I am opposed: the New Atheists, and I repeat, Andrew Brown lists off the main reasons why; and then the atheists hiding among the believers for the sake of cushy jobs. One of whom Andrew Brown may or may not be. Among whom also are R Joseph Hoffmann and the above-mentioned ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, who since that embarrassing admission has insisted that the admission did not mean what it clearly meant, ah, and I see that the current Archbishop is also an atheist who insists he's not an atheist, but a non-believer, which of course means exactly the same thing.

Well, I'm not really opposed to the second group the same way I'm opposed to New Atheists. But their refusal to admit that they're atheists/campaign to re-define the term "atheist", po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, is very aggravating.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.

Trying To Account For Differences Between Online And Offline Behavior

I'm an atheist, I've been an atheist for 40 years, I've never hidden it, and I've gotten along just fine with a lot of theists and rarely had any problems with them over differences in worldviews. That's been my meat-world experience. My cyber-experience of contact between atheists and theists could not be more starkly different. It has been mostly them fighting and being very rude to each other, and conversations on religious topics are constantly interrupted by verbal abuse from people on either side -- if, that is, there was anything resembling an attempt at discussion to begin with. I don't know what this means. Some possible explanations:

1) I may have been fortunate in the people I've met face-to-face over the course of my life.

2) I may have been unfortunate in the people I've met online over the course of the past 5 years who argue about religion.

3) The people I've met face-to-face and those I've met online may be very similar people, who behave very differently depending upon whether they're interacting face-to-face or in cyberspace.

I was raised by liberal Christians. There was never the slightest hint of my parents disowning me or wanting nothing more to do with me, because I was openly atheistic. A lot of the atheists I've met online were raised by fundamentalist Christians, and they have been disowned and shunned by their families. Over and over again this turns out to be the background of people supporting irreligious billboards and trying to have the 10 Commandments removed from public buildings, and other atheist efforts which I tend to find useless or worse. And these are the same atheists I see behaving very rudely online toward theists -- Christians, mostly -- who are behaving very rudely toward them. (Cousins, feudin' and fightin'?)

So it may just be that the people meet face to face are not those I meet online.

It may be that atheists who come from liberal backgrounds like mine are either hanging out in different places online than I am, or that they are not as vocal as I am about being atheists, or both.

Or it may be that many people's manners are much worse online than offline. Maybe the very same people I meet face-to-face, who seem to take my atheism so calmly in stride, are actually very upset with it, but hide their dismay from me, and take it to the Internet, where they unload in the manner I'm accustomed to seeing online.

Whatever the reasons, the contrast between the behavior I see offline and that I see online is very striking. Perhaps it's very autistic of me to find the difference striking, while the neurologically-typical see nothing strange about people behaving very differently in the 2 spheres.